“Not murder,” I said. “Justice.”
“You’re not gonna get the authorities to back you on that. We do this quietly and do it right, or we end up in prison for a very long time. And you”—she looked at me—“are a special problem.”
“My forte, Ma.”
She smiled, not something she’d done lately. “Half the people in the country know your face. You’ll need a damn good disguise and it’ll have to be on your passport, driver’s license, everything.”
“Whatever it takes,” I said again.
Ma shrugged. “Money. That’s what it’ll take. Maybe more than you can afford. And,” she said, reaching into a big purse, “we’ll need these.” She hauled out three inexpensive cell phones.
She handed one to me, one to Sarah. “Burners. Anonymous, can’t be traced to you or to anyone. All they are is a number, not a name, and I paid for ’em with cash, three different Walmarts. This is how we’ll contact each other while we’re doing this thing.”
She handed out prepaid phone cards, good for three months. We scratched off silver coatings, input numbers, and got our phones up and running. We traded numbers and put them into our contact lists, without names. I was “A,” Ma was “B,” Sarah was “C.” Sneaky, but that wasn’t the end of it.
“If your phone rings,” Ma said, “answer it with ‘hi,’ nothing else. Wait until one of us identifies himself before saying anything more than that. That way if any of us loses a phone or has it stolen or confiscated, none of us gets caught.”
“Spooky,” Sarah said.
“Yep,” Ma said. “As of now, we’re off the grid. We’re goin’ black, people. And you—” she looked at me. “You’re gonna need that beard like I said, so don’t shave.”
Six days after Jeri was pulled out of the mineshaft, she was cremated. That was not a good day for me. It wasn’t a good day for any of us. Jeri’s mother was at the service, and her brother Ron and his wife, Brittany. And Ma, Sarah, me, and two dozen others. I got up and said a few words in a broken voice, and Ma said something, and then Ron.
When it was over, Ron and I got together with Ma and figured out what to do with Jeri’s house. Ron wanted me to have it—if I wanted it. He said I had made Jeri happier in the two months we were together than he’d ever seen her. He didn’t want to profit from her death. He had cosigned on the loan when she bought the place. All he wanted was for the new mortgage to be in my name alone.
Ma got her lawyer on it, a wiry, gray-haired old guy by the name of Haldan Matz. I gave him power of attorney to sell the house on Ralston Street and purchase Jeri’s house, work out the financing, appraisal, and the title stuff, hire a realtor for the Ralston house, set up automatic payments on Jeri’s place. I didn’t have the heart or the time to do it. For thirty-five hundred dollars, Haldan and his staff handled all that mind-numbing detail. All I did was take everything I wanted out of the Ralston house and pile it into a U-Haul, stash it in storage. There wasn’t a lot of stuff, but I kept the couch with the odor of mom’s bulldog, Brutus, forever embedded in its fibers. It was the world’s most uncomfortable couch, but it had history. I thought maybe I’d ship it to Mom in Hawaii, get back at her for naming me Mortimer and sending me all those anti-IRS books. The Ralston house also had history, but its time had come. In its place I would have something closer to Jeri, a house with a real office and a home gym where, in July, she’d tossed me around like a sack of rice—how could I let that go to someone who wouldn’t appreciate it like I would? It also had a real kitchen and an almost-new king-size bed, not used nearly enough.
We didn’t tell Ron we knew who’d murdered Jeri. If we had, he would’ve wanted in on what was going to happen to Julia and I didn’t want him to put his life on the line like that. I didn’t want Sarah’s life on that line either, but she refused to back down. She’d lost both Jeri and Allie. Allie had been cremated a day after Jeri. Ma, Sarah, and I had driven down to Aunt Alice’s house in San Francisco for the memorial service. Aunt Alice in a peasant blouse and an ankle-length tie-dyed broomstick skirt was everything Sarah had described when we were in Tonopah. She and I got along like old friends. And I met Dylan and his girlfriend of two years, Karen, and Sarah’s parents, Barb and Gerald, back from Hong Kong and Taiwan where they’d been on another buying trip. Ravi couldn’t make it. He was off playing Navy, but his two kids and his wife, Debbie, were there. We had a lot of wine and good eats, but I can’t say it was a happy occasion.
Ma’s guy, Ernie Saladin, aka “Doc,” short for “Documents,” came through. The “paper” was superb, better than first-rate. We had passports, MasterCards and Visas, driver’s licenses, Costco cards, AAA, social security cards, a few others. I even had a Best Buy card with credit for purchases on it. Our passports had been stamped in several places and had a slightly worn look. It took ten days and cost thirty-six thousand dollars and took some underhanded money shuffling to keep it from the IRS, but I knew how to keep the IRS in the dark since I knew what did and didn’t work.
Doc was based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ma had overnighted a thumb
