Keep Them Close(46)
* * *
As morning drifts into afternoon drifts into evening, my thoughts move beyond abject terror to the consequences of what I’ve done. I’ve just wired a significant sum of money to a bank account that Finley won’t recognize. If he ever gets his act together and learns online banking, now that he doesn’t have me to handle everything for him, he will see this transaction. He will have questions, many questions.
Before now, I had plausible deniability. With Luke destroying the security videos from the parking lot and assuming all along that it was Finley, not me, involved in the incident, it was nothing more than a he-said, she-said. I could play dumb entirely—I have no idea who this person is or what he’s talking about.
But now I’ve paid him. I can’t pretend he’s a stranger. It’s the closest thing to an admission—if nothing else, an admission that I know him, that we have a history, that I was in that parking lot that night. Even if I cancel the wire now, that ship has sailed. I am on record with Marlow Luckett.
I bury my face in my hands. How did I get to this place? First, my prints and DNA on the drugs in Trinity’s car. I suspect that Finley knows about it, that he helped Trinity make that happen. That’s bad enough. If Trinity has video of me planting the pills in her car, as I suspect, that could destroy my career.
And now this, with Marlow Luckett. If Finley learns about this wire transaction, if he digs under the surface and finds out what happened, he could do even worse damage to me. Prison time, real prison time, is a possibility.
I have to keep this buried. Finley can never know about Marlow Luckett.
36
Luke
I’ve put off this moment long enough. I know what he’s going to say, I know what he’s going to show me, yet seeing it for myself has felt too tangible, too painful. But it’s time. I’m no longer a coach. My criminal case is in the slowdown of pretrial discovery, with no news on the forensic evidence yet from Allison. So aside from some private lessons I’ve started with kids from the area, I have time on my hands. Before Trinity starts filming the documentary, before I jump in with both feet, I have to hear and see this for myself.
I ease my Jeep into the lot of the suburban strip mall, the tires crunching over the last stubborn patches of snow. Most of the drifts have melted into gray slush, pulled back from the curb. The streetlamps cast long, wet reflections across the asphalt.
I pull into a space but leave the engine running, debating whether I should turn around and go. My eyes pass over the stores. The nail salon with its neon OPEN sign fluttering irregularly, one of the letters half-dim. A dry cleaner, its conveyor of plastic-wrapped shirts frozen mid-rotation. A Thai take-out place. A karate studio, dark and shuttered.
Stop stalling. I kill the engine and walk to the bike shop anchoring the corner, its large window featuring rows of bike frames hung like skeletons.
A bell dings as I enter. Trinity is talking with Tom Henley, who apparently used to own the store but stayed on after he sold it. In his late sixties now, his shoulders are stooped but his eyes look sharp. A gray ponytail bobs along his shoulders as he turns to me.
“Tom Henley, Luke Rankin,” says Trinity.
“It was your bike, okay.” He sizes me up. “You’re lucky you’re in one piece.”
“So I’ve heard. You were hired back then by the family? The woman involved in my accident, Carmela Muller? You were a consultant or an expert or something?”
His bony shoulders rise. “Don’t know about that. When it comes to bikes, I’ve done it all. If it has two wheels, I’ve designed it, tested it, repaired it, or sold it. This lawyer found me and asked me my opinion about the bike, okay. And I gave it to him.”
We follow him through a set of swinging doors into the workshop area. The space is tighter, warmer, lit by a row of bright task lamps that throw sharp circles onto cluttered workbenches. Tools hang in precise outlines on pegboards: wrenches, chain whips, spoke keys. The air smells like rubber and metal. Half-assembled bikes perch on repair stands.
“The bike is gone?” I ask.
“The bike itself? I’m sure it is. I don’t have it. But we took a lot of photographs, in case they were needed for court.” He nods to Trinity. “Until this young lady reached out, they’d been sitting in a file cabinet for twenty-eight years.”
We gather around a table, an enormous block of wood, scratched and scarred on the surface. Trinity holds up her phone, recording a video. Henley opens his folder and removes the photographs from a plastic sheath. He spreads them across the table methodically, like pieces of a puzzle. The prints are weathered, of course, the colors washed out, edges curled.
All that’s left of my mountain bike, post-accident photos of a contraption unsuitable for motion. The frame is twisted in on itself, the top tube bent into a sharp, unnatural angle, paint scraped down to raw metal. One wheel lies flat, spokes fanned out like snapped ribs, while the other is still attached but warped into an oval, bowed outward from the impact. The handlebars are crushed against the mangled front fork, brake cables dangling like torn tendons.
I hear my sister’s voice, her hand laced in mine, as I sat in bed for weeks after the accident, the exchange we’d have on a daily basis. Are you gonna let this break you? she’d ask.
No, I’d say. I won’t let this break me.