I wouldn’t let that happen.
Once I was in the car, Natalie stopped walking and turned her attention to Danny Zuker. Zuker, understanding that it was his turn, moved the gun away from my neck. He changed hands so that the weapon was too far away from me, sitting as I was, to make any kind of foolish move.
“Your turn,” Zuker said.
Natalie put her weapon on the ground.
Time was up. I had spent the seconds planning my exact move, the exact calculation, the element of surprise, all of it. Now I didn’t hesitate. Zuker would have time, I was fairly sure, to take a shot at me. That didn’t matter. He was going to have to defend himself. If he did that by shooting me, it would give Natalie the time to either run or, more likely, pick her own gun back off the ground and shoot.
No choice for me now. I wasn’t driving off, that was for sure.
Without warning, my left hand shot up high. I don’t think he expected that. Zuker had figured that if I did anything, I’d go for the gun. I grabbed his hair hard and pulled him toward me. As I predicted, Danny swung the gun in my direction.
With my left hand, I pulled his face closer to mine. He expected my right to go for the gun.
It didn’t.
Instead, using the right hand, I jammed the cyanide pill Jed had given me into Zuker’s mouth. His eyes widened in terror as he realized what I had done. That made him hesitate—the realization that there was cyanide in his mouth and that if he didn’t get it out, he was a dead man. He tried to spit it out but my hand was there. He bit down hard, making me scream out, but my hand stayed still. At the same time he fired the gun at my head.
I ducked away.
The bullet hit my shoulder. More agony.
Danny started to convulse, taking aim for another shot. But he never got that one off. Natalie’s first bullet caught him in the back of the head. She fired twice more, but there was no need.
I fell back, my hand on my throbbing shoulder, trying to stop the blood. I waited for her to come over to me.
But she didn’t. She stayed where she was.
I had never seen anything more beautiful and crushing than the expression on her face. A tear ran down her cheek. She just slowly shook her head.
“Natalie?”
“I have to go,” she said.
My eyes went wide. “No.” Now, finally, I could hear the sirens. I was losing blood and feeling faint. None of that mattered. “Let me go with you. Please.”
Natalie winced. Her tears came heavier now. “I can’t live if something happens to you. Do you get that? It’s why I ran the first time. I can live with you heartbroken. I can’t live with you dead.”
“I’m not alive without you.”
The sirens were growing closer.
“I have to go,” she said, through her tears.
“No . . .”
“I will always love you, Jake. Always.”
“Then be with me.” I could hear the plea in my voice.
“I can’t. You know that. Don’t follow me. Don’t look for me. Keep your promise this time.”
I shook my head. “Not a chance,” I said.
She turned and started back up the hill.
“Natalie!” I called out.
But the woman I loved just kept walking out of my life. Again.
Chapter 36
ONE YEAR LATER
A student in the back of the room raises his hand. “Professor Weiss?”
“Yes, Kennedy?” I say.
That’s my name now. Paul Weiss. I teach at a large university in New Mexico. I can’t say the name of it for security reasons. With all the dead bodies at the lake, the powers that be realized that I’d be best off in witness protection. So here I am, out in the west. The altitude still gets to me sometimes, but overall I like it out here. That surprises me. I always thought I’d be an East Coast guy, but life is about making adjustments, I guess.
I miss Lanford, of course. I miss my old life. Benedict and I still stay in touch, even though we shouldn’t. We use an e-mail drop box and never hit the send button. We created an e-mail account with AOL (old-school). We write each other messages and just leave them in the draft section. Periodically we go in and check it.
The big news in Benedict’s life is that the drug cartel that was after him is gone. They were wiped out in some kind of turf battle. In short, he is free at last to return to Marie-Anne, but when he last checked her Facebook status, it had changed from “in a relationship” to “married.” There were photographs of her wedding to Kevin all over both their Facebook pages.
I’m urging him to tell her the truth anyway. He says he won’t. He says he doesn’t want to mess up her life.
But life is messy, I told him.
Deep thought, right?
The rest of the pieces of the puzzle have finally come together for me. It took a long while. One of the Minor henchmen that Jed shot survived. His testimony confirmed what I had suspected. The bank robbers known as the Invisibles broke into the Canal Street bank. In Todd Sanderson’s box, there were both last wills and testaments and passports. The Invisibles had taken the passports, figuring that they could be resold on the black market. One of them recognized Natalie’s name—the Minors were still actively looking for her, even after six years—and reported it to them. The box was in Todd Sanderson’s name, so Danny Zuker and Otto Devereaux paid him a visit.
You know where it went from there. Or you know most of it.
But a lot of things didn’t add up. I had raised one with Danny Zuker right before his life ended: Why were the Minors so consumed with finding Natalie? She had made it pretty clear that she wouldn’t testify. Why stir that up, flush her out, when the end result could very well be her running back to the police? I had at one point surmised that it was really Danny Zuker behind it all, that he had killed Archer Minor and wanted to make sure that the one person who could tell Maxwell Minor that fact was dead. But that didn’t really add up either, especially when I saw the befuddlement on his face when I accused him of the crime.
That was what Danny Zuker had said. He’d been right. But I’d slowly started putting it together, especially when I started to wonder about the central question left here, the incident that started it all:
Where was Natalie’s father?
I figured out the answer to that almost a year ago. Two days before they sent me to New Mexico, I visited Natalie’s mother again at the Hyde Park Assisted Living facility. I wore a cheesy disguise. (Now my disguise is simpler: I’ve shaved my head. Gone are the unruly professorial locks of my youth. My dome gleams. If I wore a gold earring, you’d mistake me for Mr. Clean.)
“I need the truth this time,” I said to Sylvia Avery.
“I told you.”
I could see people needing new identities and vanishing because they’d been accused of pedophilia or had upset members of a drug cartel or had been battered by brutal husbands or had witnessed a mob hit. But I didn’t see why a man involved in a college cheating scandal would have to vanish for life—even now, even after Archer Minor was dead.
“Natalie’s dad never ran away, did he?”
She didn’t reply.
“He was murdered,” I said.
