The Book of Lies - Brad Meltzer [119]
“That heart of yours made of rocks?” Alberto calls out from the backseat. “Give your ol’ man a little somethin’!”
I can’t help but laugh.
My dad leaps at the opening. “Just hear me out on this, Calvin: A few weeks back, in the newspaper, there was this columnist who said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could live life backwards?’ You start out dead and get that out of the way—then you wake up in old age and feel better every day. With each passing year, your illnesses disappear, and you get more hair, more handsome, more virile—and best of all, you keep getting younger, finally ending life as a fantastic orgasm,” he says with his zigzag smile. “Okay, the column was just a joke, but imagine it a moment: What if all our mistakes—all the bad choices and painful regrets—would just undo themselves and fade into nothingness? Wouldn’t that make this so much easier?”
I stare straight ahead. “That isn’t how life is, Lloyd.”
Up the block, a police car wails, fighting through the dinnertime traffic along the beach. As it gets closer, my father is bathed in the siren’s glowing blue lights, which smooth away his wrinkles and flatter his sun-beaten skin. For those few seconds, as it passes, my father is young again. Just like on the night he pushed my mom.
“I forgive you, Lloyd.” I take a long, deep breath. “I just don’t want to see you.”
Still gripping the base of the window, my father simply stands there. There are some prisons with no bars.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t dig your way out.
“I’ll always be your father, Cal.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“How ’bout this Friday, then?” he asks. “We can go to dinner.”
The police car is long gone. But I still hear it in the distance.
“Maybe.”
Pumping the gas, I pull out toward the traffic. For the first few steps, my father holds on to the window, trying to limp along with the van. He doesn’t get far.
“You like Indian food? We can grab Indian,” he calls out, excited.
“I hate Indian,” I call back, leaving him behind.
I peer out the window. He looks older again. Too old to run. But even in the darkness, even as he stops, I see his zigzag smile.
It matches my own.
As we zip up the block, I check the rearview to get a final look, but all I see is Alberto, his nose pressed to his RC Cola can with the plastic wrap on top.
“Let me ask you, Alberto—you really think it helps, talking to your dad’s ashes like that?”
Alberto looks up, confused. “Ashes? What you talkin’ about?”
“In the can. Those aren’t your dad’s ashes?”
“Cal, I may be a drunk, but I ain’t wacky.”
“But that night—you said—”
“Damn, boy—we was in a crowded van full of junkies and baseheads. I go tellin’ ’em where I keep my piggy, and it’ll be gone by lockdown.”
His piggy? “Hold on. That’s your bank?”
Flashing a gray-toothed smile, Alberto shakes the RC Cola can, and I hear bits of change cling-cling against the insulation of crumpled dollar bills. “You keep it in yo’ socks, they steal it,” Alberto says, beaming. “It’s like your story, Cal—that coffin you was chasin’: Once people think there’s a body inside . . . ain’t no better hiding spot in the whole damn world.”
He’s right about that. But in our case, with the coffin, there was a body in—
My heart lurches, leaping up to my throat.
Double crap.
I need an airline ticket.
80
Orchard Lake, Michigan
Judge Felix Wojtowicz wasn’t a fool. Electrified from the moment he saw it, he knew the power of history. And ritual. And even the ceremonial value of a blood rite.
He knew—thanks to his own family’s diaries—that the blood sacrament was what delayed his brethren at the Cave of Treasures all those years ago. So with Ellis’s body at his feet, already wrapped in plastic, he knew he wouldn’t make the same mistakes here.
Most of all, the Judge knew the stories from times past.
He knew that dating back to 3500 BC, Mesopotamian women used to wear cylinder seals—carved stone cylinders no bigger than the cork of a wine bottle, but with a hole through them, like pieces of ziti—around their