B009XDDVN8 EBOK (7 page)

I kept my head down as I strode through the terminal. I had flown in as Jon Willing—I had reverted to using my real name after leaving Pitchford—and the last thing I could afford just then was an old high-school classmate calling out for J.J. Moretti, you old son of a gun, you haven’t changed a bit. In a gift shop I bought
myself a souvenir of my journey, a pin-striped Philadelphia Phillies license plate, before heading with a show of hurry down the exit corridor, a man in a ridiculous white baseball cap with a crucial appointment to keep.

No one stopped me, no former Pitchford acquaintance called out my old name. As I kept walking, I glanced quickly behind me. Except for a pregnant woman, no one was following. Unless she had an Uzi beneath the fake pillow on her belly, it was looking pretty clean.

I bypassed baggage claim and headed right for the garage, taking the elevator up to level four, and kept walking until I reached my car, a sweet little BMW sedan. The 3 Series I’m talking, nothing too big or too luxurious, nothing to call too much attention to itself, but still a step above the expected. That was how I rolled now, that described perfectly my car, my house, my life, at least what was left of it. I pressed the fob, opened the trunk, threw in my briefcase. From the little tool kit by the spare tire, I took out four adhesive magnets I had put there just for this eventuality, along with a screwdriver.

I headed back toward the concourse as if I had forgotten something, but instead slipped into a line of parked cars. I kept moving until I saw what I needed, a huge black SUV parked with its back to a wall. Not as private a spot as I would have hoped, but private enough. After a furtive scan to make sure no one was near, I scooted to the rear bumper, knelt down, stuck my screwdriver into the first of the screws holding on the license plate.

By now they would have found the car behind the motel in Kingman. I imagined them surrounding it with their print shirts and bullheads, kicking the tires and leaning over the rear fender to examine the blood of their fellow thug, whom I had crushed into pulp. They weren’t the mangy meth-crazed cycle gang I had been expecting all these years, tattooed and instantly recognizable, without the resources to track the Byzantine trail in which I had directed my life. Instead they were apparently
real-deal torpedoes from the Las Vegas chapter of the goddamn mob, with its tentacles reaching all across the country and deep into the nation’s databases. Imagining them kicking at the tires of my rented wreck made me realize how threadbare had been my precautions.

I thought I was being slick flying to Vegas out of Philadelphia instead of the airport closest to my home, and I thought I had covered my tracks out of Phoenix, but I should never have flown as J.J. Moretti out of the city where I left my damn car.

I edged my BMW now to the long row of payment booths at the exit of the airport’s parking garages. Affixed to the rear plate was a valid PA license. Because cars in Pennsylvania have only rear plates, my front plate was covered with an abject show of devotion for the Phillies. I didn’t look around for someone looking for me as I stopped to make my payment, I simply smiled at the lady in the booth as I took my receipt and waited for the bar to rise. When it did, I pulled slowly into the lanes of traffic. I kept my moderate pace even as I fully expected a couple tons of metal to come hurtling at me like a cannonball.

But nothing shot out in front of me. Nothing came careening from behind.

I followed the signs to I-95 North, skirted Center City Philadelphia, and headed toward New York, checking the rearview all the while. I didn’t see anything suspicious behind me, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anything suspicious behind me. Cruising in the left lane, I veered suddenly hard right, slipping onto a North Philadelphia exit ramp just in front of a storming truck, spun left at the light at the bottom, and wended my way through a warren of tight city streets.

Nothing following.

I turned into an alleyway between two rows of row houses and parked beside a beat old pickup. I waited for someone to pass. Nobody did. I got out of the car and pulled the two magnetized license plates off, revealing my two Virginia plates. I put the
covering plates into the briefcase and drove a few miles south, through the hard urban landscape, still watching behind me.

Nothing following, nothing suspicious.

