Chapter 21
The burning sky made radiant the alley, and a furnace glow filled the Expedition.
Flushed with a fiery reflection of the smoldering sun, Anson's face appeared fierce, and a golden eyeshine gilded his stare, but in his soft voice was the tender truth of him: 'Everything I have is yours, Mickey.'
As if he had crossed a busy city street and, glancing back, saw a primeval forest where a metropolis had just stood, Mitch sat for a moment in bewildered silence, and then said, 'You have two million dollars? Where did you get two million dollars?'
'I'm good at what I do, and I've worked hard.'
'I'm sure you're good at what you do, you're good at everything you do, but you don't live like a rich man.'
'Don't want to. Flash and status don't interest me.'
'I know some people with money keep a low profile, but…'
'Ideas interest me,' Anson said, 'and getting real freedom someday, but not having my picture in the society pages.'
Mitch remained lost in the forest of this new reality. 'You mean you have, really have, two million in the bank?'
'I'll have to liquidate investments. It can be done by phone, by computer, once the exchanges open tomorrow. Three hours tops.'
Dry seeds of hope swelled with the irrigation provided by this amazing, this astonishing news.
Mitch said, 'How…how much do you have? I mean, altogether.'
'This will almost wipe out my liquidity,' Anson said, 'but I'll still have the equity in the condo.'
'Wipe you out. I can't let that happen.'
'If I earned it once, I can earn it again.'
'Not that much. Not easily.'
'What I do with my money is my business, Mickey. And what I want to do with it is get Holly home safe.'
Through the streaming crimson light, through soft dusky shadows fast hardening toward night, along the alley came a ginger cat.
Caught in cross tides of emotion, Mitch did not trust himself to speak, so he watched the cat and drew slow deep breaths.
Anson said, 'Because I'm not married, don't have kids, these scum came after Holly and you as a way to get at me.'
The revelation of Anson's wealth had so surprised Mitch that he had not at once grasped this obvious explanation of the heretofore inexplicable abduction.
'If there'd been someone closer to me,' Anson continued, 'if I had been more vulnerable that way, then my wife or child would have been snatched, and Holly would've been spared.'
Slinking slowly to a stillness, the ginger cat stopped in front of the Expedition, peered up at Mitch. In a streetscape of reflected fire, only the cat's eyes produced original light, radium-green.
'It could've been one of our sisters they grabbed, couldn't it? Megan, Connie, Portia? And this is no different from that.'
Mitch wondered, 'The way you live, so middle-class, how did they know?'
'Someone working in a bank, a stock brokerage, one bent nail where there shouldn't be any.'
'You have any idea who?'
'I haven't had time to think about it, Mickey. Ask me tomorrow.'
Breaking stillness, sneaking forward, the ginger cat passed close by the SUV, vanishing from sight.
In that instant, a bird flew up, a pigeon or a dove that had lingered late over scattered crumbs, thrashing its wings against the driver's-door window as it swooped off toward some safe bower.
Mitch was startled by the sound and by the dreamlike perception that the cat, on vanishing, had become the bird.
Facing his brother again, Mitch said, 'I couldn't see a way to go to the cops. But everything's changed now. You have that option.'
Anson shook his head. 'They shot a guy to death right in front of you to make a point.'
'Yeah.'
'And you got the point.'
'Yeah.'
'Well, so did I. Unless they get what they want, they'll kill without compunction, and they'll pin it on you or on both of us. We get Holly back, and then we go to the cops.'
'Two million dollars.'
'It's only money,' Anson said.
Mitch remembered what his brother had said about not caring to have his picture in the society pages, about instead being interested in ideas and in 'getting real freedom someday.'
Now he repeated those four words and said, 'I know what that means. The sailing yacht. A life on the sea.'
'It doesn't matter, Mickey.'
'Sure it matters. With that much money, you're close to having the boat and a life without chains.'
Anson's turn had come to look for the cat or an equivalent distraction in the rouge light, the mordant shadows.
Mitch said, 'I know you're a planner. You always have been. When did you plan to retire, to go for it?'
'It's a child's dream anyway, Mickey. Pirate yarns and naval battles.'
'When?' Mitch insisted.
'In two years. When I turned thirty-five. So it'll be a few years later. And I might make it back quicker than I think. My business is growing fast.'
'The China deal.'
'The China deal and others. I'm good at what I do.'
'No way I'd turn you down,' Mitch said. 'I'd die for Holly, so I'm sure as hell willing to let you go broke for her. But I won't let you minimize the sacrifice. It's one mother of a sacrifice.'
Anson reached out, put a hand around the back of Mitch's neck, pulled him close, gently pressed forehead to forehead, so they were not looking at each other but down at the gearshift console between them. 'Tell you something, bro.'
'Tell me.'
'Normally I'd never mention this. But so you don't chew out your own liver with guilt, which is the way you are…you should know you aren't the only one who's needed help.'
'What do you mean?'
'How do you think Connie bought her bakery?'
'You?'
'I structured a loan so a portion converts into a tax-free gift each year. I don't want to be repaid. It's fun to do this. And Megan's dog-grooming business.'
Mitch said, 'The restaurant Portia and Frank are opening.'
'That, too.'
Still sitting bowed head to bowed head, Mitch said, 'How did they figure out you had so much?'
'They didn't. I saw what they needed. I've been trying to think what you need, but you've always seemed… so damned self-reliant.'
'This is way different from a loan to buy a bakery or open a little restaurant.'
'No shit, Sherlock.'
Mitch laughed shakily.
'Growing up in Daniel's rat maze,' Anson said, 'the only thing any of us had was one another. The only thing that mattered. That's still the way it is, fratello piccolo. That's the way it's always going to be.'
