Pro Bono E-Book

Thomas Perry

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 533

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Charles Warren has dedicated his legal career to aiding people in financial straits. In his newest case, helping a beautiful young widow find the money missing from her late husband's investment accounts, Charlie recognizes a familiar scheme - one that echoes the con job that targeted his own widowed mother many years before, and that led him, as a teenager, to commit a crime of retribution that still weighs on his conscience. Within hours of starting his investigation, he is followed, shot at and has his briefcase stolen. As Charlie continues to pursue answers, he quickly becomes too entangled in the web of fraud, betrayal and career criminals surrounding the theft to escape its deadly snare. A nail-biting tale of conspiracy and pursuit from Thomas Perry, Pro Bono will have readers looking over their shoulders as constantly as they keep turning pages.

Leseprobe

‘Few crime-fiction authors are as skilled as Thomas Perry at keeping readers off balance and in suspense. Mr. Perry’s Pro Bono, a cutthroat caper of embezzlement and revenge, . . . has more twists than Topanga Canyon’ Wall Street Journal

‘You will find yourself looking over your shoulders while reading this one. Pro Bono hits a lot of great notes and elevates the financial thriller to new heights’ BookReporter

‘Pro Bono once again demonstrate[s] that [Perry] is a master of the suspense/thriller genre...An original, memorable and fun read from cover to cover’ Midwest Book Review

‘Perry’s characters come to life with a single sentence…He’s one of the greatest living writers of suspense fiction’ New York Sun

‘Perry is a dominating force in the world of contemporary suspense thrillers’ Publishers Weekly

‘A master of nail-biting suspense’ Los Angeles Times

ALSO BY THOMAS PERRY

The Butcher’s Boy

Metzger’s Dog

Big Fish

Island

Sleeping Dogs

Vanishing Act

Dance for the Dead

Shadow Woman

The Face-Changers

Blood Money

Death Benefits

Pursuit

Dead Aim

Nightlife

Silence

Fidelity

Runner

Strip

The Informant

Poison Flower

The Boyfriend

A String of Beads

Forty Thieves

The Old Man

The Bomb Maker

The Burglar

A Small Town

Eddie’s Boy

The Left-Handed Twin

Murder Book

Hero

First published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2025 by The Mysterious Press, an imprint of Penzler Publishers

This paperback edition first published in Great Britain in 2025 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © Thomas Perry, 2025

The moral right of Thomas Perry to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 80471 104 0

E-book ISBN: 978 1 80471 105 7

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press UK

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Product safety EU representative: Authorised Rep Compliance Ltd., Ground Floor, 71 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, D02 P593, Ireland.www.arccompliance.com

For Jo

1AUGUST 2007

McKinley Lawrence Stone was the name he had given himself in the court papers he’d filed three years ago. When the change had been certified he held a party for himself with a few cronies using the last of the money he had left from his time as Steven Wallace. He called it his Launch Party. He had played with variations on the new name, and the one he felt most comfortable with was Mack Stone. The name Mack Stone would mark him as an unpretentious man, and the McKinley had a subtle scent of historical priority and maybe even inherited wealth, with the possibility of some education that he would be far too modest to mention. The party guests included several of his favorite people—Dickie O’Connell, who ran a card game and could deal any hand he wanted each player to have, a pair of women friends named Tracy and Faith, who operated an escort service offering housewives supplementing their incomes, and Ike Potter, a thriving dealer in mail-order pharmaceuticals who had often filled orders for him. It was a memorable party for sure. He was remembering it three years later.

He was thinking about it because at the moment he was at about the same point in the cycle where he’d been at that time, only better. He was driving a beautiful new black BMW 7 series sedan with a load of optional features. Inside the trunk was a leather carrying case that held new socks, underwear, casual shirts, and pants, and a portfolio of stock and bond accounts bought with money that had recently been the property of Linda Warren, but were now in his own permanent name, the one he’d been given at birth. He had never divulged this name to anyone since his family had moved to a new town when he was eight and they’d all made up new names.

He was already far north of Los Angeles, heading east across Nevada. Professionals like him knew enough not to head for Las Vegas. It was the first place the hunters looked. It was exactly the tempting distance from Los Angeles or Santa Barbara or San Diego to make a stupid person think he had left the police and his victims far behind and could relax. Vegas was nowhere near far enough. It was a bright, sunny, sparkling trap.

He had spent the day settled back in the scientifically designed, ergonomically perfect, expertly crafted leather seat while he looked out the window at the jagged, rocky, skillet-hot hellscape of the southern part of Nevada. Now he was enjoying the smooth, silent ride watching the mirages pool ahead on the highway, then dissolve as he approached. The afternoon sun seemed to be throwing its light ahead of him on the future. He had swung north, taken Route 50, and was in northeastern Nevada and moving fast but still barely above the speed limit on the two-lane highway.

A vehicle was coming up fast behind him. He stared at the mirror. He saw it was a gray passenger car with only the driver in it. He had a certain envy, because if he hadn’t been driving with three or four million dollars on paper that he didn’t want to be asked any questions about, he’d be going the same speed.

Mack kept his speed exactly as it was—not fast enough to prompt a cop to wonder why so fast, or slow enough to wonder why so slow. He’d had the throttle on cruise control for nearly two hours. He watched the other car approach in the mirror, holding himself back. He didn’t want to start racing some idiot, when winning meant nothing, and a tiny mistake could be fatal. He had heard that the only ambulance service in the empty parts of Nevada was manned by convicts from the prisons. He’d heard other people say that wasn’t true, but he had decided he’d better believe it anyway to keep himself cautious. Right now, he had everything he had ever wanted—almost too much money, a good car, freedom, and his next woman writing him long, passionate emails every day, with pictures intended to make him choose her house as his next address.

