The Inner Circle - Brad Meltzer [132]
She? Did he just say she?
“… I knew it from the split second I saw the looks on those boys’ faces. It was more than terror, more than remorse. The pain in their eyes was like… it was like they knew they’d never be able to face God Himself again.” He looks up from the blade. His eyes are red and bloodshot. “Y’ever been around a victim of crime—someone who’s been raped or beaten or even mugged? The depth of their horror—you feel that pain through the pores of your skin. I didn’t want to admit it, but that night… that was my own Hiroshima sitting right there in front of me.”
As he says the words, my own pores—my whole body—I feel the despair rising off him. He doesn’t have a choice. From here on in, there’s only one way to keep me from talking. Outside, I eye the service road that leads up from the front gate. Still no cavalry. If I run, the knife’s close enough that he can still do damage. My hands stay gripped to the steering wheel. I search between the seats… across the floor… looking anywhere for a weapon.
“The worst part was how easy it was to pretend otherwise and keep it all silent. Not just with Griffin. With her too. With the stroke…”
The stroke? I think for a second. He said her. Does he mean…?
“They blamed it on the Turner syndrome, but when someone takes the long accordion hose from her vacuum cleaner, hooks one end to the tailpipe of her family’s Honda Civic, and then loops the other end into the window of the driver’s seat? That’s not Turner syndrome. That’s penance,” he says. “Palmiotti didn’t find her for four hours. To this day, him pulling her out… it’s a miracle she even survived.”
My chest cavity feels hollow—all my organs gone—as I try to take a breath. All this time, we thought Wallace was protecting himself. But he was actually trying to protect… her. His sister. “You’re saying Minnie… that Minnie Wallace was the one who… and she tried to commit—?”
“You’re not listening! I need you to listen to me!” he explodes, his face contorting with pain. “I was just the driver! I didn’t do anything—I was just trying to help some… they were kids!”
“Then you need to listen to me now,” I interrupt, trying to make eye contact in the rearview. “If that’s the case, you need to tell your story. You have nothing to worry about. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I didn’t,” he agrees as the pain on his face only gets worse. “I just took them to the hospital. They told me Griffin was dead.”
“Then there you go. That’s what matters,” I say, knowing the benefits of agreeing. The sooner I win him over, the more I can buy myself more time. “All these years… you had no idea.”
“It’s true… I-I was just the driver. How am I supposed to know they gave him a fake name—or—or—or transferred him here once Wallace got his Senate seat? They told me he was dead.”
“Exactly—they told you he was dead. That’s all you knew, right?”
I wait for his answer, but this time there’s only silence from the backseat.
I glance again in the rearview. Our eyes lock.
“That’s all you knew, right?” I ask for the second time.
But as a watery glaze fills his bloodshot eyes, I quickly understand. The worst lies in life are the ones we tell ourselves.
“You knew…” I say. “You knew Eightball was here.”
“Only recently.”
“How recently? A week? A month?”
His face goes pale like an onionskin. “I lied to my own soul.”
“How long?” I ask.
“Two years. Two and a half years,” he whispers, his head sloping down as if his neck no longer works. The car still sits in the parking lot. I search the service road. Still no one there. “You have to understand, when I found out… when I confronted Palmiotti… They said they moved him here to keep an eye on him—to take care of him—but I was the only one who came to visit him. He needed to know… I needed to tell him what Wallace had done. For me. I didn’t do it for the greater good. It was only good for me. But I had no idea Nico heard me,” he adds, his voice at full sprint. “That’s why, at the cemetery… when you said you were coming here… I knew. I knew it! This was my chance to end it. I