Authors: Jeff Abbott
Cut and Run (33 page)
‘I don’t fit in with your life, Whit. I don’t. I do love you, but …’
‘Bullshit. Bullshit. I’m calling you on your bullshit, Mom.’
‘I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for me. But I need to do this. Alone.’
He saw it then. ‘You know where Frank is. With the money.’
She glanced down the darkened street.
‘Did he call you? After what he did you’d go back to him?’
‘Of course not. But I can find him.’
‘Who gives a shit about that money, Mom? You’re here. You’re home.’
‘But it’s five million, honey. Five million.’ She gave a quick little shrug. ‘Probably four by now, knowing Frank, but still
…’
Whit shook his head. ‘You aren’t going to do this to me again.’
Out of the dark a cab from a Corpus Christi taxi service rolled up and stopped three houses down. Of course. She wouldn’t
give the cab this address; the headlights might wake him up.
She tried to smile at him. ‘Whit, honey. Let’s not have a brutal little scene. You can either let me go or tie me up, but
I’ll go eventually. That’s the hard, bitter truth. Love me, but don’t change me into what you’ll love better.’
‘Mom—’
‘And I want to change you, and I can’t. You don’t want what I call life. You’re going to look at me every day and see the
bad things you did. Don’t be more like me. Be like your father. Your brothers. Even Claudia.’
‘I can tell the police about James Powell,’ he said, desperation rising in his voice. There’s no statute of limitations on
murder.’
‘Go right ahead.’ She gave her little shrug. ‘He threatened to kill you and your brothers if I didn’t do what he said, so
I killed him. You want me to confess to a crime, there you go. I’m not one bit ashamed of it.’
‘Mom. You killed him for that money.’
‘Believe what you want. Do what you like. Lock me up, throw away the key.’ She leaned over, kissed his cheek again. ‘Stay
good, baby.’
‘Please don’t. Please don’t do this,’ he said.
She leaned down, picked up her duffel. She didn’t look back, didn’t wave. He watched her get into the cab, vanish into the
dark.
I’m breaking one of my own rules now, because I’m close to a beach. Beaches are okay for me now. To the police I’m a city
girl. The Mosleys think of me as a beach girl. But Whit won’t come looking for me again, and he won’t find me if he does.
The beach here at Princeville is absolutely pristine, and the tourists are mostly honeymooners, nice kids, a few golf widows
sunning and reading fat novels. The beach here is far prettier than the ones in Texas, but it’s so pretty it almost doesn’t
seem real. A dream. So it seems safe.
Here I am Ellie again, now Ellie Masters. Eve fit like a suit faded from fashion, so I shed it. I stayed a while at a small
hotel on the south side of Kauai, waiting, thinking, until I found a condo for rent by a landlord living in California. Retired
lady, she and her husband moved here, then he died and she moved back to San Francisco to be close to her grandkids. I hope
she decides to sell and I bet she’d like cash. God knows I do.
Jacksonville, Florida, was where Frank landed; it was where he spent summers as a kid, visiting grandparents, and he always
spoke fondly of it. See, he broke the first rule. I traced him there via a false ID he thought I didn’t know about, he’d gotten
it a few years ago from the same guy who got me the Emily Smith cards. Mistake number two. I found him in a beachside house,
a modest little bungalow, and walked right up to him on his back porch one cold night and, before he could say I’m sorry,
put the bullet in his face. No hello, no good-bye you sorry piece of trash. Not in the mouth like James Powell but right
between the wide, lying eyes. Frank was surprised. I was surprised he had as much brain as he did voice. But he was never
stupid. My mistake.
The money was hidden in the house, in six different places. I took it and then phoned the Houston police, anonymously reported
that I thought I’d seen Frank Polo, who they were looking for, at the Jax address and hung up. My second good deed for the
day.
Frank had laid low, hadn’t spent more than a few thousand, and I headed down to Miami, caught a plane to the Caymans, and
started re-cleaning the money back through a series of accounts. Finally I put half in an account for me. Half in an unnumbered
account for Whit. Mailed him a note with the bank name, the account and access numbers, and ‘I love you.’ Nothing else. I
hoped he wouldn’t give it away or refuse to touch it or call the police about it like a high-minded idiot. I sort of tied
my boy’s hands; he won’t tell the police now because it’s too many questions, and the money can help make up for all the trouble
I caused him and his brothers their whole lives.