Maybe I had given the bullheaded bastards too much credit. Maybe they had given up after all. For a moment I let a shard of hope slip into my emotions and fill them with lift, as if the shard were a hypodermic loaded with hop. But then I gained control of myself and spit it out. The hell with hope—it wasn’t going to do a damn thing for me except get me killed. If I knew anything in this world, I knew this: those bastards weren’t done with me yet.

I sometimes played golf with this guy named Joel. He had a nice swing, a pretty blonde wife, he wore a red plaid vest when he mixed drinks at his annual Christmas party, and he had the best damn lawn in the neighborhood. He lavished his lawn with fertilizer, spoiled it with water. Every Saturday he rode his mower across his yard like a frontier cowboy riding the prairie, and he edged with the clean savagery of a surgeon. What I mean is that if his name wasn’t Joel Steinberg, you wouldn’t ever have known he was Jewish. But after 9/11, when everyone in the neighborhood was going on about how shocking it was that we had been attacked and how everything had changed, Joel simply shook his head.

“What’s changed, really?” he said, a glass of chardonnay in his hand. “They’ve always been after me.”

And I now understood how he felt, because no matter how safe had seemed my life in recent years, what had happened to Augie wasn’t a total shock. I had always known they were after me, and though it looked like I had slipped out of Vegas with my skin intact, I knew they still were. But I hadn’t sat idly by all these years, I had gouged a route to safety out of the hardscrabble facts of my circumstance. And now all I had to do was follow the simple steps I had laid out for myself.

First I had to make it out of Philly. Then I had to die.

After one last look behind, I punched the buttons on the car’s GPS.

W
HERE
T
O?

M
Y
L
OCATIONS.

G
O
H
OME.

Which for me meant the place that put the
über
in
suburbia
, and where I had spent the last fifteen years of my life: the Grande Estates at Patriots Landing.

T
HERE IS AN
infinite variety of American lives for us to inhabit, from urban living to off the grid, from bohemian rhapsody to rush-hour grind. Usually we don’t end up choosing, we just stumble into something and let sweet inertia sweep us along. One of our greatest freedoms is the freedom to simply fall into a life.

But I was never free enough to let utter randomness select the details of my existence. While it might not have been necessary for me to live underground, moving from safe house to safe house like a Weatherman on the run, the great choice I made as a youth determined to a great extent the life I was forced to live. I couldn’t place myself at the forefront of public events, I couldn’t allow myself to slip into a life of accidental celebrity or make a name for myself in business or the arts. I needed a certain anonymity, not the celebrated anonymity of the Unabomber in his shack, but the anonymity of the man so often seen as to disappear into his landscape.

What I was searching for was a place where with one glance anyone could know all they cared to know about me. A place where I would be judged not by the content of my character—what kind of crackpot would ever want that anyway?—but by the contents of my garage. Where I could strike up a friendship and talk for hours on end, for years even, without ever getting deeper
than the secrets of lawn care or the quality of a certain microbrewed beer. Where I could be defined solely by impersonal yet definitive numbers, my zip code (23185), my handicap (14.6), the series of my BMW (the 3, yes, or did I mention that already?), the Btu’s put out by my backyard grill (fifty-five grand, baby, and not a unit less).

What I was looking for was the Grande Estates at Patriots Landing, set nobly on the banks of the James River in Williamsburg, Virginia. Seven different models selling from the mid-threes, financing available.

I remember sitting with my new wife, Caitlin, in the model home slash sales office, built just within the development’s imposing entranceway, with its bold brick wall, its twin white lions, the name spelled out in bright golden letters. We were going over the designs of the models, trying to imagine our future from floor plans and idealized drawings. Caitlin was seeking a house in which to raise a family, to celebrate holidays and joyous events. I was looking for genteel anonymity. As we pored over the choices—that gable, that vaulted ceiling, cherry or oak cabinets—we were both finding exactly what we wanted. Caitlin was pregnant at the time with Shelby, and I had just nabbed a promising sales job in Richmond; this seemed like the time to take a leap and buy a home. We could have lived right outside Richmond for less, and my commute would have been shorter, but a home in Williamsburg seemed like a better investment and I assured Caitlin that we could swing it, even if our income didn’t yet match the suggested guidelines. Funny how we were always able to afford more than our salaries seemed to warrant. Thrift, I told her, and canny investing.