He kept his eyes on the road for a few minutes, but the other car kept coming, and whenever he looked, the car was closer. It wasn’t just on the straight, level stretches. No matter what the road looked like, the car was gaining on him. After a few more minutes, the car was nosing its grille up to his back bumper, like a race car drafting to defeat the wind. The yellow light on his left mirror began to blink to indicate the car was going to pass. Why didn’t it?

Mack couldn’t stand it anymore. He couldn’t see the other driver very well, but he was slight, probably young. Mack very gently touched his foot to the brake pedal, just to make the brake lights glow and maybe shave a mile an hour off the speed to remind this kid what he was doing. The kid wasn’t the only one whose life was in his hands when he was driving.

The gray car slid forward and bumped the rear of the BMW, jolting Mack’s seat so the back of his head tipped hard against the headrest. The bump didn’t hurt, but it shocked and addled him for a second until his eyes found the horizon again. He was instantly angry. He hadn’t carried a gun in years. He had stopped because a couple women he’d been with had gotten so enraged when they learned about the money that if they’d found the gun, they might have used it. Right now, he regretted selling the gun.

He decided to force the driver to pass. As he was letting his speed decrease, the gray car began dropping back slightly. Damn right, he thought. You’d better. He kept going at the reduced speed for a few seconds, searching ahead for a place where they could both pull onto a flat shoulder and have a frank discussion. Then a jolt made him look up into the rearview mirror. The gray car had slowed to build an empty space between it and the BMW, but then the driver stepped hard on the gas pedal, shot forward, and hit Mack’s car again.

Stone’s BMW received the force with a bang, punched forward by the gray car. His eyes opened wide and he uttered a cry, and when he heard his own voice, he realized he sounded terrified. This kid was some kind of road rage case, out of control. He was trying to hurt Mack, maybe kill them both. Mack wondered if he could have done something to set this kid off without knowing it, maybe cut him off way back on the highway. He stepped on the gas pedal and pressed hard to get some distance from the threat.

The broken stripes on the road flashed under his car now, coming toward him like tracer bullets. As he glanced in the mirror again, he saw the kid was right behind. He knew the car he was driving was an incredible machine, capable of much more than the hundred he was going now—certainly faster than the gray car. But he had been driving on this road for over half an hour, long enough to have a feel for it. He could drive faster, but he doubted he could take a severe curve at these speeds without spinning out. There had also been heavy rains all over the west this winter, and plenty of curvy mountain roads had been undermined or blocked by mudslides. What if—

The car behind him edged up close to nudge him again, but he would not allow that. He pressed the pedal harder, and as he did, the gray car was left behind. Mack was still accelerating when the BMW’s right front wheel hit a pothole and dropped to the right, bounced up, then launched itself a foot into the air, off the road, landed in a drainage ditch, and slammed into a tree.

Andy Minkeagan sat in the bus next to his friend Alvin Copes. It was a bright, clear, show-off day to be out traveling, and he supposed that someday one of them would remind the other what this was like after weeks of smoke and sweat-soaked masks. Alvin was good to sit with. They had known each other for years, so there wasn’t a lot of tiresome talk—just the easy, natural kind that made the mile after mile of road pleasant and restful.

They had been on the fire line in California for three weeks fighting the Prickleback Fire, a big one made worse by the weather, with temperatures in the hundred-and-five-plus range, and winds that would blow one way for a while and then reverse, like something big turning back because there was something alive back behind it that it had forgotten to eat. Sometimes the something seemed to be you.

Everyone on the bus was a model prisoner from Ely State. That was why they all got to spend the past twenty-one days on vacation on a fire line in California fighting fifty-foot flames with shovels on terrain so vertical and tough that the only way out was on the feet that had brought them there. The pay was ten dollars a day.

Minkeagan and Copes both had eventful criminal records with enough terms like “grand,” “aggravated,” “armed,” and “conspiracy” to have kept them in Ely for a long time, but neither had ever been convicted of homicide despite some experience with it, so they had been eligible to fight fires. Neither of them was lazy either, so they’d both taken other courses besides Firefighting Basic Training One and Two. Copes was Black and Minkeagan was white, and they’d spent some time vouching for each other with men of their races when they’d taken their first course, Automotive Technology, together, and they had found it a comfortable way to take other courses.

They had taken Commercial Driver’s License and Heavy Equipment Operator. These had been easy to agree on because they were practical, even though Copes and Minkeagan never expected to be out of prison young enough to get jobs. They felt lucky to have programs at all, because Ely was the designated maximum security prison. They took Arborist because it was an opportunity for outdoor exercise, and it was peaceful. They took Culinary because it was a rare chance to taste something besides prison food.

“Copes!” came the voice from the front. “Your turn at the wheel.”

Taking a shift driving the bus was one of the privileges of having a commercial driver’s license, but at times it was a drawback too. The driving could be hard, and it carried a lot of responsibility. Minkeagan stepped into the aisle to let Copes out of the window seat and make his way to the front as Stapleton, the current driver, slowed the bus and pulled off onto a gravel patch.

When Stapleton got up, Copes sat down in the driver’s seat, picked up the clipboard on the dash, and put his initials beside his name on the driver list. He strapped himself in, looked at the mirrors, signaled, shifted, and made the bus growl up onto the pavement of Route 50 and begin to gain speed.

