Cold Springs(67)

“Zedman?”

“You left him, Chad. He told you to leave, so you did. Real question you didn't ask the kid—what the f**k is the blackmail about? They been messing with Zedman for years, haven't they? And I think you got an idea what your friend was into. The man wanted to tell you, too, but he couldn't do it with me and that crazy ass**le, Pérez, there. You ask me, you ran from the hard choice, and you're a fool if you don't go see him again, try to get him alone. That's why I'm going out to dinner. Give you a chance to do something right for a change. Now get lost. I'll meet you—what, about nine. Montgomery Street station.”

Chadwick waited for his stomach to stop twisting. She was right, of course. He was starting to understand, and he didn't want to.

“You all right on BART?” he asked.

Jones sighed. “Yeah. Of course.”

“Ashby is the closest station from here,” Chadwick offered.

“I know that.”

They stewed in silence.

“Look,” Kindra said. “I come from a big family. I got little brothers, too, okay? I guess seeing Race just tugged at me a little more than I realized. I didn't mean to razz you.”

“That's okay.”

“You could come to dinner with me and my friends,” Jones offered, without enthusiasm. “Forget what I said.”

“No thanks.”

“All right.” Jones' voice was suddenly tight again. “No problem. Nine o'clock.”

She got out and slammed the door.

Chadwick watched her push through the pedestrian traffic toward a Chinese restaurant, and disappear inside. He pulled away from the curb and headed back toward the Bay Bridge, telling himself he had no destination in mind, but knowing exactly where the road would take him, whether he wanted it to or not.

16

John Zedman dreamed of a blasted-out apartment building—the kind of property he would purchase only if he were preparing it for the wrecking ball.

In the dream, he stood high up on one of the top floors, the interior walls stripped away, the windows gutted so that the night wind ripped through his jacket and sweater. In the distance, the lights of the hills shimmered like birthday candles.

He was holding his .22 pistol to Chadwick's forehead—his old friend Chadwick, who had lashed their lives together like burning galleons, slept with his wife, destroyed his family.

Chadwick knelt before him, eyes downcast, waiting for John's decision.

John's trigger finger tightened of its own volition, like wet rope contracting in the sun.

He woke up and his hand hurt from squeezing on the gun, but it wasn't a gun. He was holding a Laurel Heights yearbook. He had fallen asleep looking at pictures from Mallory's kindergarten year, the only year they'd all been together—Mallory, Katherine, Ann, Chadwick. All of them alive and well at the same school. Nineteen ninety-three. Snapshots from the end of time.

John remembered thinking, in 1993, We can take care of this.

He remembered his confidence, the giddy feeling that came from riding a wave of financial success, feeling as invulnerable as a god or a sixteen-year-old driver. But the memory was cold and empty. That had been some other man, someone who had withered and died the same night as Katherine Chadwick.

Even those last hours at the auction, buying Chadwick a drink, sparring with him on the playground, John had had a sense of foreboding. He'd known then that his life would come to this—his family disintegrated, his friends gone, replaced by hirelings.

All he cared about was Mallory, but the past nine years he'd had another child to nurture—his own guilt growing inside him, a burden so huge it sometimes flipped into anger, made him drink and smash picture frames and lash out at the only people who mattered. He had hit his wife. He had threatened his daughter. He had done much worse.

He wanted to explain to Chadwick that he didn't hate Race Montrose. He had paid for Race's tuition willingly; he'd felt almost relieved when the first blackmail letter came, years ago.

He was a father, goddamn it. He understood that the child was not to blame. He hadn't held a grudge against the boy, at least not at first.

Even when Mallory and Race got out of control, when Race Montrose had ruined his daughter, taught her to shoot up drugs and call her parents filthy names and unlatch windows at night to escape, John had tried to save her peacefully. He'd offered Talia Montrose money rather than unleashing Pérez. He'd been sure, then, that the letters were from Talia. He couldn't explain it, any more than he could explain how he knew when a buyer would close a deal, but he had sensed the voice of an angry mother behind those letters. So he had met with her face-to-face, treated her like a human being. And his plan had gone wrong. He had misjudged fatally.

He swallowed the cottony taste from his mouth, stared out his living room window at the sunrise until he realized with sickening disorientation that it was the sunset. He had fallen asleep after a Valium and half a bottle of wine—that same damn Chardonnay he'd meant to share with Norma Reyes—and after all that, he hadn't even managed to sleep the night. He'd taken a nap. A goddamn nap, like an old man.

He sat up. Someone was tapping a carpet tack into his left temple.

On the table, a silver lighter and a packet of tissues sat in a ceramic ashtray—the only piece of Ann's ceramic collection she'd forgotten to take when she moved out. Or maybe she'd left it on purpose. You keep the ashtray, John. Figure it out.