Fearless: Complicated Creatures Part Three (70 page)

“What?!” she cried. “Jack—
oh my
—that’s just too much,” she stammered, aghast.

“No, it’s not,” Jack assured her. “I set aside that amount as a bounty for Lightner anyway. Just give me the photos in exchange, and we’ll call it a fair trade.”

“Jack, honey, I’m not trying to look a gift horse in the mouth, but are you sure?” Hannah asked, half-thrilled, half-trepidatious.

“Of course, Hannah. Can you ship them to me at The Whitney?”

“I’ll do you one better: I’ll send them up with Carey when he’s back in a couple days. He needs to handle things up at Lennox Chase while Sam sorts this mess out down here.”

Jack fingered the palm frond of a nearby office plant. “How is she?” he asked softly.

Hannah paused. “She’s… she’s as well as can be expected, I suppose. She went down to Austin after she spread Wes’s ashes. He left her the rights to all his photographs in his will. It’s thousands of pictures. The Met and the Getty have already reached out, asking to host exhibitions of his work. TIME is doing a spread of all his most famous war photos. She’s working with his partner, Chris, to get it all sorted into a trust, but I think she just went back to Houston to meet with the board.”

Jack pinched the bridge of his nose. It didn’t sound like she was coming back to him anytime soon.

“Tell her I love her?”

“Of course, I will,” Hannah said kindly. “You’re welcome back here anytime, but I reckon she’ll be coming up to Chicago sooner than you think. In the meantime, I’ll send Carey back up with your ten-million-dollar photos,” she told him, a smile in her voice.

“Thank you, Hannah. Just send me the account transfer details, and I’ll make sure you get the money. Put the name of the donor under Wes’s name, would you? He saved all our lives that night.”

Jack could almost see Hannah smile. “Thank you, honey. You’re a good man.”

“Trying to be,” he answered truthfully. “Oh, and one more thing? Don’t tell Samantha. I’d like it to be a surprise.”

*

May—Late Afternoon

Wyatt Towers, Houston, Texas

S A M A N T H A

Samantha stood at
the window of her office at Wyatt Petroleum, staring down at the city, lost in thought. Carey came up behind her, pulling her into a strong hug.

“You mad at me for helping Wes?” he asked, rocking her gently, side-to-side.

“No,” she answered honestly. “It was the one promise he made to me that he ever followed through on. Perhaps the most important one.”

“What do you want to do?”

Sam closed her eyes, leaning back into his strength, feeling the aching hurt in her heart starting to unravel and slide down, like a ribbon. Carey had shared the recording of Mack’s confession a couple days after Wes died, along with all the research that he and Wes had done together. It had been bitterly painful to learn, especially while she was still heart-torn and raw from his death. That Mack hadn’t kept his word and told her what had really happened, proved the man he was. He’d hoped Wes had taken the truth to the grave with him, and that kind of cowardice sealed Mack’s fate with her, even if she sort of understood it. Hell, she might have killed her long-lost Uncle Toma herself, but it hadn’t been Mack’s justice to serve. In some very real ways, his heart might have been in the right place, but it was obvious as the week went by and Mack remained quiet, that he had no intention of honoring her or her family’s memory with the truth.

“What would Dad have done, Bear?” she asked, holding Carey’s arms around her waist, glad for the comfort.

“Drawn and quartered him,” he answered honestly. “He’d have put the hurt on him so bad, McDevitts for generations would have felt the effects of the blow back.”

She smiled at that bit of truth. Her father had been a bit of an unforgiving bastard. “And what would Ry do, if he were here?”

Carey squeezed her gently before turning her around. He looked at her with his blue eyes—so like his mother’s. “Ry would have forgiven him. He would have let bygones be bygones, but he would never trust him again.”

Sam nodded. She hugged Carey long and hard, grateful for the love he’d given her over the years, for his unending patience and loyalty, no matter what she asked, no matter what she needed.

“Have I told you you’re the best brother and best friend a girl could ever ask for?”

