28.
Out in the desert sunshine, Teddy rushed toward me. Then back two steps, bouncing like an overexcited terrier. The look on his face was somewhere between wonder and panic.
“Dan—”
I stopped him, fast, and shot a glance over my shoulder.
“Emerson. My name is Paul Emerson. Understand?”
He understood. I walked down the steps and followed the sidewalk at the edge of the parking lot, getting out of the path of foot traffic. He trailed me.
“I don’t know where to start,” he said.
I took him in, now that I could think clearly enough to see. He was fit, his broad shoulders holding up more muscle than flab. He’d spent a few bucks on his suit, but not too many, and his shoes were department-store leather.
I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at his face. That’s where all the bad memories were hiding.
“I don’t know either,” I said. “I guess I’m sorry. For not keeping in touch.”
“Me too.”
Silence fell, as if that was all we had to say to each other. It felt more like I had this torrent of words shoved down in my belly, a giant balloon stuffed with them, jammed up and twisted and knotted, too many to get a single one of them out.
“I tried to reach out once,” I managed to say. “You were in the military, I guess? Navy?”
“Yeah.” He smiled, sheepish, and rubbed the back of his neck. “Did a couple of tours to pay for college. Overseas. I would have been hard to reach.”
“Yeah.” I looked for something to add to that. “Were you on a ship?”
“Big one. I signed up to learn electronics. Got a little of that, but mostly I got really good at painting and cleaning.” He ducked his head, still looking at me like maybe I wasn’t really there. “Got married when I came home. We spent a few years out in Fort Collins; the company just transferred me to Vegas last month. You, uh…you have a niece. She’s six years old. You want to see a picture?”
I had a niece. I didn’t expect to get gut-punched out of nowhere, but that did the trick.
“I’d like that,” I told him.
He tugged a photo from his wallet. She was gap-toothed with blond pigtails, riding a tire swing and grinning like a loon.
“Cute kid,” I said. Hell with that. She was perfect. She was family.
“I gotta ask,” he said.
“Sure.”
“I tried to reach out to you, too. Couple of times. You were beyond off the grid. It took me a while, but eventually I figured out you wanted it that way. Then I found this guy, Jud Pankow. He told me his granddaughter had been murdered and you…fixed it for him.”
“People say a lot of things.”
“Then I tried again, and—” Teddy paused. He looked behind him, then hustled a little farther along the sidewalk, waving me close. His voice dropped to a whisper. “Dan, you were in prison. And then they said you were dead, that you died in that riot. Do you know you have a tombstone, in a potter’s field? I left flowers there.”
“Hence the new name. And it’s really, really important that you keep the old one out of your mouth, all right?”
“Sure. Right. Of course.” He stared at my shoes. “I never knew you even tried looking for me. I didn’t expect you to.”
“What? Because of what went down? Teddy, c’mon. I never blamed you for that.”
He met my gaze then. I could see him forcing himself to do it. His neck muscles strained like steel cables.
“I sold you out. I lied.”
“You were a scared kid, and Dad’s lawyer told you that you were going home with him at the end of the day, no matter what you said on the stand.”
Teddy’s cheeks tightened in disgust. “Didn’t understand until years later that he was full of shit, just trying to scare me into backing Dad’s story. I could have saved you if I’d told the truth. I could have saved us both.”
“Exactly. You didn’t know, you didn’t understand, and you were eight years old. You were never in my bad books. If you need me to say I forgive you…Teddy, I forgive you. It happened. We survived.”
I took a breath and sighed it out one side of my mouth. There are some things you don’t want to know, but you have to ask.
“Dad?”
“Seven years ago,” Teddy said.
“Cirrhosis?”
“Pneumonia. Can you believe it? The booze didn’t get him, a bad flu did.”
I took that in. My father was dead.
I’d known he had to be, realistically, statistically, given the way the man lived from drink to drink. Maybe that was why I never went looking. Or maybe I was afraid I’d find out he was still alive, and then I’d start feeling like I had to do something about it.
But my father was dead, and he’d been in the ground for seven years now. I wondered if violent schizophrenics went to hell, if whatever machinery governed the cosmos held them responsible for their crimes, or if the bad wiring in their brains gave them a get-out-of-damnation-free card. Maybe I’d ask Caitlin sometime. Maybe I’d be happier not knowing.
“We buried him up at Colewood,” my brother said. “Five people came to the funeral, and nobody really wanted to be there.”
My face went hot. “Colewood? Jesus, Teddy.”
“The plot and the headstone were already paid for—”
“He doesn’t deserve to be buried next to Mom. That’s fucking obscene and you know it.”
“It was paid for,” he snapped, throwing my anger back at me. “I’m not exactly made of money, okay? And you weren’t there. I had to handle everything on my own, and pretend to be the grieving son when I would have been fine tossing his evil ass in a burlap sack and dumping it in the trash. You weren’t there.”
His shoulders sagged as his fury drained away.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You didn’t deserve—”
“Yes. I did. You’re not wrong.”
“Geez.” He kicked his toe against the curb. “Still brothers, huh? Peas in a pod.”
“Still brothers.”
“So, the stuff they said about you.” He hedged, slow, working his way to the question. “I mean, when you were in prison, the things they said you did. So you’re some kind of…”
“You can say it,” I told him.
Our eyes met. “Gangster?”
