The Red Hunter(103)

The thought put a vise on my heart.

“Who called him that morning?” I asked, thinking of the call he took. “What upset him so much?”

Mike shook his head. “Beckham had some idea that Paul might know where the money was. He may have called, tried to intimidate him. I thought Beckham was crazy. But turned out, he was right. Paul knew where it was all along. Just left it. Well, not all of it, right? I wondered how he was paying for NYU.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I guess he took his cut after all,” said Mike. “He’s as dirty as the rest of us.”

The thinker panics. The watcher waits. The Red Hunter acts.

I moved in quick, a hook to his jaw flew in so fast that he never even got a hand up to block. He absorbed the blow with a tilt of his head, lifted a finger to the line of blood that trailed from the corner of his mouth.

“Zoey,” he said. “I’m not going to fight you.”

I took the gun out of my hoodie and his eyes dropped on it. I was aware of Seth to my left. I could hear him breathing

“Where’s your gun?” I asked Mike. “The one you used to kill those two.”

He held my gaze. It was a look I knew well, the patient teacher, waiting for his student to catch on.

“Don’t do this,” he said. “I know you’re angry. You have a right to be. But let’s go home, work through it. We have a long history together, and all of that came after what happened to your parents. Let’s take care of Paul and run the school. I can afford to give you a real job there now. No more waitressing.”

His face, his voice—so soothing. He knew me. He knew I wanted all of those things.

“The gun,” I said.

He was fast, too. He’d dropped the bag and used a lithe sidekick to knock the gun from my hand. It went skittering across the floor and landed at Seth’s feet. I dove for it—too late. Seth picked it up and looked at me, worry etched in his brow. He popped the chamber and dumped the bullets into his palm, shoved them into his pocket.

“This is not how any of this was supposed to go,” Seth said. He put the gun in his other pocket. I had to recast him. Who was he? Whose side was he on?

“Did you know that night?” I asked him. “What you were doing?”

“No,” he said, he looked down at this shoes. “Of course not. I was just a kid.”

“They knew about Seth—your parents, Paul,” said Mike. “They monitored your calls, your email. Your dad was a cop. You think he didn’t know you had a boyfriend?”

“He knew I was going to sneak out that night?”

“He knew,” said Mike. “Your dad was going to wait and follow, scare the bejesus out of the kid. He mentioned it to Paul, who told me. Just in passing, just conversation. I knew Heather was going to be away, as well.”

“But she wasn’t away,” I said. “Why didn’t you stop it? You were the fourth man. The one waiting out in the car. When you knew she was there, when you saw me come back—you didn’t stop it.”

“It was too late by then,” he said. The weight of regret in his voice only made me hate him more.

“Too late because if you left us alive it would have come back to you. You would have been caught,” I said. “They were always going to kill him. No matter what.”

“No,” said Mike. “No. If he’d given up that money, they’d have taken it and left. That was the plan. But he didn’t. He wouldn’t.”

I wanted to believe that, that Mike never planned on hurting my father. I know he wouldn’t have planned to hurt my mom and me. He just wanted the money that none of them deserved. He hired Didion and Beckham to get it. If my dad gave it up, that would have been the end of it. He could hardly report the robbery. He’d have to let it go. Or tell Paul. Or go after it himself.

“Paul would kill you if he knew what you did,” I said.

Mike shook his head as if I were annoyingly stubborn. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”

There was a red pulse moving through my body, a dangerous amount of anger like a tide washed through me.

I flew at him, an elbow to the jaw hit hard, eliciting a grunt. My upper cut headed for his thick chin, which he deflected. My knee to his groin—which he easily sidestepped. My movements were clumsy with rage, too much power, not enough accuracy.

“Don’t,” he said, barely out of breath.

I came at him again. But a palm strike to my solar plexus sent me flying back, landing hard beside the wrapped up bodies. Winded, I lay there, looking at Rhett Beckham’s dead face through sheets of plastic. Pain throbbed from my center; adrenaline, cortisol raged as I struggled to regain my breath. He was stronger than I was, a better fighter. Always had been, always would be. He came to stand over me.

“Are we done?” He looked to Seth. “Get these bodies out of here.”

Seth looked uncertainly at me but did as he was told.

“When did you start working for him?” I managed, staring at Seth.

“He’s been keeping an eye on the place for me for years,” said Mike. “To see who came after the money, he thought so we could find out who killed your parents.”

“You knew,” I said. “At some point, you figured out who was behind it.”