Envy the Night

outside and men like Vaughn to carry the messages, maybe his rule hadn’t been all that interrupted by steel bars and block walls and barbed wire.

“Yes,” Vaughn said. “Manuel DeCaster.”

“The big boss,” Ezra said, his voice dropping into an even slower drawl. “So Devin recruited you to work as the messenger, keep DeCaster in touch with the outside world in ways that monitored phone calls and visits could not.”

“That was the idea,” Vaughn said.

“I understand how that could have brought some trouble down around you,” Ezra said, “but these boys that followed you into Tomahawk, they aren’t the police sort of trouble.”

“No.”

“So who are they?”

“They work for DeCaster. I don’t know how they found us.”

“You left them an easy trail,” Frank said. “There was a tracking device in your car. That’s how they got here, and I’m wondering when they had a chance to put it on your vehicle.”

Vaughn stared at Frank in confusion, mouth half open, but Renee Matteson lifted her hands to her temples, eyes going wide and then squeezing shut.

“What?” Frank said.

“I should have remembered,” she said. “Damn it, I should have remembered.”

“You knew about the device?” Ezra said.

She shook her head. “No. Well, not specifically, but I knew they’d been following him. A long time ago, Devin was following him.”

“Devin was following me?”

“At first,” she said, nodding, “he wanted to be sure he could trust you. Wanted to know what you were doing, where you were going. I didn’t think about there being a device on the car, and that was so long ago . . . that was a year ago . . . and it was Devin, not the bastards who shot him.”

“But they would have known about it,” Frank said. It made sense. Devin and the rest of DeCaster’s team would have wanted to follow Vaughn at first, make sure there were no covert meetings with cops, no betrayals.

“How many of them are there?” Renee asked.

“Two that we know of,” Frank said, thinking that this changed everything, made Devin’s role less important, the whole thing less personal. If these two were hiding from DeCaster’s crew, then it was no mystery why Devin had fled from the hospital. His survival odds were better on the run than inside, waiting for someone to come by and finish the job. This was bad, very bad. Stepping into the middle of a personal vendetta between Devin and these two was one thing. Stepping into the middle of a power struggle that ran back to Manuel DeCaster was a damn death sentence.

“Two that you know of? Well, there will be more than that if they call for help,” Vaughn said.

“All right,” Ezra said. “So we got some bad boys and big troubles. Everybody pretty well understood that. You’re dancing, though. I asked what it was you did to attract this. Haven’t heard that one answered.”

“I didn’t do shit. Devin, he got his eyes on the throne. The longer Manuel sat in a cell, the cockier Devin got. He started talking about what he could do on his own, talking about eliminating people closest to Manuel, starting with his cousins, who were key to the whole operation, guys who are so damn mean that when you look at them —”

“Slow down,” Ezra said, “and just tell us what happened. It ain’t that hard.”

Vaughn took a deep breath and ran a hand through his hair, completely avoiding Renee’s hard gaze.

“I’m trying to tell you what happened. You want it in two sentences or something? Fine, here you go: Devin was going to kill DeCaster’s cousins and two other guys, Cubans who were involved with him. He wanted a housecleaning.”

“And this had what to do with you?”

“He needed someone to lie to DeCaster. You know, tell him that one thing was happening while something else really was, and work it the other way, too, get the information he needed.”

“You agreed.”

“It was a lot of dollars.”

“Someone smelled it out?” Frank said. “Killed Devin before he made his play?”

“Yes. Then they came for me, and Renee. Still are coming for us, I guess.”

Ezra was looking hard at Frank, a question in his eyes, and Frank met the gaze and shook his head ever so slightly. Ezra frowned but broke the stare. Frank knew what he was wondering—whether they should tell these people that Devin was alive—and he wasn’t ready to do that. Not yet. There were too many questions here, too many possibilities and problems and angles, a dizzying new scenario appearing. And a disappointing one. Frank felt that in the pit of his stomach, a hard ache of disappointment. He’d come out here hoping to align himself with these two and against Devin, see it boil down to the type of finale he’d wanted for so long. That wasn’t going to happen, though. There was still a chance that Devin was headed this way, but he wouldn’t be arriving with vengeance on his mind. Rather, he’d be on the run. Same as these two.

“Why Renee?” Nora said, breaking the silence that had gathered. “If Devin’s dead, what’s the point of killing his wife?”

“Renee was around a lot,” Vaughn said. “She knows things that could hurt them, hurt DeCaster. So do I. Now that they know Devin violated their trust, they’ll try to clean up the mess that surrounded him. Besides, they killed her husband. If anyone in the world is motivated to try to hurt these guys by going to the police, it’s Renee.”

Nora turned to Renee. “Then why don’t you go to the police? This guy and your husband are the ones that did something wrong.”

Renee smiled at her, and there was genuine warmth in it, something that Frank hadn’t been able to imagine on her face until then.

“I lived with Devin for nine years. You have any idea the things I know that the police would love to hear?”

The explanation didn’t seem to satisfy Nora, but Frank understood what she did not: Renee’s world was one in which cops were the enemy. Her husband’s death—the death she believed in, at least—wouldn’t change that outlook. Cops were to be feared and never trusted. It didn’t make sense until you’d spent a decade or so living with that worldview.

“We’d been here just one day,” Vaughn said, “when I left to get some food, supplies. I was coming back from that when Frank here hit my car.”

Frank didn’t want to hear him return to that, didn’t want anyone dwelling on the incredible coincidence of Frank hitting this guy’s car, a guy who just happened to be with Devin’s wife. The longer people thought about a coincidence like that, the more unreasonable it seemed, and he wasn’t quite ready to explain to Renee that he’d really come up here intending to kill her husband.

“Why did you come here?” Ezra said, and for a moment Frank thought the question was directed at him, that Ezra had somehow stepped inside his thoughts. Then he realized he was asking Renee.

“It’s what Devin told Vaughn to do,” Renee said.

Vaughn nodded. “Right before he got killed, he was getting worried about things, told me that if anything happened I needed to get Renee out fast. He told me to bring her here, because nobody else knew it existed. Nobody down there, at least.”

“Well,” Ezra said, “that was a hell of plan. But there’s a problem, buddy. They sure as shit know about it now.”

26

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Traffic in Chicago was always a bitch, but Grady was helped by it being a Sunday morning, and made his way out of the city and into Wisconsin by eight, doing eighty-five up I-90. If anyone stopped him, he’d flash the badge