Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop (84 page)

“You could have said
no.
”

“Could I? Remember about a week ago, that wealthy woman from Sewickley—the one who drowned? What was her name … Heybroek, wasn’t that it?”

“I remember,” Riley said. “I assisted on her autopsy.”

“Funny, isn’t it, a woman in a wheelchair falling into her own swimming pool? How careless of her. She didn’t slip, Riley, she was pushed—but I don’t suppose that showed up in the autopsy, now, did it? Do you want to know her real cause of death? She said
no
to Julian Zohar. He approached her about being a client, and she turned him down. But then she knew about the system, and Zohar couldn’t have that—so she had to have an ‘accident.’ Do you understand what I’m saying? That’s what happens when someone tells them
no.
”

“You could have agreed at first—then you could have gone to the authorities later.”

“I could have; I didn’t
want
to. They knew me, Riley; they did their homework well. They offered me a chance to save your life—without you ever knowing about it—and I jumped at it. I
wanted
to say yes.” Sarah reached across the table, took both her sister’s hands, and looked intently into her eyes. “I wasn’t talking about me, Riley. I was talking about you.
You
can’t say no.”

Riley jerked her hands away. “What are you telling me—that they’re offering me my kidneys, and if I say no they’ll kill me? Are you joking? Sarah, I’m dying anyway! What difference do a few months make?”

“It’s not that simple. They’re not just offering you your kidneys, Riley—they’re offering you a
job.
”

Riley’s jaw dropped open.

“It’s Lassiter,” Sarah said. “He’s an idiot. He’s put the entire process at risk—he’s the reason
you
caught on in the first place. They need a person at the coroner’s office, Riley. They need someone to replace Lassiter.”

“And what happens to Lassiter?”

Sarah shrugged. “Does he own a pool?”

“So that’s the deal: I get my kidney, so I can no longer turn them in; then I spend the rest of my life working at the coroner’s office, covering up strange little anomalies, passing off deliberate murders as accidental deaths. Are you out of your mind, Sarah? What in the world would ever motivate me to do such a thing?”

Sarah’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Try this for starters: If you don’t, they’ll kill us
both.
”

Riley stumbled out of her chair and reached for the counter to steady herself; Sarah was right behind her.

“When you and Nick started poking around—when you uncovered the system—they knew they had to deal with both of you. But with you they saw another option; they saw the chance to replace Lassiter. That’s why they agreed to give me a chance to talk with you. That’s why we came after you in Tarentum.”

“You called him,” Riley said. “You called Santangelo from the motel in Tarentum—and
you
were the one who wanted to come to Mencken!”

“They wanted us to get away. They wanted a quiet place where we could have some time together, where we would have a chance to talk.”

“And if things didn’t work out, they wanted a quiet place where they could
kill
us! And what about Nick, Sarah? What deal are they planning to offer him?”

Sarah said nothing.

“That’s just great. Do you understand the choice you’ve given me? To live with you or to die with Nick. Well, I love Nick too, Sarah.”

Sarah glanced nervously at her watch. “I tried to save your life,” she said. “Now you have to save us both.”

Riley turned on her. “Don’t you put this on me! I was the only one dying here. Now you’ve killed us both—
and
Nick—and
Leo!
Oh, Sarah, Leo! If only you’d
known
him. I’ll
never
forgive you for that!”

“It would have worked,” Sarah grumbled.

“Then what would have happened, Sarah? Did you really think they’d let you stop working for them? That they’d let you
retire
? What would have happened when you started to get a little older, or when you gained a few too many pounds—when the men would no longer pull over just to get a better look? You would have turned up in some swimming pool yourself.”

“I didn’t care,” she said. “It was for a greater good.”

Riley took her sister by the shoulders. “Listen to me. The greatest good is the good that’s right in front of your nose. You cannot take an evil path to a good goal.”

“All I did was love you.”

