Keep Them Close(8)
“Us?” I put my hand on my chest. “Meaning…you and I?”
He nods. “Baldy said, ‘You got that big-time lawyer wife, probably pulls down a million a year.’ I told him it wasn’t that simple.”
“It’s not that simple,” I say. “We don’t have a million dollars lying around. Did you tell Baldwin that he has more money than us? He has family money, for God’s sake.”
“Yeah. He says it’s tied up in trusts, it’s not liquid.” He runs his fingers through his hair. “I’m starting to think they only brought me in on this deal because of the money you make.”
“That’s not true.” I sit down next to him on the couch, my hand on his back, feel the rise and fall of his breathing under my palm. I need to cheer him up, get him back to that old swagger, when he used to brag he could sell honey to a bee. “You’re the best salesman around,” I tell him. “Your moment’s going to come.”
He finally looks at me, his eyes tired but warm. When he manages a faint smile, it catches me off guard, how much I still want to protect that part of him, the part that believes he can win again. It hurts seeing him like this.
“I don’t deserve you,” he says, touching his forehead to mine.
My heart flutters, as it always has. I’ve wanted Finley Brice from the moment I laid eyes on him, when I was in the first grade, he in the third with Luke. Fin was larger than life even back then, self-assured and handsome with a sense of humor and a crooked smile that melted the female population from Hilltop Elementary to Grace Consolidated High School. In his early forties now, he has that lumbering gait of a former athlete, boyish handsomeness, and chestnut hair that curls on the ends when it gets too long. After nearly twenty years of marriage, and despite what he’s done in the past, he still gives me that spark every time I see him, every time he touches me.
* * *
The next day, when I reach my office elevator on the way back from court, my phone buzzes with a text message.
I just about drop the phone as I read it:
The boys are recruiting me to rejoin the Wednesday night poker game. Ok with you?
I sit at my desk and stare at that message for an hour, my chest burning, unable to work. Then I remove the burner phone from my purse, the one I use for Harp when it comes to personal matters.
“Uh-oh,” Harp says when she answers. “Don’t tell me Finley’s up to his old tricks.”
“I hope I’m wrong,” I say, the understatement of the century. “But I need to know.”
6
Allison
The wind off the lake catches me full in the face as I step down to the Grand Avenue underpass. The evening air in the last days of January smells of salt and exhaust. My boots strike the pavement with a hollow rhythm, echoing faintly in the tunnel beneath Lake Shore Drive. Overhead: the low thunder of traffic, the vibrations carrying down through the concrete.
Harp already showed me photos. But I need to see it for myself. I need to see them in person, with my own eyes, for it to be real, for me to believe that he’s given up on us and gone back to his old ways, that I wasn’t enough for him, that we weren’t enough for him.
And this time, it means more than just parking outside Anna Cortese’s house on Palomino Drive.
Finley, bless his heart, has grown more cautious or just smarter. Why go to the mistress’s house when you have a swanky condo just off the Mag Mile in downtown Chicago, with a picturesque view of Lake Michigan? Y’know, the investment property we bought with my signing bonus from the law firm?
The underpass is colder than street level, the lighting a dull yellow, reflecting off wet walls streaked with salt stains. I hug my coat tighter, listening to my own breath.
When I reach the tunnel’s end, the lake wind hits me harder, whistling across the promenade. Ahead of me, Jane Addams Park, dark and skeletal in the dim light, bare tree branches waving helplessly. To my left, the faint glitter of Ohio Street Beach under the cover of snow.
I continue walking, boots crunching over frozen grit, until I reach the railing at the park’s western edge. I look across Lake Shore Drive to the location of our condo building at 432 East Erie. My vantage point is far from ideal. Cars hiss by in a steady stream in both directions, tires slicing through slush, breaking my view into flickers between moving headlights. Like I’m watching something through strobe lighting.
Binoculars help. And the stretch of sidewalk along Inner Lake Shore Drive, from Erie to Ontario, is well illuminated. They’ll be walking slowly, anyway, given the weather.
The wind hits me in sharp, needling bursts, rattling the bare branches over my head, but I keep the binoculars pressed to my face, trying to ignore the numbing of my fingers in my gloves.
I can’t be sure they will take the same route as last Wednesday, when Harp surveilled Finley, so I move my binoculars back and forth to check all possible routes to the rear entrance of our building, with its dark gray basalt stone, the double-wide, heavy service door, the ramp down to underground parking.
Why did Fin choose the rear service entrance? That’s easy. There are no cameras and no key cards scanned for entry. All you need is a physical key to unlock the combination pack, then you type in the code, and the service door pops open. No videos, no entries on a security database. No record at all.