Copes was pleased to see that there were no cars coming up behind, because the bus was climbing on this stretch. Driving a bus going home to Ely was complex. The average altitude around Ely was 6,788 feet, but within fifty miles the up-down variation was over 4,000 feet. It took time to bring the bus up through the gears to build up speed, and he didn’t want to tempt some fool to risk swinging into the oncoming lane to get around the bus and slamming into a driver coming the opposite way.

As though to prove his point, a sporty gray sedan shot around the next curve toward him so fast that the wind from it rocked the bus a little. Copes had stared right into the face of the gray car’s driver, and he had looked very young and very—what? Not scared. It used to be that a kid who was barely surviving doing something stupid would at least show some appreciation for the fact that his ass was still on the planet in defiance of the odds. These days they didn’t seem to feel that.

Copes blew out a breath and then took one back in and kept going, paying acute attention to the road ahead. It would have been a real joke on him to survive eight years in maximum security and fighting fires and then have some idiot turn his car into a torpedo and punch it through the front of the bus and into his lap.

Two miles on, the bus came to the spot where a new BMW had gone off the narrow shoulder into the ditch and hit a tree. Copes didn’t have to tell anybody. The wreck was in plain sight through the bus windows, and Copes slowed the bus down and pulled past a big pothole and a broken-off chunk of road, past the car, and everybody got a look while he eased the bus onto the shoulder.

The car was gouged along both sides, the front wheels were pigeon-toed inward, and the grille was wrapped around a tree so far that the headlights were looking at each other. The driver’s-side airbag was still inflated so it didn’t seem as though the driver could have gotten out. Copes pulled a few feet farther uphill so there wouldn’t be any gas trickling under the bus if there was a leak from the BMW, and opened both doors. “Okay, let’s see what we can do,” he called.

Minkeagan took a chemical fire extinguisher and others took shovels and ran out the two doors toward the wrecked car. Copes engaged the hand brake of the bus, but he didn’t turn off the engine, in case they needed to transport the driver.

By the time Minkeagan arrived, the men had stabbed the air bag to deflate it, and two of them were pulling the driver out of his seat. They laid him out on the ground. Minkeagan leaned in and turned off the BMW’s engine.

“Is he alive?” Copes asked.

“Nope.”

“Are you sure?”

The man who had made the declaration smiled and looked into Copes’s eyes. He was Holloway, and Copes and the others knew he was the one the newspapers had called “the Night Dispatcher” even though the authorities didn’t. He’d seen plenty of dead men and knew how to make them that way.

Minkeagan said, “All this blood. Is that from the windshield or did somebody light him up?”

“Broken neck and head trauma,” Holloway said, “but I don’t think it matters. Dead is dead.”

Minkeagan was moving to the back of the car, and Copes noticed he had taken the keys with him. Copes said to the others, “You’re right. Let’s get back on the bus, and we’ll call the cops at the first stop. I guess that’ll be the diner with the red roof.”

The others had lost interest when they’d learned the man was past saving, and they were tired, so they shuffled toward the bus. Minkeagan lingered. He used the key fob to open the car’s trunk and saw the leather case. He lowered the trunk lid a few inches to verify that the others were facing the bus and not him, then leaned in and opened the case. He saw the stack of cash, saw the manila envelope full of account reports with the names of banks and finance corporations. He left the cash, took the envelope, and slipped it up under his shirt and down behind his belt, closed the case, and then locked the trunk. He handed Copes the keys.

Copes knew better than to have the conversation now, so he joined Minkeagan and they trotted to board the bus with the last of the others. He got into the driver’s seat, waited for Minkeagan and the rest of the stragglers to sit, called out, “Everybody set and seated?” and then began to drive.

Minkeagan sat near the front, a few feet from Copes. He couldn’t talk, couldn’t tell him what he thought he had. He could keep it under his shirt for now, but very soon he would have to make a decision about where to hide it next. The ideal place would be somewhere inside the bus, but there was no part of the bus that didn’t get seen by somebody fairly regularly. The inner lining of one of the seats would be good, but the seats were getting pretty worn from normal use, and all the fire crew travel last year had accelerated that. This summer was likely to bring as many fires as last. A place like the cargo bay under the bus might have some spaces that could be opened and then closed, but it was full of fire gear right now. Time felt as though it was speeding up. When the bus got back to Ely, the guards would search everybody right away for contraband before they were brought to their cells.

Minkeagan didn’t get a chance to talk to Copes until they stopped at the restaurant and the others all got out to loiter around the parking lot and wait for the police. As soon as they were twenty feet from the nearest prisoner Minkeagan said, “It’s a bunch of stock, bond, and bank accounts. All the ones I saw were in the name Daniel Webster Rickenger. There’s some ID in that name too, some of it old, like his birth certificate. If we work this right in the next fifteen minutes, we’re rich. Once the cops get here the chance is gone.”

“I’ll go talk to the manager and look around,” Copes said. He walked toward the front door, studying the building as he went. He made it as far as the front entrance before a man in a necktie, a man with a cook’s white coat, and a waiter came out to head him off.

“How can we help you?” the man with the necktie said.

Copes said, “We’re a fire crew from Ely, just heading back after three weeks in California. We found a man who had been in a single-car accident two point three miles west on Fifty. The man is deceased. We stopped to ask you if you would please call the police and tell them, or let me use your phone to call them myself.”

The man with the necktie said, “Just you?”

