Cold Springs(62)

Chadwick set John down, let go of his shirt.

He stepped back, the anger draining as quickly as it filled him, leaving him ashamed and hollow. “I don't want to be your enemy, John.”

“You stole my wife, then my daughter, and you're not my enemy? Get the f**k out, Chadwick.”

He turned and poured his coffee into the wind, the liquid curling like a brown silk shroud as it fell.

After Chadwick left, John stood at the railing, staring at the half-eaten toaster waffle, at his own reflection in the yellow glaze of the Fiestaware plate.

He looked like a plague victim.

Worse. He reminded himself of his father in the last year of his life—slugging down gin at El's Tavern, bemoaning the wife who'd left him and the son who'd grown to fear him—until his liver had finally turned to clay.

Men who don't let their anger out eventually get warped inside. John knew this. They get twisted. They drink, or fight, or seek even darker consolations.

Chadwick had seemed larger, dangerous in a way John never would've imagined before.

He had always been so reserved. How could anybody be that way all the time? How could they not let their feelings break out somewhere?

“Boss,” Pérez said.

I don't want to be your enemy.

“The money,” Pérez said. “You already sent the account numbers?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Don't.”

John looked up. “My daughter. Samuel will kill her.”

“Samuel Montrose isn't the blackmailer. Blackmailer is that ass**le Chadwick. You see the look in his eyes when he grabbed you?”

If Pérez hadn't said it, John might have let the moment pass—he might have let the doubt play in his mind, then evaporate. But Pérez saw it, too.

How could the blackmailer have described Mallory's day at Cold Springs so well? Why had Chadwick been spared the blackmail letters, and John had not? Most importantly, who knew about that one mistake John had made, nine years ago, that had been the grounds for the blackmail?

As much as the nightmare haunted John, he had always suspected the blackmailer couldn't be Samuel.

It had to be Chadwick.

Katherine's suicide had derailed Chadwick's plan to steal Ann from him. Chadwick was left alone, bitter, cut off from his past. Naturally, he would look for someone besides himself to blame, someone to hate. He would look at John, who still had his wife and child, and Chadwick would grow angry. If Chadwick couldn't be happy, then neither could John. The blackmail had destroyed John's marriage. Now John was close to losing his daughter. This wasn't the work of Samuel Montrose. This was the work of an embittered friend, who'd just looked John in the eye and claimed he wanted to help.

“Let me take care of this,” Pérez said. “I'll get your daughter back. I'll deal with Chadwick. Let me call a compadre of mine.”

John's hands trembled. Chadwick—his oldest friend.

His daughter's life.

The taste in his mouth was like arsenic. His reflection in the yellow plate stared up at him—sour, hard, old. Getting old alone. Without his daughter, or his wife.

“What do you need?” John asked Pérez.

And for the first time that John could ever remember, Pérez smiled.

15

Downtown Oakland steamed with eucalyptus and car exhaust and burning peanut oil from Chinese buffets. On Broadway, Asian women pushed strollers past the vegetable stands. Jackhammers echoed in the canyons between buildings. Businessmen chatted under the red and gold awnings of dim sum restaurants.

Jones turned on 12th Street and found a nice illegal parking spot by a construction zone, where the plywood walkways were decorated with murals of César Chávez and Malcolm X.

The address for Race's grandmother was across the street—a ten-story brick building that should've been condemned for earthquake safety decades ago. Or maybe it had been condemned. Half the windows were boarded up, the other half open to the air, like cells in a rotten honeycomb.

“What's this kid's name again?” Jones asked.

“Race Montrose.”

“And he's not a pickup.”

“Just a kid I need to talk to.”

She chewed her gum, then nodded. “Okay. We're getting out of the want-to-tell-me phase, into the pretty-much-have-to-tell-me phase. What the f**k's going on, Chadwick?”

He had been waiting for a confrontation. All the way across the San Rafael Bridge, Jones had been too calm, driving almost like a human being—both hands on the wheel, speedometer not a mile over eighty. She hadn't even rammed the drivers who cut into her lane.

“I'm sorry about what happened in Marin,” he said. “You don't have to come in this time.”

“Aren't we supposed to be partners?”

Behind the horn-rimmed glasses, her eyes were tranquil, almost sleepy. False advertising.

“You're right,” he said.

He told her about Katherine and Samuel Montrose, Mallory and Race, Talia Montrose's murder. He filled in what she hadn't heard about the missing millions from Laurel Heights, the fact that Race had tried to warn Norma before it happened.

The information seemed to weigh her down with a heavy, quiet anger that reminded him a lot of Asa Hunter.