The Hand on the Wall(50)

“You could have left the kid on the road.”

“I said that! But Andy said we had to keep going—that it would be even better with the kid. And it was at first. The woman—she was quiet; she wanted to make sure the kid wasn’t hurt. Everyone was behaving real nice. I thought we would let them go after the score we got that night on Rock Point, but Andy thought we could get a million. A million bucks is nothing to a guy like Albert Ellingham. He said we should hold out a little longer. He found this place, some farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere. He said they couldn’t look in every farmhouse in the country. I think you turn right up here.”

George turned the car, watching Jerry out of the corner of his eye.

“It was a few days in,” Jerry said. “We kept them comfortable. I’d talk to them. I even brought in a radio for them to listen to. We kept the woman tied up, but the kid, I would let her play sometimes when Andy was out. As long as”—he couldn’t seem to say the name Iris—“she could see the kid, she would stay still. She saw I was feeding her. I even brought her a doll. I kept telling her it was all going to be okay. She was quiet for a while. She and the kid would sleep together. It was all going to be all right. But then, that day . . .”

Jerry had to stop for a minute.

“Keep going,” George said.

“I let the kid play a bit one day when Andy was out getting food. All of a sudden the woman said, ‘Alice, go play!’ And that kid took off running. I think she had been coaching the kid to do that, like it was a game or something. Before I could run after the kid, the woman jumped at me. She had gotten her hands loose. She was strong. You never met a broad so strong. She jumped on top of me, dug her thumbs into my eyes. I dropped my gun. I didn’t want to hurt her. I thought, Just let her go; let her run. But something in me . . . I don’t know, if you fight all the time you can’t not fight if you get jumped. She was going for the gun, and I grabbed a shovel or something from the wall and hit her with it, hard. There was blood, but . . . she was still standing. She started running. I can still see her running across that field, screaming for the kid to run. The kid was nowhere. In my head, I’m thinking, It’s over. Good. It’s over. We can just go now. But she was screaming so loud I got scared. I caught up to her when she fell. She had blood on her face, in her eyes. I told her to shut up, shut up and everything would be fine. I hit her once or twice, just to try to get her to stop. And she started . . . laughing.”

At this, Jerry stopped and seemed genuinely puzzled by the story. George tightened his grip on the steering wheel.

“Andy came back when this was going on. When I saw him, I let her go. Because I knew. I thought, Give her a chance. She got up and started screaming again. And Andy, he just . . .”

The picture was complete and all too clear to George. Iris was one of the most alive people he had ever met. She loved a dance, a party . . . she could swim for miles. That moment in the field—she had trained for that her whole life. She was a Valkyrie. She went down fighting.

“. . . shot her,” Jerry said simply. “It all happened so fast.”

Jerry fell silent, lost in the moment of Iris’s death there in the field.

“Alice,” George prompted him.

“It took us an hour to find the kid,” Jerry went on quietly. “I told her her mother had gone home. She started crying. We moved to another place. We wrapped the woman’s body up and Andy drove back to Lake Champlain and put it there to make it seem like we were closer to Burlington than we were. After that, Andy started getting nuts, talking about the FBI all the time. He never left me alone with the kid again. We’d drive from place to place. We slept in parks, sometimes hotels, but usually out in the open, in the car. Then one day he decided he could leave me with the kid again for a little while. He went out for an hour and came back and said he’d found this place. We were going to leave the kid for a bit and come back when it was less hot for us. This couple would watch her. We told them she was his sister’s kid, and that the husband was no good and we wanted to keep the kid safe for a bit while we dealt with it. They seemed to buy it, and they liked the money. We slept in a barn that night. Andy talked about Cuba, that he knew a guy with a boat who would take us there for five hundred. He said we should go there. We’d drive to Boston and get in the boat. When I woke up, Andy was gone. He left a grand in my pocket. I didn’t know what to do. I got cousins in New Jersey, so I went there. But I don’t know what to do in New Jersey. So I came back to New York. I knew at some point you’d show up.”

“So why leave me the card?” George asked.

“I guess I was tired of fighting it. You get tired.”

George felt something roiling in his abdomen—coffee and bile. You get tired. He was so tired. Once he got Alice, it would be over. Whatever happened to him then, maybe it didn’t matter. Get Alice and get Andy. Albert Ellingham knew half the government of Cuba. That would be easily settled. A sweet relief broke with the dawn. So much pain and tension and fear this last year, and for what? Now, there would be some redemption.

“Here,” Jerry said. “Turn here.”

They turned down something that was barely a road—it was a dirt path cut into the woods, pocked and pitted, full of ice and snow. The car sputtered and at one point almost slid off the road and into a tree. At the end of the road was a house, rough, made of logs and clapboard, with a collapsed-in porch with several deer antlers scattered around. An anemic finger of smoke came from the chimney.