The Dismantling (28 page)

“We had to get out of the city.”

“Yeah, and that could've been anywhere.”

“I still had to pick somewhere, right?” He reached over and switched on the bedside lamp. “I didn't want to just start driving.”

She got out from under the covers and pulled on a pair of jeans. “What's your plan here?” She sat back down on the bed, cross-legged. “We run? We hide?”

“Just until—”

“Just until what? Until DaSilva gets bored of looking for us?” She shook her head. “Screw that. We can't wait around. He's going to come after us. He tried to have you killed, Simon.”

“I don't know if I believe that. And, anyway, you could leave. I'm the one he needs to get rid of. You'd be safe.”

“Don't be such a martyr,” Maria said. “And, yeah, maybe he can't hurt me now, not while this investigation's happening. But since I left with you, he's got to figure I know all about his gig with Health Solutions, right? I can't be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life. I won't live like that.”

“So what do you want to do, Maria?”

“I don't know.” She rubbed her face. “DaSilva or that woman, Katherine—have either of them called you?”

“I'm not sure.” He remembered that Katherine's phone was still in the RAV4 out in the lot; she probably didn't have his number at all now. But DaSilva had to be trying to reach him. He stretched for his jacket, crumpled on the floor next to the bed. He patted at the damp lump of wool, but he couldn't find his phone in either of the outer pockets. Annoyed, he lifted the jacket and shook it out over the bed. His cell phone tumbled out of the inner breast pocket, followed by a sheet of folded, partially crumpled paper. He picked up the phone and jabbed at its buttons: the thing was dead, its battery long drained. He showed Maria the blank screen.

“Figures,” she said.

“Yeah.” He reached for the sheet of paper, and as soon as his fingers touched it—even before he'd unfolded it, before he'd smoothed it out on the bedspread, the dime-sized burn hole at its top edge, and fully understood its immense value—he remembered with a jolt what it was: the wire transfer form he'd found in the office. He'd completely forgotten about it, never returning it to DaSilva; instead, he'd carried it around, ignored, in his coat pocket for over two weeks. His pulse thumped hollowly in his ears: it was pure luck he hadn't lost it. Even now, he handled the damp paper carefully, desperate not to smear the ink.

“What's that?” Maria asked.

He looked up at her, and she must have seen it in his face, his surprise and excitement, because she quickly leaned over the paper, squinting as she tried to read DaSilva's scrawl. After a few moments, she raised her head to stare at him: “Holy fuck.”

“I know.”

“You had this the whole time?”

“I forgot about it. I don't think I quite realized what it was before.”

They looked back down at the paper together. The form authorized the transfer of $380,000 from the Health Solutions LLC account at a Citibank branch on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. This amount, Simon realized now, was exactly what Crewes had paid for the combined cost of Maria's liver and Health Solutions' fee. Listed as the beneficiary was a company called Black Sea Holdings, located at a street address in Nicosia, Cyprus; the beneficiary's bank was the Cyprus Popular Bank, also in Nicosia. The numbers for both accounts were filled in clearly. But all of this would have meant very little without DaSilva's signature, bold and messy, overflowing its box at the bottom of the page.

“Does he know you have this?” Maria asked.

“No.” He told her how he'd found it where it had fallen behind the fax machine. “He doesn't even know it exists.”

“He will soon.” She stood up and dug a smartphone out of her bag.

“I thought you threw away your phone,” Simon said.

“I bought this last week. New number, no contract.” She held the phone over the paper and snapped a photo. “I wondered how he was doing it.”

“Doing what?”

“Manufacturing all that cash. Clients write out checks, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So he had to figure out a way to turn those checks into untraceable cash. It's like laundering in reverse. This”—she tapped the form—“is the first step. Getting the money out of the American banks.”

“And this company in Cyprus, they—what, exactly?”