“That’s the problem, Sarah—all you did was love me. You’ve got to love something
more
than me, something greater, or even love gets twisted.”

Sarah held out her watch. “Time’s up. What are we going to tell Santangelo?”

Riley paced back and forth across the kitchen, her mind racing. “We have to buy some time,” she said. “We’ll tell him I agreed—that I bought the whole thing.”

“These people are not idiots, Riley. Santangelo doesn’t want this to work out—he despises loose ends; he’d rather kill us both and be done with it. If he detects the slightest hesitation on your part, if he picks up any hint of deception … all he wants to do is go back to Zohar and say, ‘It didn’t work. I took care of it.’ Can you look Santangelo in the eye and convince him—unless you really mean it?”

Riley shook her head, trying to sort through the barrage of thoughts.

Sarah took her by the arm. “This can still work,” she whispered. “You’re right, we need to buy time—so take your kidneys, Riley, do that much—we can negotiate from there. Even about Nick—who knows what we might be able to work out?”

Riley twisted her arm free.

“Nick is coming back here,” Sarah said. “If you say no, he’ll be dead the minute he walks in the door. Do you really love him,
Riley? You’re the only one who can save him—you’re the only one who can save us all.”

Riley lunged for the back door.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to save my soul,” she said. “I’ll worry about my life later.”

“You can’t run—not in your condition.”

“It’s a world of responsibility, Sarah—I can do anything I have to do.”

“He’ll follow you.”

“Not where I’m going.”

“Riley, he’ll
follow
you—you don’t know him.”

She started out into the darkness.

“I won’t be here if you make it back,” Sarah called after her. “When he realizes you’ve run, I’m finished.”

Riley didn’t look back. She kept moving forward with all of her remaining strength, heading for the base of the bony pile. Now she was just a distant shadow, and Sarah called out to her sister for the last time.

“I love you, Riley.”

Santangelo charged into the kitchen and saw Sarah alone, standing in the doorway, facing the empty darkness. “Where is she?” he demanded.

“She ran.”

She heard his footsteps approach quickly. There was a moment of silence, and then she heard the click of a revolver hammer behind her head. She closed her eyes and waited …

She heard a second click, and then he pushed by her into the doorway. “I’m going after her,” he said. “You wait here. If that Bug Man comes back, you do anything you have to do to hold him here until I get back, understand? No more screwups, Angel. Do this right, and I just might let you live.”

He disappeared into the darkness.

Nick plowed through the barricades without stopping. They seemed to explode, sending splintered chunks of black-and-white wood clattering across the hood and over the roof. He kept the gas pedal to the floor, racing through town, the empty shanties whipping past like shuffling cards. As he rounded the last corner, his headlights played across a clump of brush just thirty yards from the house. Hidden behind the brush was a silver sedan with the passenger window open.

He’s already here.

He killed his headlights and pulled in behind the sedan. If they were watching for him, it was already too late—in the perfect darkness of Mencken, approaching headlights would stand out like signal flares. He approached the house on foot; no sound of voices came from the house, no flicker of lantern light, no sign of life at all—maybe because there was no life. Nick tasted acid in the back of his throat.

He started to work his way around to the side of the house to try to get a look through a window—but just then, the front door opened and Sarah stepped out. A flashlight swept the ground in front of him.

“Nick! Is that you?”

“Where’s Riley?” Nick called back.

“She isn’t here! Come inside, we’ve got to talk!”

“Uh-uh,” Nick said. “We’ll talk out here.”

Sarah ran wildly to meet him; Nick was startled by her apparent recklessness. He searched the surrounding brush, expecting to see an armed figure step out of the shadows at any moment—but Sarah arrived alone. She threw her arms around his neck and let out a sob. “I have to tell you something,” she said.