“Yes, sir,” Copes said. “I’m driving the bus, so I feel like it’s part of the job.”

“Everybody else stays outside?”

“That’s right.”

“Come in.”

The man held the door open for Copes to enter, and followed him in, “You can use the phone over here by the lectern. It’s for taking reservations.” He guided him over to the lectern, which was empty now, the person replaced by a sign that said, “Please seat yourself.”

Copes dialed 911 and listened to the female operator’s greeting, “911, what is the location of your emergency?”

Copes told her as precisely as he could, gave his name and the group he was a part of, and said he would hold the bus and wait for the police to arrive and give them the keys to the wrecked car. He said he would hand over the phone to the manager of the restaurant and did. When the man had verified that Copes was real and hung up, Copes thanked him for the use of the phone and walked to the front door and went out to the parking lot again.

He was scanning for Minkeagan, saw him leaning on the side of the building, and approached him already talking. “There’s a hood with a ventilator running on the wall above the stove. I think they clean the fan from inside, and the vent is on the roof.” He kept walking while he was talking, drawing Minkeagan with him. They reached a spot near the back of the building where the roof sloped down to a height of about ten feet. He squatted and knitted his fingers to give Minkeagan a stirrup.

Minkeagan didn’t talk, just stepped onto his cupped hands and stretched his arms above his head while Copes lifted. He caught the edge of the roof and pulled himself upward while Copes kept pushing. In a few seconds Minkeagan was up. He bent low and walked as quietly as possible up the red roof. He had no trouble finding the vent because he could hear the hum of the fan. The rectangular sheet metal shaft rose above the roof about a foot and a half and turned sideways. Its mouth was a metal flap on a hinge. The flap was wavering outward an inch or two to emit a smoky, meaty smell from the grill. Minkeagan moved close to it, opened the flap and looked. Inside the shaft about a foot and a half down there was a screen, probably to keep any animals from using it as a way to get into the kitchen. He took the envelope out of his belt, slid it into the shaft so the bottom edge rested on the screen and the envelope was curled close to the inner side, so it might not be seen even if somebody removed the flap. It was a fairly tight fit without blocking the vent. He looked under the flap again, then took a step back. The vent was high enough to keep the mouth above the snow level, and the opening and flap faced southeast. There wasn’t going to be a better place.

Minkeagan hurried down to the edge of the roof, lay down, and lowered himself. When his legs reached the edge and draped downward he felt Copes wrap his arms around them and lower him to the ground. They walked past the front corner of the restaurant and saw that the other prisoners had gathered around the bus again. They joined the group and participated in the general complaining about how long it was taking for the cops to come, how long the drive from California had been, and the predictions of screwups to come. The police would try to blame the driver’s death on them, and treat everything they said like it was a lie just because. They would keep the bus waiting here long enough so they’d miss dinner at Ely.

A few minutes later two police cars and an ambulance pulled into the parking lot, and Copes went to meet them. One set of partners was a pair of large men, and the other car held a man and a woman. Copes gave the car keys to the first cop who approached him, and then told all the cops at once where the man and his car were. The male and female cops and the ambulance drove toward the accident scene, while the two men stayed behind and interviewed Copes and Minkeagan for the police report. After some conversation on their car radio, one of the cops told Copes and Minkeagan the bus could return to the prison.

By then, most of the fire crew were back inside in their seats, so the loading didn’t take long. Copes got in, looked at the clock, and saw his shift was over. He looked at the roster on the clipboard and called, “Daly! It’s your turn to drive.” He and Minkeagan went back to sitting together near the rear of the bus as it pulled back up out of the lot onto the highway.

The next day during exercise period while they lifted weights Minkeagan described to Copes every detail he could remember seeing in the packet of financial papers. They were finally far enough from other prisoners to speak freely about the accounts, and about how, in reality, they were already rich. The money would stay where it was safe. In fact, it would grow. As soon as either of them could get out of Ely, he would go back to the restaurant, climb up on the roof, and retrieve the envelope. Within a few days he would become Daniel Webster Rickenger and make his way to Los Angeles to convert their wealth from investments into spendable cash. He would put half in a special account for the one who was still here in Ely. A life sentence was not an easy thing, but it seldom meant a man’s full life. Now that they knew what the future held for them, the years ahead were going to fly.

2

When Charlie Warren was fifteen, he was on his school’s swimming team. The culmination of the season was a sectional meet in Santa Barbara at the University of California’s big pool complex, where six schools competed over a three-day period during winter break. They stayed in the University’s vacated dormitories, ate at the student union, and competed during the day, with each event run in several heats.

On the third and final day, Charlie swam his best event, the 200-yard Individual Medley. He touched the wall a body length ahead of the others and then, panting heavily, grinned up at his friends and coaches and savored their shouts and hand clapping for a moment. As he was getting out of the pool he glanced at the bleachers and saw his mother waving at him.

He’d had no idea that his mother would be at the sectional meet. Since his father had died when he was eleven, she’d continued to attend athletic events as a parental duty, usually only home meets or games, but here she was. She hurried to the bottom row of the bleachers, trotted up as soon as he had his towel around him, and hugged him. Then she pulled back and said, “Charlie, this is Mack Stone. We knew today would be the finals, so we figured we’d drive up and surprise you. Mack, this big guy is my baby.”

Mack had a suntanned face and aviator glasses, and an expensive haircut slightly too long to be showing gray on the sides. Was he about Linda’s age, or had they both just slipped into the vagueness of middle age, not young but playing young, like actors? He was mainly shocked that his widowed mother was here with a man. Mack Stone held out his hand, smiled, and said, “Congratulations, Charlie. That was a terrific effort.”

