The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [175]
In the end, Reggie gave up nothing and everything. He got to keep his own secret, leave his life mostly the way it was, yet he had to surrender the key that could bring it all tumbling down.
Reggie introduced Della Dickey, who explained that she had found an item among her father’s effects when he had died seven years ago. Her father had passed before he could hand down his legacy to her, his only child, as he’d always intended. When Della spoke the man’s name, Reggie understood from the recognition on their faces that her father’s legacy was the same one that Gary Jameson and the others would quietly pass down to their own children. And when she told them what she had supposedly found among her father’s things, Reggie could tell from their shock that they would give her, and him, everything asked for in return.
But Reggie could tell by the long, silent stare he received from Elizabeth Gold that Solomon’s widow wasn’t buying any of it.
The rest was details: what could be done, what couldn’t be done; what was within their power, what wasn’t.
The last list, Reggie marveled, was shockingly short.
75
THE FOLLOWING SPRING
IT FELT SOMETHING like a Vegas casino in scale, with ceilings high enough that you’d never notice them and air cold enough to pinch you awake and waitresses revealing enough to make you stare and slots paying just enough to keep you in your seat after twenty or more dry pulls.
The headliner in the theater had been a has-been before Wayne and Nada were even born, however. And the steaks were tough and the pasta overcooked and the drinks were poured of cheap stuff and everyone on staff would have been on probation for some combination of incompetence or indifference if they’d been working at the Colossus.
Wayne let it all slide because he loved being her whale.
The doctors at Executive Concierge had secretly stitched up Wayne’s side and his arm and they’d offered him, and Nada, too, some minor plastic surgery. Nada declined but dyed her hair—red to black. Wayne had his crooked nose straightened and shortened, had a bit lifted from under his chin. He thought it was a handsome face now. He also colored his hair and kept the beard, and disguised his old thick body with the modestly trimmer one he had found on his hungry journey to Chicago. Nada received payment for her summer of work, a quarter of a million dollars in a Cayman account, and her mother signed the papers, giving her full access to the trust fund, and they had assurances from her and Gary Jameson that the Thousand would leave Nada and Wayne alone.
With respect to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which was still engaged in a manhunt for the fugitive killer Wayne Kenneth Jennings, Wayne and Nada were on their own.
One day soon, when everything had quieted down, Wayne would risk a phone call to his mother, or his brother, just to say he hadn’t done it.
There were new driver’s licenses and birth certificates and Social Security cards and passports, even credit histories. Wayne’s papers gave his name as Cameron and Nada’s was listed as Gwen, after one of Peter Parker’s girlfriends in her old Spider-Man comic books. It was only a few days before they were using those names without giggling, settling into their new skins and shedding the old ones as unsentimentally as they might trade in a car. They did that, too—her yellow Miata for an invisible silver Accord.
What had been exchanged for all of this, Wayne wasn’t sure. Nada said it was something that had belonged to her father, something she believed her mother must have known about, must have kept hidden all these years. It was also the final bit of proof, in Nada’s mind, that her mother had killed her father as well as Erica. For that reason, she was disappearing once more, and this time Elizabeth Gold would never be able to find her.
They drove east from the suburban hotel where they had been hiding and healing, up through Michigan and then Ontario to test their new passports, and then to the Finger Lakes and the Adirondacks and up the New England