One False Move (24 page)

“Who do you fucking think this is? Can you talk? Is there anyone else there?”

“I’m alone. Go ahead,” he said while thinking, yes, go ahead and tell me why the fuck I should even listen to what you have to say?

“We’re gonna need some new IDs. Make them driver’s licenses.” Jared Barnett was taking charge. “And cash. Don’t get funny with the cash. Keep it small bills. We’ll probably need about twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“Hold on. Where the hell do you think I’m going to get three new IDs?” And twenty-five thousand dollars? Max wanted to slam the phone against the wall. How the hell did this get so turned around? He wanted to tell Jared Barnett that
he
owed him. That he
still
owed him.

“You’re a resourceful guy, Max. You figure it out.”

“I think you should turn yourself in.”

“What are you, fucking crazy?”

“No, now listen. I can get you off.” Max stood up, staring past his reflection in the window out at the full orange moon. He wondered what a liar’s moon looked like as he said, “I did it before, I can do it again.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not waiting in prison for five more fucking years while you do it. Besides, I thought you were pissed. You sounded pissed. How can I trust a fucking lawyer who’s pissed?”

“I was surprised. That’s all.” Max kept his cool. This bastard could ruin everything. He needed to convince him he was on his side. “You can’t blame me for being surprised. I never expected things to get so screwed up, to go so badly. That’s all. What the hell happened?”

There was silence, and for a few seconds Max thought he had lost him.

“One false move,” he mumbled.

“What’s that?”

“Isn’t that what they say? That all it takes is one fucking wrong move to change everything? It doesn’t matter. Not now. How soon can you get the IDs and money?”

“How am I supposed to get them to you?”

“Don’t worry about that. Just get it. I’ll call back tomorrow.”

“If you tell me—” But he heard the click.

Max stayed at the window, wondering how the hell he’d take care of this. How the hell he’d fix this. One little favor—that’s all he had asked from Barnett to pay off his attorney fee. Who could have predicted it’d get this fucked up.

10:32 p.m.

Andrew leaned against the wall of the shower and let the warm water massage his wounded head. The throbbing wouldn’t stop. Nor would the image of that Gas N’ Shop clerk, her small body scurrying back and forth from one task to the other. Full of life, and now she was dead because he had tried something stupid. Thanks to Jared, Andrew felt like an accessory to the farmer’s murder. But he felt completely responsible for that poor clerk.

There had to be something he could do to get out of this. It was clear Jared wasn’t going to ever let him go. Eventually, he’d have to kill him. At first, that realization paralyzed as much as it panicked Andrew. But at the moment, he was too exhausted to be either. Especially after examining the bathroom’s contents and being disappointed to find only the miniature shampoo, conditioner, mouthwash and soap. The shower had a Plexiglas door instead of a rod and curtain, not that he had had much success with the rod he had found at the cabin. He had even checked out the insides of the toilet tank, only to find that almost all of the mechanical guts were made of plastic. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected. He knew hotel rooms didn’t provide razors or nail files. He had spent enough time in the best of them over the course of the last two years, traveling to promote one of his books or do research for the next.

Research. All the research, all the interviews about murder and killers that he had done and yet, what good was it to him now? He had gathered all that knowledge, but without the experience of dealing with the real thing, he wasn’t sure what he could do. Although, he wondered if
anything
could have prepared him for this.

He wished he could rip off the harness from his shoulder and arm. He wished he had full use of it. Then he would, at least, be on an equal footing with Jared. But, as it was, he couldn’t even wash up under his damn armpit without experiencing a shooting pain. In the beginning, when he hadn’t even dared to lift his arm enough to fit a sponge under it because of the pain, he worried about body odor. A Nebraska summer, with its heat and humidity was not a good time to break a collarbone. Now he scrubbed all over, ignoring the pain and practically rubbing his skin raw, feeling a bit like Lady Macbeth.