There was a condescending upward tilt to Mack’s head so he could look down his nose and give a fake smile. Charlie said, “Thank you.”

Linda said, “I guess the meet must be about over. Maybe you can sneak off with us and go to dinner before we start the drive home. I’ll tell the coach so he doesn’t wonder where you are.”

“I’ve still got the relays,” Charlie said. “You go ahead. I’ve really got to ride home on the bus with everybody else.” He glanced over his shoulder. “In fact, the coach is giving me the eye right now. I’ll see you at home tonight.” He brought himself to look at Mack Stone. “Nice to meet you, Mack. Thank you both for coming.”

When the school’s bus dropped Charlie off at home a bit after midnight that Sunday night, a strange not-new Mercedes was in the driveway. He went inside the house and there were only a couple lights burning, one in the foyer and the other on the stairs. In the morning when he woke up, Mack Stone was in the kitchen and Charlie’s mother Linda was cooking breakfast for him.

After that, his mother spent much of her time going places with Mack Stone. Charlie came from school to an empty house many days, and on the other days it was worse, because they were both there. The period when Linda was the clear hostess and Mack was a guest didn’t last very long. Soon she stopped referring to her bedroom as “my room” and called it theirs.

Mack didn’t appear to do anything the way Charlie’s father had. He never seemed to go anywhere, or talk about friends or acquaintances. When Charlie asked his mother, “What does Mack do?” She said, “What do you mean?” He said, “For a living.” She said, “He’s in business.”

Charlie tried out that idea for a couple days, but couldn’t find any substance in it. He tried to google Mack’s name, but there were millions of Stones. He noticed Mack had a laptop computer, and would spend time tapping away at it, but when Charlie would get close enough to look at the screen, it was usually on some catalog or advertisement. Whenever Mack referred to anything on the screen, it was “I found a really great deal on a hotel in Cabo,” or “You’d look great in this dress.”

Finally, Charlie asked him directly what he did for a living.

Mack said, “Why do you ask?’

“I just wondered. You never seem to go anywhere, unless it’s with my mother. Do you work when I’m at school or something?”

“I’m an investor,” Mack said. “My money goes out and works for me. I sometimes direct it from one place to another, or use the profits and dividends to invest in new companies. But most of the time a smart investor picks something good and sticks with it.”

Things remained this way until Charlie’s freshman year ended, and then his mother announced a surprise. She’d decided he was going to attend a summer program at a school in northern California. She gave him a glossy, colorful booklet describing what the place offered. It seemed to value the skills that would have been good for an aspiring knight—horsemanship, archery, martial arts, and literature. There were also tennis, golf, swimming, and kayaking. The place was coeducational, and the photographs included roughly equal numbers of male and female students. Charlie decided that since his mother had already made up her mind, his smartest move would be to agree to it, and since he was going to agree, to do so without visible reluctance or audible complaint.

He went for six weeks in July and August, and they were the best six weeks of his life so far. Being with contemporaries of both sexes in a place where the only real adult supervision consisted of coaching and ended with dinner was like a dream. His only regret at the end of the program was having to leave.

He flew into Los Angeles on August 16, when the temperature was 108. He stepped out of the baggage claim door, waited for forty minutes, and then watched Mack’s Mercedes pull up to the white curb and saw him and his mother both smiling. The air conditioning was blowing through their hair in a frigid breeze.

At dinner on the 19th, Linda announced to Charlie that she had hired a very special and well-known consultant in educational futures, who was coming the next day to present to him a proposal for his. “Her name is Camilla Barton. Mack, tell him what you think of Camilla.”

Mack replied, “Charlie, a guy like you needs an Ivy League school, and getting people into those schools is a whole study in itself. I asked some friends who have hired her for their kids. She knows how to do the trick—what works now and what doesn’t anymore. She also has connections and relationships, and that’s the ingredient you can’t fake.”

Charlie had a strong feeling that this was some kind of scheme to keep him out of their lives a bit longer, but he didn’t want to start an argument without knowing what he was objecting to. He had been skeptical about his mother’s idea of sending him up north for the summer, but the summer had been much better than she knew or would ever have allowed. He would wait a day and see.

Camilla Barton turned out to be a middle-aged woman with very short dark hair and a briefcase. She wore a lot of jewelry—a necklace and bracelets made of large chunks of transparent plastic with wisps of gold leaf embedded in them.

She said, “I’ve studied your records, and talked to your counselor and your academic advisor, Charlie. The smartest move that someone like you could make, and one that could change your life, is to transfer to the right prep school now, before it’s too late. The school that I consider your best bet is old, and it’s known to admissions offices everywhere. It’s in New Hampshire.”

Miss Barton left him with a collection of brochures for eastern prep schools. The one she had recommended most highly was the Thorsen Academy. He looked up the school online and learned it was 2,960 miles from Los Angeles. His mother was trying to do her best for him, but she was also at least acquiescing to Mack’s plan to move him out of the way of their relationship.

There seemed to Charlie to be no point in resisting their effort to push him out. In two years, he’d be applying to colleges no matter where he was, and he’d probably never live at his mother’s house again for longer than a school vacation.

Charlie went off to the new school, made friends easily, and discovered that the place deserved its academic reputation. For a Southern California teenager, the New Hampshire fall was a beautiful curiosity. A bit later the iron-gray skies, rain, cold winds, and then later deep-drifted snow seemed unnecessarily harsh, but by then he’d learned that the strategy for enduring dissatisfaction was to work harder.