“My guess is that whoever's behind it has people here in New York who will give DaSilva the amount in cash, for some kind of a fee. Probably dirty money, from drugs, gambling, whatever. Untraceable. And now this guy's company has a bunch of clean American money sitting in its account.” She shrugged. “But I'm just guessing. It doesn't really matter. This paper fucks him either way.”

Simon picked up the form. “We should take this to the police, Maria.”

“No.” She spat the word out. “No cops.” She paused, and then, more measured, said, “You broke the law too, remember? You think you can get a plea deal? Maybe. But get ready to give back all the money you've made. And what about your clients, people like Crewes and Cheryl? You want to bring everybody down with you?”

He said nothing. She was right—he knew it.

“No cops, Simon,” she said again, defiantly. “I've earned my cash, and I'm keeping it.”

“We can still use this though.” He paced back and forth from the bed to the window. “We have some leverage here, we just have to figure out what to do with it.” He stopped, looked at her. “What if we offer to sell it back to him? We give him the form and he gives us—what? Forty thousand in cash? More? And then he agrees to sever all ties with us. We don't owe him anything more. We don't tell him anything about where we're going. He'll never find us.”

“And if he says no?”

“We say we're going to take it to the police.”

“He won't believe that.”

“A reporter, then. Somebody who wants to dig into all this.”

Maria nodded slowly. “Yeah. That might get him out here.”

“How much should we ask for?” Simon said. “Thirty? Forty?”

Maria shrugged. “We can ask for whatever we want. He's not going to give it to us.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He's not going to just pay up and leave us alone,” she said. “I'm telling you. He wants you dead. He'll probably blackmail me so I say what he wants me to say during the Cabrera investigation. Or maybe he'll just get rid of me too, now that he knows I know about him. Either way, there's not going to be any exchange.”

Simon sat back down on the bed. “I thought you agreed with me.”

“You got it half-right.” She smiled, the crooked gray tooth flashing. “We get him out here.”

“Yeah? And then what?”

“And then we kill him.”

He barked out a laugh.
This
was her idea? It was too insane to be serious. But she wasn't smiling. “Maria. I'm not a murderer.”

“Nobody's a murderer until they kill somebody.”

He shook his head. “That's circular logic.”

“This man doesn't want you alive, Simon. There's no other choice.”

“I just offered us another choice.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. We disappear.”

“You really think you can do that? And is that how you want to live the rest of your life? Invent an identity? Cut yourself off from your family, all your friends?”

“Isn't that what you did?”

“I don't have a family and those weren't real friends. What are you afraid of? Getting caught? We'll design it so that's impossible.” She grabbed his arm and squeezed. “Listen to me now: killing somebody is as simple as making a plan and having the will to follow through. That's it.”

“Jesus, Maria.” He pulled his arm free. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Do you realize how crazy you sound right now?” She shrugged, unmoved. “And how do you know anyway?” She looked away then, down at the worn, nubby carpet. “Maria?”

She raised her head. “Because I've done it.”

He stared at her. She held his eyes, steady and calm. Then he broke her gaze and laughed. “Okay, you almost had me.”

“I'm not lying.”

“You've lied to me about all kinds of things, from the day we met. Now you expect me to believe this?”

“Yeah, and I was protecting myself before. I think you understand that. And I wasn't lying about the rape.”

“All right, but—”

“Why would I lie about this? Right now?”

“Okay,” he said. “I'll play along. Who did you kill?”

“My foster brother.” She spoke without hesitation, her voice steady.

“When?”

“The night I flew to New York.”

“What? Just a few weeks ago?” He said this as though it was only the timing that made the whole thing impossible.

“Thirty days. But who's counting.”

“You're telling me that was your plan? To kill your brother—”

“Foster brother. I don't share any blood with that piece of shit.”

The venom in her voice silenced Simon. For the first time, he wondered if he should be afraid of her. “Maria, if this is true—”

She sliced her hand through the air, cutting him off: “It's fucking true.”