Carey smiled down at her. “That mean you gonna finally let me win at poker?”

“Oh, hell no.” Sam shook her head, laughing. “You’ve got to earn that.”

“How can I earn it if you won’t give me a hint what my tell is?”

Sam rolled her eyes, pushing him back before she went to her desk, touching the intercom. “Marv—get Mack in here. Tell him I’ve got a question about the production quantities on one of our rigs. Then I want you to call up our corporate attorney and have him listen to the conversation along with you. Got it?”

“You got it,” Marvin’s disembodied voice returned. She’d have to give him a big damn promotion soon. He’d be doing two jobs before he knew it.

“You want me to stay?” Carey asked.

“You can bear witness,” she told him, taking a seat behind her desk. “That or make sure I don’t strangle him with my belt.”

Carey eyed her. “God help that bastard, ’cause no one else will.”

Marvin knocked once before escorting Mack in. He gave her a sympathetic smile as he strode toward her, his silver-black hair glinting in the bright sunlight filtering in from her windows.

“How’ve you been, Sammy girl?” he asked her.

She held up her hand in acknowledgment before offering him a seat across from her. “Pardon me for not standing, Mack. My back’s been killing me,” she lied, preferring he not get close to her.

His expression turned immediately trite. “Course it is. How’re you healing?”

“As well as can be expected,” she replied, playing it off.

“So you wanted to talk production quotas?” Mack asked, glancing uncertainly at Carey as he sat down opposite him in the other guest chair. Carey could give a shit about oil and everyone knew it, but his posture was so relaxed, his presence came off harmless enough.

“I have something else in mind to discuss, Mack.”

“Sure thing,” he said with an amiable shrug. “What is it?”

Sam looked him in the eye. “When I had you out to the ranch a couple months back and asked you to tell me if my daddy had any enemies who’d have wanted him dead, did you think about coming clean then?” she asked, her voice soft but her meaning razor fine.

Mack tensed. He glanced at Carey, who remained still and calm, though his expression had hardened into the
don’t-fucking-think-about-it
face he’d honed in the SEALs.

“What are you getting at, Sammy?” he asked carefully, shifting in his seat.

“I asked you a question point-blank, Mack. What I decide to do with you will be largely dependent on my satisfaction with your answer,” she responded, sitting back and waiting for him to hang himself.

“Sammy, I don’t know what you’re working round to, but—”

She leaned forward, tossing a stack of photos toward him.

“That’s what they found of my uncle, Toma Sakurai. You going to tell me now that you had nothing to do with it?”

“Sam—I—” he blustered, weathered cheeks reddening.

Sam touched the keyboard on her computer, and Wes’s voice filtered out so strong and so clear, her heart clenched.
“I think you took one look in Sakurai’s eyes and decided on some good, old-fashioned cowboy justice. You took him out, Mack. I can see it in your eyes plain as day.”

Mack paled under his deep tan, but still he said nothing.

Sam hit the keystroke again, only this time it was Mack saying, “
That’s when I shot the motherfucker in the face.”

She crossed her hands on the desk, her gaze dark and unflinching as she stared him down. “You were never going to tell me, were you? You thought your secret had gone down with Wes. Now all that’s left is to admit it.”

It was game over. Mack was done for and he knew it. A kind of
to-hell-with-it
confidence came over him, like a man staring at the end of the noose and thinking, ‘At least let’s make it quick.’

“Can you really blame me, Sammy? That’s water so far under the bridge, ain’t no one in the world besides you left to give two shits about it,” Mack told her, his chin rising a little in defiance. “There’s no murder weapon, no real proof. Just a phone recording that could have been doctored, which makes it circumstantial at best. No jury in the world is gonna hang an old man who’s done nothing but give to charity, make money for this state, and make friends in powerful places.”

Carey shifted forward and Sam lifted a hand to stay him.