Caitlin thought the modest Carter Braxton model looked nice, with its three bedrooms and butcher-block countertops, coming in at a cozy 1,700 square feet. Or maybe even the George Wyeth model, a similar size but with a jazzed-up front entrance. The salesman was trying to talk us up to something a little more
ambitious, four bedrooms and 2,200 square feet, like the Patrick Henry, with its lovely brick front, or the Peyton Randolph, with its stone entranceway.

“What is this one?” I said to the salesman as I stopped paging through the model booklet and pointed a finger at a wide house with a spire rising from the roof and a porch that wrapped across the whole of the front like a bright ribbon.

“That might be a bit overwhelming for your situation,” said the man, smiling kindly, like an indulgent uncle, even as he brought me back to the page he had selected for us. “The Patrick Henry is quite a popular model, and it fits perfectly within the price range you said you were looking at.”

“I like the brick on the Patrick Henry,” said Caitlin. “Is it real?”

“No,” said the salesman, “but you can hardly tell.”

“Let’s get back to this one,” I said, flipping to the page I had been on before.

“That,” said the salesman, “is the George Washington.”

“It has a ring to it, doesn’t it?”

“It is not quite our most regal model—that would be the Thomas Jefferson—but the George Washington is still quite sturdy and handsome. Five bedrooms, a great room off the kitchen in addition to a formal parlor and a cherry-paneled home office, forty-five hundred square feet of gracious living, with a front porch modeled on the rear portico at Mount Vernon.” The salesman sighed the sigh of the disappointed dreamer. “It is grand in every way, including, sadly, the price. Now, the Patrick Henry has quite a few nice options, such as granite countertops for the kitchen or even a cupola for the breakfast nook.”

“Ooh, a cupola,” said Caitlin.

“I could put you on a nice lot on a beautiful and secluded cul-de-sac not far from the entrance.” The salesman pointed at a tiny trapezoid on a map of the development. “Chandler Court, right here.”

“I think we would prefer to be closer to the river,” I said.

“Those lots are reserved for our more expensive models,” said the salesman.

“Nearer the entrance would be more convenient,” said Caitlin. “And maybe we should stay within our price range.”

“Very sensible,” said the salesman, “so let’s talk again about the Patrick Henry. You have your choice of color on the vinyl siding, but I would suggest the off-white, quite classic, and goes beautifully with the faux brick.”

Now, at the end of the long journey from Vegas, as I turned into Patriots Landing and drove past the twin white lions, the fearful clench of my stomach finally eased. I glanced at the rearview mirror and let out a breath of relief at what I didn’t see as I passed the very model house where my wife and I had made our choice. The roads were lined with examples of all the houses we considered that day, each looking neatly squared away on its suitably sized lot, the Carter Braxtons, the George Wyeths, even the insipid Patrick Henrys with their fake-brick fronts.

There is a certain unreality to a place like Patriots Landing. It is at the same time both a living neighborhood and the idea of a neighborhood. Driving through the development, fresh from the travails of Vegas, I could see both aspects at once. Kids playing on small front yards, kids biking on the wide streets, men and women gardening and mowing and coming back from running errands, all the indicia of a normal drowsy Saturday in the real world. Yet the trees were all the same size, and the lawns were maintained according to neighborhood code, and everything in sight had a naturalistic artificiality, as if built by a film crew to evoke a nostalgia for something that had never before existed. The whole thing was a conspiracy between developer and homeowner to pretend to create something real, even though the only thing being created was a real piece of artifice. And it was exactly that quality that drew me to Patriots Landing in the first place. Where better to hide in plain sight than within a shared delusion?