His father would tell him it served him right. Of this, Andrew was certain. He heard his voice in the back corners of his throbbing head: “All your fucking book learnin’ can’t get you out of this one, can it?” It reminded him of the reprimands he had endured as a kid when his father found him reading instead of doing some chore like shoveling the crap from the chicken coop, a task that hadn’t even been on Andrew’s to-do list until he was discovered with a book. It was almost as if his father had hoped to drain him, so that he wouldn’t have the energy to read. At the end of the day, Andrew’s young body would be physically exhausted and aching, but there was nothing his father could do to turn off his curiosity, his desire to read and learn and dream beyond the borders of his family’s farm. And that made his father even more angry. He seemed to be forever disappointing the man. John Kane wanted a son to take over the farm when he was gone and instead he got one who couldn’t wait to leave.

That’s when he remembered Charlie with the comic books, quiet and innocent. And then he thought about Charlie’s explosive reaction when he saw that waitress’s face on TV. Andrew had believed that Melanie was the weakest link, but now he realized he might be wrong. His mind started reeling, accessing what he knew about the psychological effects of murder. If Andrew was feeling this responsible and guilty about the gas station clerk when he hadn’t even pulled the trigger, what must Charlie be feeling? And suddenly Andrew wondered what it might take to get Charlie on his side.

11:17 p.m.

Melanie couldn’t sleep. Charlie, in spite of his outburst, was curled up on the bed and snoring. So much for his guilty conscience, and yet, she was relieved. She didn’t like seeing him like that. She didn’t like thinking he had anything to feel guilty about.

Andrew Kane had given in and stretched out on the other side of Charlie, but Jared had insisted on tying together the author’s feet and wrists, cutting in half and using the cord from the hotel’s phone. Of course, he didn’t care about the phone. He still had Andrew’s cell phone. She wondered if that was why he’d left the room. Did he need to call his outside contact? And who the hell was it? He was being secretive, when they couldn’t afford to have any more secrets. It felt like a betrayal.

She watched her brother in the dim light from the TV. She had convinced him to let her keep it on with the sound off when he was turning out all the lights and pulling the curtains tighter. He sat with his elbow on the small table, his fist bracing up his head. That’s how he slept. Every once in a while his head rolled off his clenched hand but without waking himself.

She wished she could sleep so easily. When they were kids, Jared had taught her what to do when she couldn’t sleep. How to go away in her mind to a place with all the things she loved. He’d made her list them—cotton candy, the Bee Gees, Ferris wheels and corn dogs. That was the summer he had taken her to the county fair, so all her favorite things were associated with that experience.

His tactic helped her fall asleep many nights. It became her weapon against the obstacles that invaded her sleep, the biggest one, of course, being fear. The fear that her father would come up and wake them, ripping off the covers and pouring ice-cold water on them or yanking them out of bed by grabbing onto their ankles and pulling until there was nothing left to hang on to. Melanie could still feel it, her head bouncing off the mattress, hitting the bed rail and cracking against the floorboards. But that was the easy part. Over the years she had tried to erase from her memory the sting of the whip or the smell of scorched skin, her own skin burning under the flaming red ash of his cigarette.

Melanie shook her head. She didn’t need to be remembering all that now. What she needed to remember was that Jared had cleaned up the mess that night. She owed him. That was a debt she’d never be able to repay and he knew it. Even if she had supplied him with an alibi for Rebecca Moore, they still wouldn’t be even. They’d never be even. And now here they were in yet another mess. How could Jared have let this happen? Only this time it was worse. This time he had involved her boy, her baby, her poor Charlie. She wondered if she would ever be able to forgive her brother for that.

She got out of bed to go to the bathroom and noticed that Jared had left the cell phone on the dresser. She glanced back at him. His head was down, his breathing heavy with sleep. She snatched the phone and took it with her into the bathroom, carefully closing and locking the door. She flipped it open and started looking over the buttons. Somewhere there had to be one that would tell her what she wanted to know.