“You sanctimonious sonofabitch. Not only did you have no right to kill that man, but you had no right to keep it from me either. I can understand wanting to protect my father’s legacy, and I even believe you convinced yourself you were doing right by me somehow, but you balls-out lied to my face when I came to you with this. I’m the head of this company, Mack—
not
you. So let’s not pretend for one second that you were doing anything other than covering your own ass, so you could keep shitting in high cotton at the expense of my peace of mind.”

“Peace of mind?” Mack scoffed, sitting forward, belligerent. “You were never going to get that to begin with. You think any of this brings them back? You think putting me away is going to make anything better?”

She knew it wouldn’t, but that was the thing about the truth. It didn’t need to feel good. It was like cauterizing a wound that’d been hurting all her life. She’d needed it to move on. She’d needed it to let go.

“Just answer me one thing, Mack—just one.” She met his eyes. “How did that poor bastard Childress get mixed up in all this? He took the needle for a crime he never committed. I want to know why.”

Mack’s lips pressed together. For a few interminable seconds, Sam was certain he’d never tell her the truth, but then, maybe by this point, he figured he didn’t have anything left to lose.

“Childress wasn’t always a drunk,” Mack finally told her. “He used to be a helluva machinist. Worked the tooling on the pump jacks in the fields when we were just two young bucks. But he started hitting the bottle, and I guess he never stopped.” He glanced down at his hands—gnarled with age and hard work. A hard man’s hands, lined and scarred.

“So was Childress just a patsy?” Carey asked, angry, speaking for the first time since he’d sat down. “You sent a man to prison and let him rot before the lethal injection?”

“He was already rotting,” Mack replied, joyless. “Childress had cirrhosis from the booze. He was flat broke and on his last leg. He came to me looking for a handout a few months before Sakurai showed up. I gave him a little, out of pity, but I knew he’d just use it for hooch. He thanked me, did what all drunks do—confessed all his sins and regrets—and one of them was that he’d had a son out of wedlock when he was a kid. He’d left his hometown as soon as it happened. Ran off on her. That’s how he ended up working the oil fields. Earl had all these grand fantasies of sending all his extra money back home, but it all went to drink instead.”

“So he was a dead man walking,” she realized.

God, that made so much sense now.
It was horrible, awful, and just too tragic for words, but it all made sense.

“I gave Earl what he wanted: a way out,” Mack responded, his frank gaze unerring. “He got health care in prison and a painless ending—far better than cirrhosis anyway. And his bastard son got a check out of the blue, like winning the lottery. Everybody wins.”

“You’re a sick sonofabitch if you call that winning,” Carey told him, shaking his head. He turned to Sam, disgust written all over his face. “I take back everything I said about what Ry would do. Roast this asshole. Just fuckin’ roast him.”

She was sorely tempted. A part of her—a big part—wanted to eviscerate him. Make him suffer because she could. But there was a painful, niggling kernel of truth to Mack’s logic. Nothing Sam would do to him could bring anyone back. All she could do now was change the future with it.

“What’s that old adage?” she asked, thoughtful. “The truth will set you free, but first it’ll piss you off?”

Mack blinked, unsure of where she was going with this.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Sam told him in no uncertain terms. “You’re going to resign your position, effective immediately, citing early retirement for health reasons.”

“I’m healthy as a horse!” Mack declared hotly.

“Not after I break both your legs you won’t be,” Carey responded, his eyes narrowed, hands tightened into fists the size of beer steins.

Sam smirked. Carrick Nelson: Best. Sidekick. Ever.

“Then you’re going to sign over all of your Wyatt Petroleum shares to me,” she continued.

Mack sneered at her. “And if I don’t?”

“Oh, I’m not done yet, Mack. You should know better than to interrupt a lady when she’s handing you your ass,” she tutted, making Carey smirk. “Your liquid assets are your own, Mack, but I’d use them wisely, because you’re going to be relocating by tomorrow. And if I were you, I’d pick a non-extradition country.”

“I hear Uzbekistan is lovely this time of year,” Carey added sagely.