“So why does that mean you have to stop him? Why don’t we just get out of here, get away?”

“You’d do that?”

She hesitated, looked around their living room, and then nodded slowly.

He leaned in and kissed her soft lips, let himself dream it for a moment. Just hop in the car and go, take what money they had and start over. Somewhere without winter winds and bleak history. Somewhere they could be different people.

It was a beautiful dream, but that was all it was.

“Evan would kill the boy just to spite me. And maybe Richard, too. And even if he wouldn’t,” he paused, “I think I’ve done enough running in the last seven years.”

“Then what?” She stared at him. “Pretend you’re John Wayne?”

He sighed, closed his eyes. “I don’t know.” Unbidden, an image of Patrick rose up in front of him. That day at the pub, not a month earlier, when he’d watched in the mirror as Patrick came in, flirted with the girls in the corner booth. How he’d thrown his head back and howled with laughter when Danny shot him in the mirror. Danny rubbed at his eyes, wanting to smear the image. “‘Running just breeds faster problems.’” He opened his eyes. “Dad used to say that.”

She was silent. He knew her mind was working, trying to find them a way out, an option where they walked away unscathed. A smart play.

“Did I ever tell you how my dad died?”

She softened. “Of course. In a car accident.”

He nodded. “His brakes went out. He drove an old Ford pickup with big tool chests in the back.” He smiled. “My friend Seamus and I used to take the tools out of the compartments and climb inside, pretend we were smuggling ourselves in the Millennium Falcon. We’d fight over who got to be Han and who had to be Luke. That was twenty years ago, and Dad was still driving it when he died. The money was never there for a new one, so he just rode it into the ground, even as the salt ate holes in the underbelly and the rust crept up the doors.” He sighed. “You know the last time I saw him, I was in prison?”

She nodded, her face creased.

“He came to see me. He looked so out of place. He’d worked his ass off since he was a teenager. Work was part of being a man to him. Criminals, people who would steal instead of earn, they were beneath his contempt. He hated that I was there, hated what I’d become. But I was his son, so he came to see me.” He shook his head. “We talked about baseball.”

“I’m sure he knew that you loved him.”

He blew air through his mouth, stared at the ceiling. “That was December. A couple weeks later he was driving that ancient piece of junk down the Eisenhower. It was snowing, and the roads were very slippery. Sunday morning, but he was on his way to a job anyway. His brakes failed.”

Karen moved behind him, put her arms around his neck, her chest warm against his back. “Baby, you’ve told me all this. You don’t have to relive it now.”

He shook his head. “What I didn’t tell you was that the cop who’d responded to the accident call came to the funeral. That really touched me.” Danny remembered him perfectly. A football player’s build, cop mustache, and bone-cracking handshake, but a voice that was almost a whisper. “I went over to thank him, and he told me something that I’ve never been able to forget.”

Karen tightened her grip on him, but it felt like he’d gone numb.

“He was a beat cop, and he’d seen a lot of accidents. After a while, he said, you learned to read them. A story written in skid marks and broken glass and points of impact. They were mostly the same, he said. People asleep at the wheel, or drunk, or careless. But Dad’s had been different.”

“How?” Karen said, her cheek against his.

“It was the tire marks, the cop said, that gave it away.” Danny sighed, remembering the “of course” feeling. The way the scene had flashed in his imagination, clear in every detail. Dad at the wheel, talk radio playing low, a cigarette in his mouth. The patched seats radiating cold. Suddenly, the sense that something wasn’t quite right. His father pumping the brakes, feeling them go soft. Staring out at the snowy morning, at the lines of cars crowding him.

“Dad swerved into the concrete barrier on purpose.”

“Suicide?” Her voice was incredulous.

Danny shook his head. “His brakes were gone. The roads were icy, and there were a lot of cars. He could have tried to move to the right, off the road, hoped that everyone would get out of his way. But if it didn’t work, he might have crashed into another car. Maybe a family.”

He turned to look at her. “So instead of risking other people, he jerked the wheel to the left. They were widening the road, and there was a concrete construction barrier on that side. The cop said he was going fifty or sixty miles an hour. Dad didn’t have a chance, and he knew it.”

Karen held his gaze, but her eyes were wet.

“I’ve been living with that for years. I had to be escorted to my father’s funeral by marshals. I thought that was bad enough. But worse was that three months later, when they let me out of prison, I went right back to my old life. Oh, I pretended to go straight. I got a new apartment, a job tending bar, but I knew I was bullshitting myself. It wasn’t two months before Evan and I ripped off the manager as he deposited the night’s take, and then it was back to old habits. It wasn’t until the pawnshop that I even started trying to do what I should have done all along. What my dad did without hesitation.”

The memory burned. For a guy who thought he brought intelligence to the table, he’d made a mess of a lot of things. When Evan had come back into his life, they’d sat in a hot dog joint and argued about the reasons, Evan claiming that it was economics, that the system put the gun in his hand. That they were in a fight to the death with the odds stacked against them. In a world where men like his father worked seven days a week just to survive while men like Richard had everything handed to them, he couldn’t deny that there was some truth to the argument. But it was too simple to be complete. Because the fact was that there had been moments when two choices had opened up before him, and he’d made the wrong one. Made it knowing it for what it was.

“No more.” As he said the words, looking into Karen’s eyes, he realized that he meant it. No more fear of consequences. No more convenient wrong choices.

No more smart plays.

And suddenly he knew what to do.

36

Through the broad front windows, menacing clouds mottled a chill blue sky. The morning sunlight was pewter, stark and lacking warmth. Halloween had always seemed like the first day of winter to Danny, and this year that felt particularly true.

“I’m at the coffee shop.” He heard a faint echo half a heartbeat behind each word. They kept making cell phones smaller instead of making them work. “I’m going to wait a few minutes to be sure. Then I’ll head over.”

“Let me come. I can make the call from anywhere,” Karen said.

“No.”

“Danny-”

“We’ve been over this.” He said it gently.

“I could help. We’re in this together.” She sounded frustrated.

“I know.” He leaned on his elbows to glance out the front window. Traffic seemed normal in both directions, no signs of heightened police presence. He didn’t expect any, but they’d agreed there was no point taking chances. “But if you’re with me, Debbie might spook. This has to go perfectly. Please.”

She sighed. “All right.” He could hear stress beneath her calm.

“We’re going to get through. It’ll be fine.”

“Just be careful, okay?”

“I promise. You have the number?”

She read Nolan’s cell phone number back to him.

“Good. Stay by the phone. I’ll call you as soon as I’m done. And listen-” He paused. “I’m sorry you have to deal with this.”