“If this is true, why are you telling me?”

“To show you it can be done. Nobody helped me. I did it by myself and here I am. Alive. Free.”

Tires hissed wetly on the nearby road; the light around the blinds brightened, suffusing the room with a milky glow.

“This was revenge?” It wasn't really a question.

“He deserved to die,” she said. “He was scum, Simon. The kind of person who picks on the helpless and most vulnerable just because he thinks he'll always get away with it.”

“How did it happen?” He didn't know if he believed her yet, but he wanted to hear what she would say. “How did you do it?”

She smiled a little, almost bashfully, and he could tell that she took a measure of pride in her planning, in the sheer audaciousness of her act.

“You need to understand what it was like for me after Thomas left. The fucker went back to college like nothing had happened. I stayed with the Dreesons through the end of the school year, in some kind of shock, I guess, in this sort of numb haze. All I could think about was finishing school and leaving. I turned eighteen a week after I graduated, and then I got the hell out of there.”

She told Simon that the day after her birthday she moved into a crowded and mildewy share house on the east side of Venice, a room she'd heard about through the punk-show grapevine. She dipped into the Dreesons' cash box one last time and took a hundred dollars for her first two weeks of rent. When the day came, she rode the bus in a diagonal across the entire city of Los Angeles, her bike wedged between her knees, duffel bag on the seat next to her. Before she left, she told the Dreesons that they shouldn't expect to hear from her anymore. They didn't seem surprised; she'd barely spoken to them during her last five months in the house. Within a week, one of her new roommates had found her a job as a waitress at a café in El Segundo, and finally, she thought, her real life had begun.

What had actually begun, though, was a period of darkness or, rather, the desperation of staving off the darkness, of filling time and mind and attention with something—anything—else. She lived around the cheaper fringes of the South Bay, waitressing and bartending and getting high. She inhabited a world of casual, low-stakes criminality: bottom-rung drug dealers, crooked chop shops, guys fencing stolen electronics. She discovered—like mother, like daughter—that she preferred downers: alcohol, painkillers, Xanax, certain strains of indica weed. She snorted heroin a few times, but it was too expensive, and after she saw an evil batch of black tar rip through Venice, she was too scared of it anyway. The obvious point of it all, as she recognized now, was to obliterate the rape and the feelings associated with it, but at the time she just thought of the drugs as an end in themselves, just what you did when you were young. She decided, too, that Thomas wasn't going to take sex away from her, and so she fucked whomever she wanted, as a way of proving to herself that she wasn't afraid of sex, wasn't afraid of men. And it was true: she wasn't afraid of them; she mostly just hated them. But none of it—not the drugs, not the sex—made her feel better. None of it chipped away at the temple of pure anger in which she felt herself encased, to the altar of which she offered her every action, her every thought.

Four years after she left the Dreesons, she finally told somebody about Thomas. She didn't plan this disclosure; it just happened. She and two of her girlfriends—Amanda and Dalia—went to a house party in Manhattan Beach, passing a flask of Bacardi 151 between them, the party the usual blur of smoke and music and bullshit. At some point they stumbled the few blocks to the beach and collapsed in the damp sand. Amanda lit a blunt of Kush, and as they passed it, talk turned to a story going around their circle. A girl Maria vaguely knew had passed out in the upstairs bedroom of a party not unlike the one they'd just left. According to the story, the host of the party had found her there after everybody else was gone, and he'd done just about what you'd expect a shithead like him to do. “And she,” Amanda continued, “did
nothing
about it.”

“Yeah,” Maria said, “'cause she was unconscious.”

“No, I mean after. She knows what happened. But she still sees the asshole at parties and acts like everything's fine!”

“It's not that simple,” Maria said.

Her two friends looked at her. “What do you mean?” Dalia asked.

“I mean . . .” Was she really going to say it? Why shouldn't she? “I mean, I was raped, and I didn't have a fucking clue what to do about it.”