cell phone talking to agents parked a hundred yards out, who were giving me each and every detail of what you were doing.”
I take a deep breath, attempt to suppress the desire to make my first kill. I utilize my last strand of self-control as this realization washes over me: “But… you let me enter her room. I could’ve killed her right on the spot.”
He takes a deep breath and lets it out in measured pulses. “It shouldn’t have been Melody. I was against that.”
“Oh, you were against that.”
“It was a poorly estimated risk. But we did what we had to do.”
“And to get to my family, you would have let me kill her?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you knew it could happen.”
“Not with you. Part of estimating the risk was knowing that you, of any member of any crew in the five boroughs, had virtually no capacity to kill. You were the ultimate actor for the part, Johnny. Like I said, this was the perfect scenario, and it was handed to us.”
I wave him away with the back of my hand. “But you knew it could happen.”
He keeps his eyes on mine but licks his teeth like his mouth is getting dry. “We knew.” Now he looks away. “It should not have been Melody.” He bites the inside of his cheek, then adds, “I really liked her.” An entire minute passes before he completes whatever memory of her he’s recalling. “I mean, I really did.” He looks up at me again, repeats, “Shouldn’t have been Melody.”
I look at the clock and notice midnight is approaching, feel exhaustion setting in, taking over. “But it was. She was an innocent witness. Where’s all the love for innocent witnesses you spoke about earlier?”
He raises his voice as his justification becomes as fatigued as I am. “We can’t play by the same rules. You get to break the laws and we have to capture you while abiding by them. We’re both playing football here, but Justice isn’t allowed to have a passing game.”
As the hatred returns, I get the notion that what my family does is bad, but only notable because we’re higher up the scale, that we aren’t the bad guys; we’re the worse guys. This entire exchange with Sean brings the anguish back to my mind, has me recalling the very day I inadvertently made Arthur and Lydia and Melody McCartney vulnerable, how that cop manipulated a little boy to get what he needed, a scared kid who wanted to do the right thing to protect the girl with the blond curls and make sure she and her parents were safe, how the cop lied to me, said whatever he had to so he could gain my trust. So he could break my trust.
Maybe Sean is different—his anger and violence toward me at the notion I’d killed Melody certainly seemed genuine—but his remorse does not displace the risk he thrust upon her in the first place. I stare at him, see his pathetic look of regret covered by an opaque, synthetic smugness.
He bores me with a tale of his true incompetence, how they really did lose her in West Virginia—I never confess to where we were all that time—and how it became nothing more than a matter of “coming back to Baltimore to regroup and wait for further instructions from DC.”
I’m tired and hungry and in need of a rush of nicotine. I haven’t wanted to destroy someone this badly since Gregory Morrison. I take a drink of water, slowly twist the cap back on, and say, “I think it’d be in your best interest to put those cuffs on me.”
FIVE
I wake up slouched over the conference room table, my arm asleep and head pounding from dehydration. I take a drink and notice two men sitting at the far end of the table, pads out and already scribbling, too blurry to decipher anything distinct about them; they’re all the same anyway. The clock reads 4:23. I rest my head on the edge of the table again and immediately fall back to sleep.
Just before six, I wake to chatter occurring at full volume. Sean wasn’t kidding; the room is filling with professionals of every age and size, all requested to arrive early on this Monday morning. At quick glance I count seven people, but two of them, one man and one woman, are the folks running the show, the pair everyone goes to for answers, to receive orders and direction.