“Nobody. All of them were nobody.”
“All of who?”
He groaned, as if Jack were grabbing his various strands of thought and tying them into painful, knotted memories. “Stop asking so many questions, damn it.”
“Listen to me. It doesn’t matter what you did. I’m your lawyer. I can help you, but not if you add kidnapping and carjacking to your troubles.”
“Shut up and drive.”
“Just put the gun down.”
He shoved the weapon even harder against Jack’s skull. “No more talking!”
“All right,” said Jack. “Where are we going?”
The question hung in the darkness. With the utmost discretion, Jack caught a glimpse of Falcon’s face in the rearview mirror. His lips were moving, but the words wouldn’t come. Or was he talking things over with himself?
Falcon said, “You and your buddy are going to show me where you put all my money.”
“What money?”
“Don’t pull that shit on me again, Swyteck. The money in the safe deposit box!”
“All I took was ten thousand dollars to post your bail. Not a penny more.”
“You took all of it, I know you did!”
“Dude, we didn’t take your money,” said Theo.
“You gotta have it! The bank’s crawling with cops, I know it is. They’re just waiting for me to come get my money, see? If it’s there, I can’t possibly get at it. So you better have it. You just fucking better have it!”
Jack felt the gun shaking, as if Falcon were fighting the urge to pull the trigger. Whether the money was actually missing or not was irrelevant. In Falcon’s paranoid mind, it was gone, and Jack had taken it. Charged, tried, convicted. Any further denial would only have unleashed the execution. “All right,” said Jack. “I’ll take you to it.”
chapter 15
Y ou seem distracted,” said Vince.
“No. I’m okay,” said Alicia. She flagged the cocktail waitress and signaled for another round of drinks.
It was almost eleven o’clock by the time Alicia had finished up at the medical examiner’s office, driven home to get ready, and picked up Vince at his place. Vince’s blindness had thrown a curveball into her routine. Selecting what to wear, putting on her makeup, blow-drying her hair-did any of those things that she would normally do really matter to him anymore? She wasn’t sure why, but even raising those questions in her mind made her feel guilty. She debated whether to talk it out with Vince but decided it was better to keep the conversation light. The band was quite good, and they listened to music at the bar for a half-hour. When a table became available, they went out to the sidewalk cafe, where they could hear each other talk. The cold front was still a factor, but the bar had outdoor space heaters to warm things up. It was a crisp, clear night, and the moon over the ocean was so large that you could actually see the shadows on the lunar surface. She wondered if she should tell Vince about it.
“You keep looking around when we’re talking,” he said.
She did a double take, wondering how he knew.
“I can hear it,” he said. “When you’re not speaking directly toward me, the voice projects differently.”
“Really? That’s amazing.”
“It’s a skill I’ve been working on. I get a little better at it every day. But we weren’t talking about me. Why are you looking around?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be doing that.”
“Am I making you uncomfortable?”
“No.”
“Are people looking at us?”
“Looking at us? No. Of course not.”
He paused, then smiled smugly. “This is awesome.”
“What is?”
“I’ve done most of my practicing on people I know only on a casual basis, but it works even better with people I know well.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My hearing. And my ability to tell when people aren’t telling the truth.”
She returned the smile, even though he couldn’t see it. “Okay, okay. We are being watched.”
“Happens every time I go out. People staring and saying, ‘Hey, who’s the lucky girl with that incredibly hot blind guy?’”
That drew a little laughter. The waitress brought them fresh drinks-white wine for Alicia, another Heineken for Vince. When the waitress was gone, Alicia said, “Actually, it’s my father who’s watching over us.”
“Is that so? Maybe my hearing isn’t as good as I thought it was. I completely missed the band’s spontaneous rendition of ‘Hail to the Chief.’”
“He’s not here, turkey. What I mean is that about half the City of Miami police force is within a three-block radius of me at all times. I can count three off-duty cops right now.”
“Your father’s concerned for you,” he said, taking on a more serious tone.
“That’s an understatement.”
“It’s only natural. Things have changed, now that we know your stalker is a killer.”
She thought back to the autopsy room. “It was absolutely brutal, what he did to that poor woman.”
“You could have called me to cancel tonight. I would have understood.”
“It’s good for me to get out. Even if we are being watched.”
“Pretty cushy job for those guys. I would imagine you’re still easy on the eyes.”
She didn’t know how to respond.
Vince said, “Have you changed much? Your appearance, I mean.”
“Well…no. Not really. It’s only been six months. I was upset when we split, but I didn’t get crazy and cut off all my hair or tattoo a ticking biological clock on my forehead.”
He drank from his beer glass and carefully placed it back on the coaster. “I’m starting to forget what people looked like.”
She looked at him-not with sympathy but intrigued. Vince had never been one to speak freely about his feelings, and it was a little disorienting to hear so much from his heart. He was different now, in so many ways. Not all of the changes were bad. Not bad at all. “I suppose that’s another skill you’ll develop with time. You’ll learn to reconstruct those images in your mind.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“It’s strange, really. My grandmother, who has been dead for over two decades, I can picture perfectly in my mind. But with my brother, who I see every week, it’s now almost impossible for me to attach a face to his voice.”
“What about your uncle Ricky?”
“Of course I remember the red hair and those blue eyes. But with the distinguishing lines of the face, it’s like everyone else. The best way to describe it is to imagine that there is a big photo album in my mind. If people are part of my past, they stay there forever, just as they were. But if I make them a part of my new life, their image fades. The more contact I have with them, the more they are defined by things that don’t depend on sight. For those folks, there will eventually be nothing left in the photo album but the shaded outline of where the picture used to be and a little label that tells me who it was.”
Again, she found herself struggling for a response. “There’s more to a person than just a face.”
“Thank God for that. Because the way things are now, a face is nothing.”
“I don’t think I agree with that.”