I don’t have to work, what with my cash settlement from Frank, but I get restless sitting around so I took a part-time job
in a little coffee shop/bookstore in Hanalei. It’s a hippie town near Princeville. The young people here all have dirty feet
and it’s not the kind of Hawaiian destination anyone from my previous lives would pick. So I am the world’s oldest barista
and I sell travel books and bestselling paperbacks to the vacationers. The dirty-feet kids all like to read Beat Generation
writers. They don’t know what life lived running is, trust me. But most of the customers are tourists who come in once and
only once, and the other clerks are nice but aren’t nosy. I say I’m from California, where it seems half the world is from,
and it’s answer enough.
But every day is a terrible temptation.
The bookstore owner, Doris, a really sweet lady, set up an Internet access on a couple of computers in the store. Thought
it’d sell more coffee, and it does; the hippies love it. They come in and e-mail their parents for more money.
But when the store’s not busy, I sit down and I open to a search engine and I want to type in Whit’s name so bad I could cry.
I want to know he’s okay. But I’m afraid, every Web site you visit on that machine is recorded in a file somewhere in the
world, I’m sure of it, and having made myself vanish again I don’t want to risk it. I would for him and him alone. Because
if I know he’s okay, will that be enough? Will I keep from e-mailing him? Or phoning him? Did he get the two-plus million
out of the account? Is he having fun with his share or did he give it all away to charity out of pointless guilt? I won’t
ever know.
The temptation is like hunger, hell, starvation of the worst sort. Because you imagine that the barest crumb would keep you
going.
But I don’t. For weeks and weeks, I don’t. Then I get an idea. I log on using Doris’ account (her password was ‘doris,’ for
God’s sakes), go to the Web site for the
Corpus Christi Caller-Times
. I don’t search by Whit’s name on the archives, I search for ‘justice of the peace.’ How many are there in the Coastal Bend?
Not many, right?
I find articles on him. Still in office, conducting a death inquest on a homicide over in Laurel Point. A mention in a story
on Babe’s passing, dated two weeks ago. Babe gone. Whit grieving bad, I know, I’m aching to hold him now.
So Whit’s safe. He stayed in office. I didn’t ruin him. He’s tough like me.
But it made me miss him more, bad enough where I felt
sick and I went home early and lay on my bed. I could buy one of those prepaid call cards. Pay cash. Make it impossible to
trace. Let him know I’m okay, hear his voice for a minute.
But no. He let me walk away when I needed to and it’s not fair, me opening the door again. Let it be shut. Let me be strong
to keep it shut. He doesn’t need me.
At night I rent the movies.
Caddyshack
and Monty Python and all those Woody Allen ones full of jokes only New Yorkers and Whit get. I pretend he and I are sitting
together, sharing popcorn, watching the movies. It is all I’m gonna get now.
And it has to be enough.
In writing this book, I relied on the particular help and expertise of Peter Ginsberg and Genny Ostertag; Lieutenant Gray
Smith, Narcotics Division, Houston Police Department; John Leggio, Media Relations, Houston Police Department; Ted Wilson,
Chief, Special Crimes Bureau, and Roe Wilson, Division Chief, Post-conviction Writs, both of the Office of the District Attorney,
Harris County, Texas; and Dr William K. Thomson. Any errors are entirely of my doing, not theirs. I also owe thanks to my
mother and stepfather, Liz and Dub Norrid; Matt Manroe; and Trish Kunz for kindnesses to me during the writing process.
Also, many thanks to Shirley Stewart, Anthony Cheetham, Malcolm Edwards, Jon Wood, Jane Wood, Helen Richardson, Nicola Jeanes,
Angela McMahon, Jenny Page and everyone at Orion.
No one writes a long book alone, and my most special and heartfelt thanks go to Leslie, Charles, and William for their loving
support and encouragement.
Some of the Houston locales in this book are real; others are entirely fictional. Everything else in the novel – characters
and events – is a product of my imagination.
Now read an extract of the first
Whit Mosley novel
When the Blade (as he secretly called himself) felt blue, he liked to relax behind the old splintery cabin, where his three
Darlings were buried, and feel the power of their vanished lives pulse through him. It was quiet in the shade of the laurel
oaks, and on lonely evenings the Blade pretended that his Darlings lived with him, with their cries and pleadings and wet,
fearful eyes. His kingdom was small, twenty feet by twenty feet, and he ruled over only three subjects. But he ruled over
them completely, life and body and soul.