When Charlie flew home for winter break, his mother and Mack Stone met him in the front entrance of the house and told him they had decided to get married. When he came home again for summer break, there was the wedding. His mother had told him months earlier that Mack wanted him to be his best man, but Charlie had replied that he wouldn’t. After a lull, she had written him a letter formally asking him, as her only close living male relative, to walk her down the aisle. He had written back, “Down the aisle of what?”

She called him and said they had rented a wedding venue named Ocean Ranch Celebration Gardens for the ceremony and invited three hundred guests. She said, “I know you disapprove. I know you will dread it. But please do this for me because I need you to.”

He did as she asked. The scene of the wedding was lush, a parklike expanse above the ocean with a pavilion shaded by tall eucalyptus trees. He noticed that just about every one of his mother’s friends and her supposedly extinct male relatives was there, together with spouses and children, including some surviving Warrens. She wore a light blue gown that looked elegant on her long, thin body and her slightly graying hair was styled the way it had been when he was a child. Everyone seemed to have a good time at the wedding. Early the next morning she and her new husband Mack Stone flew off to their European honeymoon. Before they returned ten days later, he had left for New Hampshire, where he’d enrolled in a late summer session.

When Charlie returned at the end of that year, Mack and Linda were living about the same, but he could see that there was tension. The first time Mack was out and he was alone with his mother he said, “You and Mack aren’t getting along the way you were when I left. Did something happen, or what?”

She said, “It’s nothing, really. It’s just that some of Mack’s investments haven’t been doing so well this year. And you know how I can be—worried and anxious when there’s really no need to be. You probably remember how your father used to be. He could tell you the bank balance without looking at the checkbook, how much was coming in or going out. I didn’t realize how comforting that was for me. Things are different now. Mack isn’t like a man who works in an office and operates a firm. Investing is different. And he has the personality for it.”

“What’s that?”

“You know. Optimistic and confident. If I say we shouldn’t buy something, he tells me I’m being silly, timid for no reason. ‘The markets go down, but they always go up again.’“

Charlie began to ask her more questions when she was alone. Even with her vague answers, he came to realize that Mack had been living for two years like a very expensive pet. He had a beautiful new BMW. It had been bought only in his name because he said that made it easier for him to bargain for the best price, insure it, and take it in to be serviced. He also had a new wardrobe and a lot of stories about the wonderful places they had visited in the past year.

It settled on Charlie that his parents had not been very good at survival. His father had achieved himself to death and died of a heart attack unselfish but early. His mother had judged her second man by assuming he was just like her first, but on no evidence. Over the summer the strain on the marriage became impossible for Linda to hide. Around the Fourth of July, Charlie heard her ask Mack if he knew why the June deposits from the investment accounts hadn’t turned up. He said “They have. I used them for the kid’s June 30th tuition payment.”

Charlie knew there was no June tuition payment. Tuition was charged at the beginning of fall semester and at the beginning of spring semester. Schools didn’t defer billing until the end of an academic year in June. That night, when Mack and Linda were out to dinner, Charlie looked around in his mother’s office that Mack seemed to have taken over. He checked the file drawers where his mother had always kept the account statements from her banks and investment companies and was able to trace a decline in the balances, which seemed to have accelerated over the school year. His mother’s bank statements showed large checks written to credit card companies, and her long-term accounts had numerous cash withdrawals.

The most disturbing to him were the investment statements. This seemed to have been a good year for stocks. Each of the accounts had some increase in value each of the nine months while he’d been away, a couple of them large, but a decrease in balance. On the first day of each month for years, there had been a transfer of the same sum of money from the stock funds to the joint bank account. But last year, beginning in September, sometime before the fifteenth of each month, there had been an additional withdrawal of an irregular sum that seemed roughly proportional to the recorded increase in stock value. If the value went up five percent, the withdrawal was about that much. Mack had been tapping the accounts, but trying to make it less glaring by timing it. Charlie noticed that Mack was an optimist. Four times he had overestimated the rise in prices, twice drastically.

Each time Linda and Mack were out together, he looked deeper, searching for signs of where the money had gone. Charlie needed to wait for a day when Mack was out without Linda before he could show her what he had discovered. She sat at the desk and stared down at the figures as he pointed them out, then went back month by month and showed her the same phenomena. Charlie watched her closely, and it was only about ten minutes before she began to cry. He pulled the paper she’d been looking at away from her. “Don’t get the statement wet,” he said. “We’ve got to keep him from knowing.”

“I don’t want to keep him from knowing,” she said. “I can’t believe he’s been doing this to us. The minute he gets back here I’m going to be in his face.”

“If you do that, he’ll know that you caught him,” Charlie said. “As long as he doesn’t know, maybe there’s something you can still do.”

“What? Send him to jail? Sue him? He’s my husband.”

“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “I’m not married to him, and I’m not even legally an adult, so nobody will listen to me. If somebody does something, it’s got to be you.”

“But what can I do about it now?”

“Something. Get on the phone and cancel anything they’ll let you cancel—his credit cards, his permission to sign things at your banks and brokers. Withdraw anything you can and transfer it to a new account. Change every password. If there’s any card you can’t cancel, report it missing, maybe stolen, so they have to freeze it and send you a new one. You must have an accountant you had before he came along. Call him and tell him what’s going on. How long is Mack going to be gone?”

“He said he’d be back around six. He has a haircut appointment, some kind of business meeting, and then he was going to shop for clothes.”