She hit Menu and there on the list was Call History. This was easier than she’d thought. She clicked on Call History, bringing up yet another list. She chose Outgoing Calls to see if Jared had, indeed, gone off to call his secret contact. And there it was: the date, the time—only an hour ago—plus, the phone number and the person’s name. She clicked back to find the earlier call—the one from this morning in the car—just to check, to make certain. There it was again. The same number, the same name.

Why was Jared keeping in touch with his attorney? Why in the world did her brother trust Max Kramer more than he trusted her?

7:45 a.m.
Comfort Inn—Hastings, Nebraska

Melanie awoke to the sound of slamming doors. It took her a while to realize where she was. Sunlight filtered in through the crack between the curtains. Somewhere, not far away, she could smell freshly brewed coffee. The last thing she remembered was being stretched out on top of the bedcovers, watching a late-night horror movie—a giant tarantula invading a desert town—and she remembered thinking about pink cotton candy. Someone had pulled the covers up over her, and she curled into them, hugging a pillow as if for security. Which reminded her of Charlie. She raised herself onto her elbow to see that Charlie was gone. Andrew Kane still lay on the bed tied up, only now he had pushed himself into a sitting position, leaning against the headboard.

“Where’s Jared and Charlie?” she asked, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

“Jared’s in the bathroom. I’m not sure where he sent Charlie.”

“He sent Charlie somewhere?” Melanie sat up, scanning the room in a panic until she saw Charlie’s backpack.

“You love him a lot, don’t you?”

She met Kane’s eyes, looking for sarcasm and surprised to find none.

“You wouldn’t get it,” she said. “It’s been just the two of us for a very long time. We watch out for each other.”

“And Jared?”

“What about Jared?” she asked, glancing at the bathroom door without meaning to.

“Nothing.” He shrugged his one shoulder as if it didn’t matter. “It just sounds like he’s gotten you and Charlie into a real big mess.”

“Sometimes things don’t go exactly the way you think they will.” Her mind flew back to another time, another mess. Why was it so much on her mind? She thought she’d removed it from her memory, gotten past it. And yet, Jared’s reappearance less than two weeks ago seemed to bring it all back.

“What is Charlie? Eighteen? Nineteen?”

“He’s seventeen,” she blurted out as if needing to defend her baby before she could even figure out why Andrew Kane wanted to know.

“Geez! He’s still a kid.”

Her thoughts exactly. Charlie was too young to be involved in such a mess. What the hell was Jared even thinking? And the guns. She’d never forgive Jared for bringing along guns.

“I could help you and Charlie,” she heard Andrew Kane say, but her mind was focused on the image of all that blood on their coveralls when they came running out of the bank. It had reminded her so much of that night with her father, the bloody drag marks, all the blood seeping in between the cracks of the linoleum, the splatters on the white wall. She never knew how Jared cleaned it all up. But he did. He took care of it.

“I know some detectives with the Omaha Police Department,” Andrew continued.

Melanie heard only bits and pieces of what Andrew Kane was saying. Something about Charlie being a minor, about Jared having killed before and about her not even being in the bank. She wasn’t really listening. Instead, she was back at that nightmarish scene, and only now did she realize Jared had never told her where he’d buried him. And she had never asked. She remembered seeing her brother hosing down his tennis shoes and the muddy shovel, scrubbing down the floor and the wall while she just watched, unable to move, unable to help. She wasn’t even sure if Jared had told their mother when she got home later that night. And yet, he must have. Why else would she have told everyone that her husband “just up and left”? Why else would she be so absolutely certain that Jared couldn’t have killed Rebecca Moore? Because that was exactly what Corrine Starks told the police, that her son couldn’t possibly kill anyone. She had to have known.

The bathroom door opened, startling her back. Jared looked awful. He hadn’t showered. His short hair stood up in places like Charlie’s, but the difference was Charlie wanted his that way. She was certain Jared did not. His face was unshaven even though Melanie knew he had bought disposable razors at the gas station. And his eyes were red and swollen. He scraped his hand over his face when he noticed her staring at him.