“So what the fuck are we going to do about it then, huh?” I snarl.
“Right now,” he replies evenly, “‘we’ are not going to do anything. You’ll meet with Lukas in a few days, once you’ve rested. Until then, we bide our time.”
“No. Hell fucking no. I’m not waiting days sitting on my ass.”
I wrack my brain, but I come up empty on things to do—until one hits me like a lightning bolt.
“Susan,” I blurt.
Afon raises an eyebrow and waits for me to go on.
“Susan Oglethorpe. Bill’s wife. She was breathing when they wheeled her out. Cass said Bill’s daughter, at the funeral, told her that the doctors were optimistic she’d wake up.”
“And? What does this change?”
“You remember that Bill pulled me aside in the woods at the partner retreat, yeah? He started to tell me something about Raymond, but he didn’t get the chance to finish. Hours later, he and his wife are half-dead from carbon monoxide poisoning? That’s not a coincidence.” I glare at him. “If you and Lukas are really as in the dark as you say you are, then Susan might be the only living person in New York to possibly know who really runs Vainakh.”
Afon flicks his ash out the window.
Then he puts the car in drive.
“You really are just like your father,” he mutters as he accelerates back onto the highway. “Always talking me into doing stupid, reckless shit.”
“Thank you,” I breathe.
“Don’t thank me,” he snaps. “I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing this because I would also like to know who put a gun to Raymond Snyder’s head before we could. Anyone who can move that fast on our home turf is someone I would like to introduce to a very deep hole. Before they do the same to us.”
42
MAT
While Afon goes to the nurses’ station to “ask about visitor passes for the Oglethorpe family,” I’m left alone with the manila envelope they handed me on my way out of the precinct.
I sit down by the window and open it up. They didn’t return much because there wasn’t much to take in the first place. Keys, belt, watch, cufflinks.
And one folded square of paper.
I unfold it on my knee.
The sonogram is creased now in places it wasn’t creased before. Someone unfolded it, looked at it, then refolded it badly and shoved it aside. I picture a uniformed cop holding it up under a fluorescent light, him squinting at it, deciding it was nothing important, and crumpling it back in the envelope.
I look at it carefully. I’ve done this before, of course, but it’s a different experience doing it now. What’s the thing Heraclitus says?No man ever steps in the same river twice, for he is not the same man and it is not the same river?
I’m no longer the same man.
This river has fucking changed, too.
When Cass first handed me this, I thought there’d be a clean way out for us.Freedom,as I said to her and to Afon and myself over and over again.
Now, I see that there’s no such thing as that. We’re all tied down in one way or another. Freedom is an illusion.
But maybe this little life can be free in a way I’ll never be able to. It’s only a small thing now. If my math is correct, its heart has only just begun to pump.
For the child’s sake and for its mother’s, I’m going to do what must be done.
Freedom.If not for me, then for them.
But in a sick twist of fate, for right now, the freest place Cass can be is in a jail cell. Those locked doors keep her caged in, but they also keep Vainakh cagedout.