“It’s not even ten now. That gives us some time. Pick out the accounts that are worth the most and try to save those first. I’ll try to find the right phone numbers and dial them so you can just talk.”

They both worked frantically. There were papers that would have to be signed in person, accounts she couldn’t deny Mack access to, things that couldn’t be done until the next day when Mr. So-and-So could approve them, or couldn’t be done by phone, or needed both her signature and Mack’s. If Mack’s access to an account couldn’t be canceled, she would withdraw funds and have the checks mailed. If she couldn’t withdraw everything from an account, she withdrew what she could and moved on. After the most obvious things had been done, or at least attempted, Linda called the attorney she and Charlie’s father Matt Warren had hired to write a will leaving their money to Charlie, and then more recently, to change her will so Mack was included. Linda told her what had happened and said she needed a new will and a divorce.

A couple hours later, the lawyer called back. She and a colleague had been working on securing large assets, and he had discovered that McKinley Stone had approached a real estate agent within the past week and tried to arrange a sale of what he called “the family house.” The title search had revealed that the house had been placed in a living trust in Matt and Linda’s names with Charlie as the only contingent beneficiary sixteen years ago. Mack had no right to sell it. She would try to find out more and let Linda know what she learned. She also said, “Meanwhile, get out of that house before he comes back. When these guys get found out, they aren’t ever pleasant, and sometimes they’re violent.”

Mother and son packed suitcases. They agreed to each drive one of the cars to keep them both out of Mack’s hands. They would meet at a hotel in Santa Barbara and keep working on preventing Mack from finishing the job of stealing the money Linda and her first husband had put away for them. Linda would drive the Jaguar, and that would leave the Toyota Charlie had driven whenever he’d been home from school.

Charlie carried his mother’s luggage to her car and saw her off. As he was about to leave, he realized that he should bring some more of the financial papers with him. He went back into the house and selected the monthly statements from Linda’s account drawer that were the clearest evidence of what Mack Stone had been doing, put them in his bag, and then, as he was opening the back door, heard the whisper of the BMW’s tires on the paving stones of the driveway.

The BMW stopped on the driveway, blocking Charlie’s car in. The only thing he could do was retreat into the kitchen, unlock the back door, then slip into the pantry and wait. He heard Mack come in the front door talking loudly on his cell phone. He said, “Well, I’m home now, and I can prove this is just a misunderstanding. My wife will explain to you that I have a perfect right to move any of our assets from one place to another any time I please.” There was a pause while the other person said something, and then Mack said, “Then first she can explain that they are joint assets.” There was a pause. “Linda!” The next time his voice came from the staircase. “Linda!” The third time, the voice was faint because it was coming from the second floor. “Linda!” Charlie could hear strain and frustration in it. Charlie slipped out the back door with his suitcase, carried it across the front of the house and the next three to the nearest corner, and took out his phone.

His friend Kyle Sung lived a couple blocks away, so he called him. He said, “Look, I’ve got to go out of town for a few days, and my car is blocked in the driveway. It will be clear in a couple hours, but I’m in a big hurry. Could I borrow your car for the trip and leave you the keys to mine?”

“Sure,” Kyle said. “I don’t need to drive anywhere tonight. I’ll pick you up in a minute.”

“Great. Can you make it at the corner by Nora Hartz’s house?”

“Sure.”

Kyle’s car was much better than the one Charlie had been using. It was a practically new Audi and had a big engine, but it was sleek and had a dark gray color that made it look understated and expensive. Charlie left the house and walked down the street past Nora Hartz’s house carrying his suitcase. When he got near the corner Kyle was already in sight. As soon as Kyle pulled over and popped the trunk, Charlie put his suitcase in and got into the passenger seat. As Kyle drove back to his house he said, “You feel like telling me what’s going on?”

Charlie said, “It’s basically my mother breaking up with the asshole she married. I’ve got to stay out of his way for now, and he just pulled his car into the driveway and accidentally blocked my car in.”

“Wow. That’s bad timing. You think he’ll give me a hard time when I come to get your car?”

“I think he’ll be gone in a couple hours. If he isn’t gone yet, he’ll be all smiles, pretending to be a great guy. Thanks for this.”

“No problem.”

When they reached Kyle’s house, Kyle got out and left the motor running. “Good luck with all of it, man.”

“Thanks,” Charlie said. “I owe you a big favor.” He handed Kyle the keys to the Toyota.

Charlie got into the driver’s seat and pulled away very smoothly, not going too fast so Kyle wouldn’t worry. He thought about heading for the 101 freeway to Santa Barbara, but then he decided that there was no reason now to be in such a hurry. If Mack was gone already, he could return Kyle’s car and go back to the plan. He was driving a car that Mack wouldn’t recognize, so he could just drive past and look for the BMW.

As he reached his street, he saw that the BMW was still in the driveway, but immediately saw Mack stepping out of the front door. He slowed down and watched. Mack slammed the front door, hurried to his car, got in, and pulled away fast.

As soon as Mack turned the corner, Charlie parked Kyle’s car, ran to the house, and went inside the back door to the kitchen. Everything looked the same. Charlie was about to go back outside, but then he sensed something was off. The air was wrong. It smelled different. Had Mack left the oven on, or something? He checked the dials and burners, then touched the oven door, checked the air fryer and microwave, and walked toward the front of the house. Suddenly there was the screech of the fire alarm. It was coming from upstairs. He ran back to the kitchen, grabbed the fire extinguisher off its rack on the wall, and sprinted to the stairway and up to the second floor. His mother’s bedroom was filling with smoke. Charlie saw that the flames were just taking hold, flickering up the curtains. Mack must have lit sone papers in the trash can and pushed it under them.

