Page 88 of A Week Away
I could see he wanted to argue, but then he collapsed under the weight of the situation. “Yeah. Whatever.”
I took the shoebox out of the trunk and closed it. Then I walked over to the storage facility next door and found the control room again. Rocky was sitting inside. Several of the screens in front of him were blank. He’d done as I asked.
Seeing me he said, “Oh, shit.”
“Yeah. Things went sideways.”
“What does that mean?”
I held out the shoebox. “There’s ten or twelve thousand dollars in here. I haven’t counted it. There’s a dead guy in the Top Dog office. He accidentally shot himself. In about a half an hour, discover his body. Say you heard a shot. Eventually the police will want to look at the missing video. Tell them a guy in a blue Corvette with a white stripe paid you to turn it off. In a few days, leave town. San Diego. Anywhere you want to go.”
“There’s no other way to play this?”
“You could tell the truth, I suppose. You don’t know my real name. But the guy with the Corvette deserves to be in jail. You could help send him there.”
“But it’s scary enough that I have to leave town.”
“That’s true.”
“I won’t come back to testify.”
“I don’t think you’ll need to. By that time they’ll have enough real evidence to put the guy away for good.”
He reached out and took the shoebox from me. We wished each other luck and then I left.
Cass was sitting in the car in his underwear—well, my underwear. Despite being dry, he managed to look like an unhappy wet dog.
“Did we just kill a man?” he asked.
I wondered what answer he wanted to hear. Would he be happier if I said, ‘Yes, we killed a man?’ I decided on the truth. “We didn’t know the gun would malfunction. We didn’t know he’d get it away from you. You could have easily been the one bleeding to death on that floor.”
Before I’d even got us out of the parking lot, he said, “We have to kill Luca.”
“No. We don’t need to do that. The security guard is going to tell the police that Luca was the one who paid him to have the cameras turned off. The gun that Mr. Cray shot himself with was owned by Luca’s former girlfriend. You told me that. And it may have been used to kill a judge. There’s a lot of holes, but I trust the police to fill them in. Luca’s going to prison. Probably for the rest of his life.”
“He deserves to die.”
“He deserves to suffer. Death ends suffering.”
CHAPTERTWENTY-FIVE
September 19, 1996
Thursday
In the morning, I drove over to Aunt Suzie’s house to say good-bye before I went to the airport. The purple Civic was in the driveway. I was pretty sure it belonged to Heather.
I’d actually slept well. Particularly well, despite watching a man die. I tried to feel bad about it. But no matter how I looked at it, he’d basically killed himself. Yeah, I was the one who apparently hadn’t cleaned the gun well enough. But I never suggested that Mr. Cray take it away from Cass and try to shoot him. He’d done that willingly. I also wasn’t the one who’d buried the gun. I was just the one who missed some of the dirt. An honest mistake.
“We just heard about Mr. Cray,” Aunt Suzie said when she opened the door. “The police came by. Wanted to know where Cass was last night.”
“What did he say?”
“Isaid he was with me.”
I nodded. “So, Mr. Cray is dead?”
“Don’t act like you didn’t know.” Then she patted me on the arm. I thought she might say something like ‘good job’ or ‘well done.’ I resisted the temptation to explain it had all been an accident.
