“So what happened?” asked Jeffrey when he didn’t go on.
“Nothing yet. I had copies of everything here at my house. My meeting with them is scheduled for next week.” He smiled quickly.
He slumped back down in his chair, as if he’d been drained of all his energy in the telling of his tale.
“Then Mickey committed suicide, and Lily disappeared. Monica was nearly psychotic with grief, medicated to the point of catatonia. I was alone, on the verge of losing everything. Still part of me refused to believe that The New Day was behind it. Part of me believed it was punishment for my selfishness, my foolishness, all the crimes and sins of my life.”
“When did you come to believe differently?” asked Lydia.
“When you came to see me, started asking me about The New Day.”
“Is that why you went there?”
“I went there to make a deal.”
Lydia frowned at him. “What kind of a deal, Mr. Samuels?”
He shrugged. “I have something he wants. He has something I want. I proposed a trade.” Again he fell into silence. Then, “You know what’s brilliant about Rhames is that he doesn’t break you completely. He took Mickey. How? I still don’t quite know but I have an idea. But with the death of my son, he showed me what he was capable of doing. Everything else he just left dangling. He knows that once a man is without hope, once he has nothing to lose, there’s no way to control him. Things might go all right with the IRS, Lily might come home, Monica might come back from her place of grief. Things might normalize a bit someday. He knew it was that hope that would bring me to him.”
“What does he want?” asked Jeffrey, shaking his head. “It can’t just be your money. All of this… there are easier ways to get a person’s money.”
“No. Not just my money.”
“He wants you to say Uncle,” said Lydia. “He wants you to surrender.”
Tim Samuels shrugged. “Something like that.”
“So what kind of deal did you make, Mr. Samuels?” asked Lydia. “Whatever it was, please let us help you.”
He shook his head slowly. “I don’t need any help, Ms. Strong. I got my family into this and I’ll get them out.”
“How?”
“The less you know, the better. And now, I’m going to ask you to leave.”
“Mr. Samuels, you know we’re going to have to involve the police.”
He rose and started walking toward the door. Lydia and Jeffrey exchanged a look and followed.
“You do what you have to do,” he said in the foyer.
Lydia didn’t like his calm. It was eerily incongruous with the things he was saying.
Samuels opened the door for them. His hand was pale with strawberry blonde hair and a riot of freckles, nails bitten to the quick. He rested it on the brushed chrome door handle and turned tired eyes on them.
“Why are you telling us all of this now, Mr. Samuels?” asked Jeffrey.
He didn’t smile; he didn’t open his mouth. He just looked at them and the answer was clear. That whatever arrangement he’d made, it was too late to stop it. Tim Samuels had wrangled with the devil and lost.
What now?” asked Lydia as she climbed into the passenger seat of the Kompressor. Jeffrey didn’t answer, just put the car in gear and headed up the drive.
“We can’t just go,” she said, looking back at the house. She felt the tension of helplessness in her hands, a deep frustration constricting her chest. She knew what Tim Samuels apparently did not; that there were no deals with people like Trevor Rhames.
“We’re not going. We just need him to think we are.”
Samuels stood in the doorway and watched them leave, face blank, hands hanging at his sides. Jeff turned off the drive as if they were headed back toward the highway and drove until the house was out of sight. After about a mile, he looped around on a winding back road that left them off on a scenic overlook where they had a clear view of Samuels’ driveway. The house sat below them, a picture postcard of white and gray against a moody sea.
Lydia didn’t have to ask what they were doing: watching Samuels to see what happened next. She played the conversation they’d had with him over in her mind.
“Anything bother you about that conversation?” asked Lydia.
Jeffrey blew a sharp breath out of his nose. “Where do I begin?”
“You know what’s bothering me?” she asked.
“Hmm,” said Jeffrey, his chin in his hand, his eyes on the house below them.
“Monica Samuels.”
He nodded.
“I mean, where is she?”
“Catatonic with grief, doped up on tranquilizers.”
“According to Samuels,” she said, leaning against the door. “But she wasn’t catatonic if she left him.”
“Okay.”
“So where is she?”
Jeffrey considered it. “Well, we can’t ask Tim Samuels where his wife went. What about that girl you interviewed?”
“Jasmine.”
“Maybe she knows.”
They spent the next few hours in the Kompressor watching the property, hoping that Tim Samuels would leave so that they could follow him, or that someone from The New Day would show up at his house. Neither of those things happened.
Eventually Dax showed up in the Rover to relieve them. He pulled up behind them and didn’t exit the vehicle. He had a friend with him, a guy Lydia and Jeffrey knew only as Claude. He was mute; he looked like Frankenstein’s monster with a square jaw, bad hair, and assorted scars on his face and hands. Dax couldn’t work alone yet, since he still couldn’t run properly. He was slow and stiff, as they’d seen earlier at The New Day. And anything that didn’t involve him pulling out his big gun and firing from a sitting position was going to be difficult for him. He’d brought Claude along for anything that required speed and finesse. Which was kind of like using a sledgehammer to etch glass.
“Maybe we should have asked one of the trainees at the firm to work with him,” said Jeffrey, gazing at Dax and Claude in the rearview mirror. They looked like a pair of escapees from an asylum, brooding, drinking Mountain Dew from giant plastic cups.
Lydia gave him a look. “Dax doesn’t play well with others. Anyway, it’ll be dark soon. There are no other houses for a mile or so, so hopefully the villagers won’t see them and come after them with torches.”
Lydia’s cell phone rang and she looked in the rearview mirror as she answered.
“Hey,” she said.
“What are we looking for?” asked Dax.
“Anyone who comes in, follow when they leave. If he leaves, trail him.”
“How long do you want us to stay?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, call us later.”
She saw him nod in the rearview. She and Jeffrey took off and headed back to the city.
Monica Samuels moved like she was made out of glass, as though the slightest misstep or sudden noise would cause her to shatter into a thousand pieces.
“I didn’t have anyplace else to go,” she told Lydia, placing a cup of tea on the table before her. “I couldn’t stand the thought of a hotel. So impersonal. I feel disconnected enough as it is.”
A call to Jasmine had revealed that Monica Samuels had moved into her daughter’s apartment. Now, Lydia and Monica sat at the small round table in Lily’s tiny kitchen. Monica had asked Lydia if she wanted tea and Lydia had declined. But Monica didn’t seem to hear, boiled some water and made her a cup anyway. The bitter smell of some herbal concoction drifted unpleasantly into Lydia’s nostrils.
“I’ll stay just until she comes home,” she said with a sad, hopeful smile. “A young woman doesn’t need her mother hanging around.”