Nick pried her arms from his neck and shoved her away. “I know who you are, Sarah. The mosquitoes that I took to Sanjay—the container was leaking, remember? I asked you for something to put it in. You handed me a plastic bag, but you took out a hairbrush and comb first. You left some of your hair in the bag, Sarah—your
real
hair, not that wig you wear on the job. Sanjay matched your DNA with the blood in the mosquitoes. It was
your
blood, Sarah—you were in the room the night Leo was killed. You’re the lure, aren’t you? You’re the woman with the long red hair.”

“That’s what I was going to tell you.”

“Save it,” he said. “There are only two things I want to hear from you—where is Riley, and where is your partner Santangelo?”

“She’s climbing up the bony pile—and Santangelo is right behind her! Come on, we’ve got to go after them!”

“You expect me to
follow
you? Where, Sarah? To some quiet spot where your partner is waiting for me?”

“Nick, this whole town is a ‘quiet spot.’ If I wanted to kill you, you never would have made it this far. You’ve got to trust me.”

“Trust
you? The way Leo trusted you?”

“Look, you can think whatever you want about me—but right now someone is trying to kill my sister.”

“I know—
you
are.”

“Don’t be an idiot! Look, there isn’t time to explain. Riley is about to
die,
Nick. Now maybe I’m lying to you—but if you love her half as much as I do, you won’t be willing to take that chance.”

Nick hesitated for only an instant. “Let’s go.”

“Do you have a gun?”

“Don’t
you
?”

“Then how are we going to stop him?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “but we sure won’t stop him standing here.”

Nick took off running toward the bony pile, and Sarah was close behind.

Riley stumbled two hundred yards along the mountain’s base before finding the first familiar landmark. As a six-year-old girl she had trampled down a sycamore sapling to point the way up—the safe way up. Now it was a full-grown tree, still bowing to the
ground in memory of that day. She glanced back over her shoulder and started up the hillside.

The slope felt infinitely steeper than she remembered. Loose bits of coal and shale crumbled under her feet; she seemed to slide back half a step for every one she moved upward. She felt a surge of panic; she was trapped in a childhood nightmare, running as hard as she could to escape an approaching storm, but going nowhere. It was the wind—it wouldn’t let her go. It kept tugging on her, holding her, pulling her back.

Even before she had reached the sycamore, her head was pounding and her back was throbbing with pain; now her exhaustion was almost overwhelming. Dull, aching pulses radiated from her failing kidneys like sonar waves, bouncing off the cap of her skull and down through her leaden limbs. She sank down on the hillside, panting, gathering the energy and summoning the will for the next upward advance.

“Ri-i-i-ley!”

She spun around in horror.

“Ri-i-i-ley!”

The voice sounded distant. He was still at the foot of the mountain, searching for the path she took upward—or was he? Did he only sound distant because he was calling in a quiet voice? Or was it all just a trick of the wind—was he right behind her in the darkness, just a few steps away? She held her breath—but her heart beat so loudly that she was sure the sound alone would give her away.

“I’m coming after you, Riley. I’m not far behind. You can’t get away, not in your condition. Don’t make me come up there after you—I’ll be even angrier when I find you.”

She looked down at herself. Thank God her clothing was dark, blending in against the ebony hillside—but her skin! She dug her fingers through the sooty coal, then rubbed her face and neck and arms until only her golden hair stood out in the moonlight—but she had no cap or hood to cover it. She looked up into the sky; ominous clouds passed intermittently across the face of the moon, momentarily blocking its light. Beneath the shadow of each cloud she vanished into the hillside—but when the moon slid out again, her hair lit up like a carbide lantern. She felt a drop of water on her face. She quickly rubbed the spot to cover it again.

She looked farther up the mountain, searching for the next marker: an ancient tangle of wheat-yellow brush that had somehow found a way to survive in the dusty soil. The hillside was dotted with such pockets of life: thorny brambles, twisted trees, and coarse tufts of buffalo grass enduring in meager deposits of soil and clay dumped along with other mine debris. Riley spotted the brush, about twenty yards up and as many yards to her left—and then it suddenly disappeared.