Today, with his portable tape recorder playing a worn Beach Boys cassette and the clear harmony of ‘God Only Knows’ drifting
up into the oaks, he sat down between two of the unmarked graves: one of the mouthy carrot-topped girl from Louisiana who
had fought so hard, the other the young woman from Brownsville who had cried the whole time and hardly deserved to be a Darling
at all. He had selected a new Darling, a prime choice. But fear made his spit taste like smoke, because he had never wooed
near Port Leo, much less wooed anyone … famous.
He had followed her for a daring ten minutes yesterday, sweat tickling his ribs, idling near her in the grocery store while
she shopped with the big-shouldered boyfriend who had brought her to Port Leo. The Blade didn’t like the boyfriend named Pete,
not one bit, although he liked to think about all the mischief that Pete had been up to, starring in those nasty movies. The
Blade had eavesdropped in the grocery, pretending to inspect the jug wines while the couple selected beer. She fancied
Mexican beer, one that folks drank with a lime slice crammed down the neck of the bottle, and he wished he knew its taste;
but Mama didn’t let him drink. The Blade hoped they would talk about sex, being their vocation, but Pete and his Darling talked
about grilling shrimp, the rainy autumn, how irritating his Godzilla-bitch ex-wife was.
His Darling’s voice sounded edgy, and impatient.
I’m tired of us sneaking around this town and you pissing off these dumbasses. Let’s go to Houston to write your movie. I’m
in big favour of Plan B
. The hint that his Darling was making a movie, here in Port Leo, tightened his throat with desire. The boyfriend muttered
no. Then she’d said,
Jesus, let this crap with your brother go
.
The sweet agony of being close to her flamed into fear. He’d grabbed a gallon of cheap cabernet in terror and bolted for the
checkout lines, crowded with new winter Texans. He’d fled to the cereal aisle and shoved the jug behind the Cheerios and waited
until his Darling and her boyfriend left the store before venturing out.
They hadn’t seen him, known him.
Pete was writing a movie? He didn’t think that the films those two did involved screenwriting. Didn’t they just point the
camera, clamber on the bed, and do their artful moaning and thrusting with all the sincerity of professional wrestlers?
Last week he had driven into Corpus Christi when he learned that his soon-to-be Darling did movies, of an extremely dubious
sort. He frequented adult bookstores, driving the two hours to San Antonio or the thirty-odd miles to Corpus Christi, avoiding
the few establishments that were too close to Port Leo along the ribbon of Highway 35, never going to any single store too
often, paying with bills worn thin from lying under Mama’s mattress. He never asked the clerks for recommendations – he
didn’t want to be remembered – and tried to fit in with the faceless men who wandered the too-brightly lit aisles of the
porn stores. He was unremarkable: just another lonely guy with eyes only for the bosomy models on the video covers.
His research uncovered that she had acted in only a few movies; she had directed far more. He almost felt proud of her. On
his last jaunt, off the sale table, he bought a video she had headlined five years ago, her last acting job. She went by the
name Velvet Mojo, an appellation the Blade found tasteless. The tape was called
Going Postal
. He suspected the post office would receive a satirical treatment. Perhaps even a deliciously violent treatment. But the movie
disappointed. No violence. And while his Darling was versed in erotic tricks involving stamps that made his tongue go dry,
her friend Pete performed with her, which seemed … wrong. The Blade watched them couple again and again until the world’s
edges grew soft and his mind napped. He heard Mama cursing. When he awoke, he felt bleary and offended. She deserved rest
with the pleasure of his company.
He could save her from this sordidness. He would.
That little shady spot under the old bent oaks, it would be perfect for her. But winning her would be tricky. Wooing other
Darlings and avoiding suspicion had been easy. Louisiana and Brownsville and Laredo were far away. She was within a mile or
so. And he would have to wait. He could not truly enjoy her now, but he could in a few days. His hunger sharpened, and he
imagined her lips, speckled with her own blood, tasted of copper and strawberries.
The Blade stood with resolve. He would make her his. But first he would have to make sure that no one cared if she was gone.