“That’s a word for it. Let me put it this way: remember back in the day, when we’d boost food from that 7-Eleven down the street? You’d distract the clerk while I loaded up the backpack?”
Teddy looked to the sky and let out a sound somewhere between an empty laugh and a sigh. He put his hands on his hips.
“Of course,” he said. “That was the only way we got any food at all, some nights.”
“Turns out I’ve got a talent for taking things that don’t belong to me. And I believe a person should play to their natural strengths.”
He laughed again, this time with some affection behind it. “Do I even want to know why you were in Mayor Seabrook’s office?”
“Believe it or not, doing my civic duty. Sometimes it takes a bad guy to catch a bad guy.”
“That I don’t believe.”
“Oh, it’s true,” I said. “Let’s just say I have access to avenues of information that the cops don’t.”
“No. Not that part. I don’t believe that you’re a bad guy.”
Sweet, innocent Teddy. I could have shown him where the literal bodies were buried. I could have led him to a river of blood, my arms washed elbows deep in it. After all that, he’d probably still say the same. It was nice to have someone who believed in your better nature, even when you knew they were wrong.
“So,” I said. “Security, huh?”
“Playing to my natural strengths, I guess. Ex-military and all that. It pays the bills, and it beats being stuck in an office all day.”
“I hear that.”
The conversation faded as we both worked toward the same question. He asked it first.
“So what now?”
“Now? Well, I’ve got to get back to work. I assume you’ve got to get back to work. And we shouldn’t be seen talking in public because officially you don’t know me—”
“But after?” He studied me, head tilted, pensive. He looked like a kid trying to find the confidence to ask a girl to prom. “Still brothers?”
“I’d like that,” I told him.
“Would you…want to come around sometime? Dinner or something? You’ve got a sister-in-law and a niece you haven’t met yet.”
I hadn’t been expecting the invitation. I figured we’d end this with a polite exchange of phone numbers before slipping out of each other’s lives again.
“Is that okay?” I asked him. “Teddy, you know what I do for a living.”
“Well, don’t tell them that. Just…make something up. You used to be good at that.”
“I’m still pretty good at it.”
He reached out and took hold of my arm.
“I want you in my life,” he said. “We can’t make up for lost time, but we can start fresh, maybe.”
We exchanged numbers. We went our separate ways. I cracked the car door to let the heat out and stood there and marveled at life for a little while. As I got behind the wheel, reality sawed through the wonder like a serrated knife.
I had a list of enemies as long as my arm, and any one of them would love to get their hands on my long-lost brother. They’d snatch him for leverage or just hurt him to hurt me. My recent promotion and induction into the courts of hell, where a stab in the back was how most people said hello, added a fresh layer of trouble to the mix. The best, smartest thing I could do—for Teddy and for myself—was to keep my brother as far away from me as humanly possible. Cut him off, change my phone number, disappear.
But I wasn’t going to.
I was only human, and a chance to reconnect with Teddy—after my father and the world had torn us apart—was a treasure I couldn’t forsake. So I’d find a way to make this work.
The undercarriage of the Elantra rattled again as I pulled out onto the street. I set the dashboard GPS for the rental place, and then I called Pixie.
“You found another Network safe house?” she said. “Already?”
“No, just wondering if my car’s popped up anywhere.”
“Seriously? That’s what you’re calling me about?”
“I miss my car,” I said.
“So go buy another one.”
“It’s a painstakingly rebuilt 1970 Hemi Cuda,” I said. “It’s not a Honda Civic. You can’t just ‘buy another one.’”
“I’ve got feelers out, okay? I’m doing my best.”
“That’s all I ask—” I paused as the phone beeped. “Hold on, I’ve got another call coming in.”
I tapped the screen, and an unwelcome voice growled in my ear.
“You shouldn’t have made fun of me,” Grimm said.
“How did you get this number?”
“When a man is challenged to a fight, he stands up and answers.”
“I did answer,” I told him, “and my answer is ‘you’re ridiculous.’ That answer still stands, by the way.”
“I’m going to expose you for the craven weakling you really are.”
I sighed. “Look, what did you call yourself? Huffington Goofyman?”
“Hunter. MacGregor. Grimm.”
“That’s what I said. Bottom line is, I just don’t have time to deal with you right now. I’m supposed to be getting ready for a fight with a guy who is A, actually dangerous, and B, actually has a reason to want to kill me. It’s a lousy reason, but that’s more than you’ve got.”
“Too bad he’ll never get the chance,” Grimm replied. “Bang. You’re dead.”
I stepped on the gas and wove through the midmorning traffic. I took Grimm seriously enough to cast an eye toward the rooftops on either side of the street, watching for the telltale glint of a riflescope catching the sunlight. If he was good enough to get my number, he was good enough to track my movements. All the same, there were a dozen directions I could have left city hall from, and the possibilities exploded with every intersection I passed.
I shouldn’t have been nervous. And yet.
“I’m driving forty miles an hour,” I said, keeping my tone light even as my nerves trilled like warning bells. “You’d have to be one hell of a sniper to hit me through the windshield, assuming you even know what street I’m going to take and have time to set up a perch before I get there.”
Grimm chuckled. It was a long, slow, raspy sound, and entirely too confident for my liking.
“People always make that mistake,” he said.
“Which one?”
“Thinking the word ‘bang’ implies a bullet.”
The undercarriage of the sedan rattled again. Louder this time.