Miles sighed and smiled. He felt the weight of a dozen cinder blocks lifting from his shoulder. “That’s wonderful.”
“There’s something else, though.”
Miles felt the blocks drop back into place. He recalled Chloe’s fear that she might test negative for his disease but be found positive for a totally different condition. “She has something else? Christ, what is it?”
“She’s perfectly healthy,” Dorian said. “But they compared your profiles. Yours and Chloe’s.”
“Okay,” he said slowly.
“There’s no DNA match between the two of you.”
Miles couldn’t find any words.
Dorian added, “You’re no more related to her than I am to the Queen of England.”
Forty-Four
Somewhere over Pennsylvania
Rhys Mills normally liked an aisle seat, and as close to the exit as possible. It was a control thing. Whenever possible, he liked to be first off the plane. And he hated the window seat, being hemmed in by someone, having to maneuver around them if you wanted to use the bathroom.
But today, booking at the last minute, Rhys had few options. He had asked the middle-aged woman on the aisle if she would like the window, trying to make it sound as though he was doing her a favor, but she wasn’t interested. Had a very active bladder and might need to get to the bathroom lickety-split, she told him, like he was dying to hear every possible detail about her urinary situation. So here he was, leaning into the fuselage, looking down through the clouds at the state of Pennsylvania.
Heading home.
It was usually a good feeling. But Rhys was filled with dread, as well as heavy-duty painkillers for his knee. The assignment he and Kendra had been sent on was unfinished. Worse, Kendra was dead. If he was to finish this job, he’d need a new partner. This had not been the kind of gig, to use Kendra’s word, one could do alone.
Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her lying there, her face a mess of raw hamburger. Saw his hand pointing the gun downward, squeezing the trigger.
He told himself it was the right thing to do, not just for himself but for Kendra. It was highly likely she would have died without his intervention. He’d spared her considerable suffering. And if she could have been saved, what sort of future awaited her? Years of reconstructive surgery. Plus, if Roben and the girl went to the police, and the cops put it all together, Kendra’d be spending her time in prison instead of the plastic surgeon’s waiting room.
Rhys, too.
No, it was better all around that Rhys put that bullet in her brain. Better for the client, too. Had she lived, she might have talked. Once the police had you in a box, you had to do what you could to save your own neck.
Would have been better if he’d gotten rid of her body, though.
At least he’d stripped her of any ID — not that any of it was legit — but even fake ID, once police had run some checks, would raise questions.
Would Roben and the girl report this? Hard to say. The girl would have to admit what she did. A confession would pose considerable risk if the cops didn’t buy her story. By the time Rhys boarded his plane out of Fort Wayne later that day, there hadn’t been a word online about her body being discovered.
He closed his eyes again, and this time, instead of remembering her as he’d last seen her, he pictured her coming to his motel room in the middle of the night, pushing him onto the bed, having her way with him. Her entire body was hungry, and when it was satisfied, she left. Kendra was no sentimentalist. If he’d been the one caught in the face with that bat, she would have handled things the same way.
“Well, here we go,” said the woman sitting next to him, unbuckling her seat belt. “The Pepsi’s found its way through me already!”
Rhys offered a thin smile and looked back out his window.
When he landed, he’d head home first, have a couple of scotches, take a shower, maybe find a woman — there were a couple he could call on short notice — all before breaking the news to the client and deciding where to go from here.
There’d been some suggestion, in a cryptic text, that another job, tangentially related to the one he’d been on, awaited him. But he wouldn’t need the bleach this time.
This one would be on the house. When you fucked up, when you were in the client’s bad books, you didn’t nickel-and-dime him.
Forty-Five
New Rochelle, NY
When his call with Dorian was finished, Miles stood there in the storage facility corridor, unable to move. It wasn’t a symptom of his disease. It wasn’t his muscles refusing to respond. It was the shock of the news just delivered to him that had frozen him to this spot.
Chloe was not his daughter.
The hallway seemed to be spinning, and he threw out a hand to steady himself against the wall.
Chloe said, “Miles?”
When he said nothing, she ran to him, ducked under his outstretched arm, and put her arm around him. The phone was still in his hand.
“Who was it?” she asked. “Who called?”
Miles tried to say something but nothing was coming out.
“Is something happening to you? Do you need a doctor, because, like this guy is one. I don’t know if he’s the best guy but he might know something.”
“It’s... okay,” Miles whispered. “Just... something kind of came over me.”
“Who called?”
Miles moved his dry tongue around in his mouth, trying to create some moisture. “Dorian,” he said. “They did the test.”
“Oh,” she said.
“I know you said you didn’t want to know the results, but I might as well tell you.” Miles needed a second to form the words. “You’re fine. You don’t have it. Or anything else.”
Chloe’s face crumpled. “Okay,” she said, her lip quivering. “That’s good, right? Isn’t it?” She gave him a squeeze.
“It is,” he said, and squeezed her back. “It’s good.” He put his arms around her. “So happy.”
She hugged him back, and when she pulled back, tears in her eyes, she said, “So that’s why you went all funny? That’s how you handle good news? What would you have done if it was bad news?”
He offered something approximating a smile. “I felt a little overwhelmed.”
“Okay, well, this is all great, but remember you asked me to come to help you focus? The doc looks like he’s ready to wet his pants, so maybe we better go talk to him before he has to change his diaper.”
Miles nodded. “Okay, okay, let’s do that.”
Together, they made their way back to the open storage unit, where Gold had stopped shredding and was eyeing them like a cornered rat.
“How’d you find me?” he asked again. Rather than wait for an answer, he looked at Chloe and said, “Who are you?”
“Chloe Swanson.” She smiled and pointed a hitchhiking thumb at Miles. “This dude’s daughter.”
Miles felt those invisible blocks on his shoulder grow heavier.
On the way here, in the back of the limo, Miles had gone over with Chloe the questions he’d intended to ask Gold, but now he could hardly remember what any of them were. She was looking at him, as if wondering when the grilling would begin.
But Miles said nothing. Chloe looked at him expectantly, waiting. After a few seconds, she prompted him. “You up for this?”
Miles said, “Chloe, wait in the car.”
Her eyes popped. “Excuse me?”
“I want to talk to Dr. Gold privately.”