Another wait for a response that didn’t come.
“Please, Timothy. Don’t be stupid. You’re smart and well educated. You have a world of potential. Don’t toss it because of some silly notion of revenge.”
A smile. A shake of the head. His silence built up insistently, like a siren’s wail growing in the room. Susan allowed frustrated anger to slide into her voice, and finally she came up with the best possible argument:
“And you will take down Andy, and maybe me, too, even if I cooperate and testify against you. I’ll lose my job for sure this time, and probably my entire career. I might even be looking at jail time. But that isn’t anything compared to what will happen to Andy. Do you want to see her go to prison?”
Deep breath. Moth’s answer, simple, impossible: “No.”
More silence. Susan’s last, helpless question: “Well then?”
A lie: “I won’t let that happen. Goodbye, Susan. I will see you tomorrow at Redeemer One.”
One last effort, pivoting in a different direction: “Andy, please. Don’t let him do this.”
And Andy Candy’s immediate response: “I’ve never been any good at making Moth do anything. Good or bad. Once he makes up his mind, he’s as stubborn as a mule.”
A cliché, to be certain-but accurate.
Susan eyed the two of them. They suddenly seemed very young. “Well then, fuck it,” she said. She turned to leave, but at the door tried one last time: “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Selfishly, she began to calculate her own exposure. It was significant. Conspiracy. Accessory before the fact-that was certain. Accessory after the fact-that was equally possible. A variety of criminal charges-ones she was accustomed to filing against the guilty-flooded her. She could see the entries in the criminal statutes, probably could even quote some of them verbatim if she were pressed. The lawyer within her wondered if she should quickly write up a warning and have the two of them sign it-some sort of statement that absolved her of any criminal responsibility. This was unfeasible, she thought, especially when Moth repeated, “Goodbye, Susan,” and held the door open for her.
She wanted to strike out, slap sense into him. Grab him by the shirt and give him a jolt of reality. She did not do this. Instead she exited, and as the door closed behind her, she felt more alone than she ever had before.
Moth took the driver’s license picture for Stephen Lewis of Angela Street in Key West and went to his computer. Whatever information he could unearth about this man was a few clicks away. His fingers hovered above the keyboard, but what he said was, “She’s right, you know.”
“Right about what?” Andy Candy responded, although she knew.
“All of it,” Moth said. “The risks. The dilemma. The reality. I shouldn’t go around fooling myself.” This was said without conviction.
He paused before adding, “And us. She was right about that. Andy, I can’t ask you for anything else. You need to leave now. Whatever happens, it has to be me, alone. Susan talked about potential… the future… not throwing it all away-pretty much every argument you would expect her to make. And every argument made much more sense than what I have in mind. Christ, I don’t even know if I can do it. She was right about that, too.” He shook his head. “I just have to try.”
Andy Candy realized that good sense should absolutely dictate what she did next. She also realized it would not.
“Moth,” she said in a low voice, “I’m not leaving you now.” This, she knew, was both the best and worst thing she could have decided to do. There are all sorts of rights that are wrong and wrongs that are right, she thought, and this is obviously one of them. She did not know which category she meant.
“If I had a future,” Moth said slowly, “it was because Uncle Ed provided it for me. And we turn all this over to the cops-and the killer will just disappear again. Maybe he has another identity somewhere. Maybe he has ten. And sure enough, no matter how much pressure Susan brings, and how many FBI flyers go out, they won’t find him. People disappear in the USA all the time. It’s a big headline when some guy who’s been gone for ten, twenty, thirty years accidentally gets caught. Sixties radicals disappeared for years. How about that guy, the Boston mobster? His face was on every post office wall and FBI ‘Most Wanted’ list and it was still decades before anyone found him. And that was pretty much blind luck. This guy-our guy-doesn’t seem like the sort that allows for either luck or accidents in his life.”
Andy Candy wanted to be practical.
“He will kill us, Moth. I know it. Maybe not today or tomorrow-but someday. When he feels like it.” This, she knew, was a truism. Saying it out loud added a layer of panic onto her fear. “Jesus,” she said, but this wasn’t a prayer.
Moth nodded in agreement.
“So, is there a plan?” she asked. She thought for a moment, Maybe we’ll be lucky and he won’t be in Key West. Then she contradicted herself: Maybe that would be unlucky.
“Yes,” he replied, as he turned to the computer to do some research. Then a qualification in drawled-out slang: “Kinda.”
46
Islamorada to Tavernier, then on to Long Key, Grassy Key, touching the Everglades, all the way down to Key West, the Overseas Highway meanders through close to seventeen hundred different islands. The view is spectacular: the Gulf of Mexico on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other-all glistening in sunlight, a hundred separate shades of blue waters. What Moth liked was the famous Seven Mile Bridge-which actually wasn’t 7 miles long, but just shy at 6.79. It carried a name that was deceptive, that seemed both true and false at the same time. It was nearly seven miles, so why not call it that?
Andy Candy drove. It was late in the afternoon, but the traffic wasn’t bad. She was cautious, not only because the highway that shifted from four lanes to two and cut through shopping malls and marinas is dangerous, but because if a Monroe County sheriff’s officer were to pull them over in a routine traffic stop, it could ruin everything.
In a backpack in the backseat they had some clothes that Moth had carefully selected, along with the fully loaded.357 Magnum. They had a battered baseball hat, some sunglasses, and a wide-brimmed straw hat favored by old ladies afraid of the sun.
It wasn’t much of a kit for murder.
They might have appeared to be a young couple heading for a snorkeling trip, maybe parasailing, or a sunset cruise. They weren’t. What they didn’t look like was a pair of killers.
They stopped near Marathon Key. While Moth went into a liquor store, Andy Candy found a damp, muddy spot in a corner of the parking lot. She took out some of the clothes Moth had packed and proceeded to rub them in dust and dirt, beating them up as much as she could. She glanced around, making sure that no one saw what she was doing. She looked a little like some ancient impoverished crone doing the wash by hand-only in reverse. She wished there were some stink-dried sweat, urine, fecal matter, maybe skunk scent-that she could add to the mix.
When she looked up, she saw Moth approaching. He had a plain brown sack, and she heard two bottles clank together.
“Never thought I’d do that again,” he said. He tried to install confidence in his voice, but Andy thought it seemed shaky. She was unsure whether this was because of the liquor Moth held in his hands and everything it promised it might do to him-or because of the plan, which seemed to promise to do something else.