Charlie sprayed the curtains and the trash can, and the fire went out in seconds. He turned on the air conditioning fan and threw open the French doors onto the balcony, and in a moment the terrible noise of the alarm died out. He closed and locked the French doors, pivoted, and ran down the stairs. His eyes seemed to be seeing things through a red film in front of him. Mack had tried to burn the house down on his way out. As soon as Charlie had seen the fire, the rage had gripped his chest. He dashed out the front door to the street, already reaching into his pocket for the keys to Kyle’s car. He was not going to Santa Barbara anymore.

He threw himself into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and had the car in motion before his seat belt buckle clicked. He knew the intersection where Mack Stone would be stopped. It always took sitting through the long traffic signal, sometimes twice, before a car could get through onto Sunset in the late afternoon. Mack’s car wasn’t stuck at the signal so Charlie didn’t wait for the light to change. He just veered left, shot straight through, and kept adding more speed. In another second or two he was weaving in and out of traffic, knowing that he would be able to see the BMW before long. He was not used to driving this car, but he was quickly building a feel for its controls. The car was small, but it had a powerful engine and was the right weapon for what he was determined to do.

It was three days before he spoke to his mother again. When he reached her hotel, she demanded to know where he had been and what he’d been doing. He told her he’d needed to be alone to think. She never asked him again, maybe because within another day or two, the authorities had notified her about her husband’s death, and she knew a reason not to.

3MAY 2021

Vesper Ellis climbed up on the step stool to reach the deep blue glasses in the cupboard. They had been nested inside one another on the top shelf since the last time she’d used them, which had been over a year ago, and she needed to wash them all again before she could add them to the tray.

She inspected them as she took them down, two in each hand, set them on the counter, and reached up for the next four. The color was gorgeous, a perfect sapphire, the eyes of the angels in Renaissance paintings she’d seen, a pigment which she’d read had been made by grinding up lapis lazuli.

It almost made Vesper feel guilty for hating the glasses. It did not seem to her to be wise to serve anybody anything outdoors in a vessel that wasn’t fully transparent. As a child she had been given lemonade in a deep green glass, and when she took a sip, the hornet that had flown into it for some of the sugary drink had stung her lip to make its escape.

One of the adults present that day made the predictable remark that pretty girls’ lips were sometimes described as “bee-stung.” She wished him dead for over an hour, and then determined to forget he existed, which was as close to obliteration as she could achieve.

Vesper arranged the blue glasses on paper doilies on a tray of their own, but kept them all upside down. It would have been unthinkable not to have enough glasses for the garden party, and all the clear tumblers and stemware and highball glasses had been placed on the dining tables and the bar according to their natural purposes.

Vesper felt slightly dizzy for a second as she stepped off the stool. This was George’s fault, and she mentally placed it on his side of the balance sheet. He always seemed to have his most desperate desire for her at inconvenient times—often so late at night that she didn’t get back to sleep before the alarm went off. This time it had been at dawn, when he was fully aware that she was preparing to entertain three dozen people at midday and had to get started.

All her emotions about the day were strong—first rage at his selfishness and uncaring attitude about the effort she’d been expending for days and the importance, not just to his business standing, but to her reputation too, damn it, for getting social events right. And then there was the warm feeling of being adored and desired by her husband, a sensation that started out faint and not at all fair compensation for her annoyance, but grew as the closeness and touch continued, until it made the negative feelings start to seem foolish and distant and then overwhelmed them completely. The feelings were vivid, but then once again they ended with her having to rouse herself from a state of profound relaxation to start performing tiresome chores in rapid succession to make this day happen.

She had once very tentatively and obliquely asked her mother about George’s timing, or really, alluded to it, just putting it in front of her in case she knew something that Vesper should know. Her mother, whose name was Iolanthe, a crime of a name perpetrated on her at birth that she had also visited upon her daughter when she called her Vesper, said, “He’s going to feel that way about somebody. If he’s worth keeping, you should do your best to make sure it’s you. You’re lucky you’re so beautiful that what happens is up to you. You’re both in your twenties, young enough to find ways to make both of you happy.”

This morning Vesper had just given George a final kiss before she climbed into the bath, and now she was fresh, subtly perfumed, powdered, and made-up. She was all efficiency and motion.

There was pride too. Vesper could have spent a lot of money putting on these events for their friends and George’s colleagues. There were caterers in the Valley who were very good, even excellent. They brought their own dishes and linens and tables and chairs and five or ten staff to deploy them and to park the guests’ cars. She still believed there were advantages to doing things the way her mother and grandmother had done them. People didn’t pay magicians because they wanted rabbits removed from hats. They wanted the pleasure of seeing rabbits appear from the hats so smoothly that it seemed natural and inevitable. She stepped onto the back porch and looked at her preparations. Yes, she had done it again—rabbits.

Everything was right, tastefully chosen and arranged. The tables were set, the food was cooking, the bar was overstocked with liquor bottles with famous labels, wine of four kinds to pair with the entrees beside the correct glasses ready to be filled.

In a moment the first guests were arriving. Vesper greeted five or six couples with hugs and then swooped away to the kitchen to pick up a platter the timer at the back of her brain told her was ready and return with it. When she was back, there were enough other women who were looking for a chance to help, and a couple men too. The next trays and platters were brought out behind her and she simply had to say, “That goes over there,” and point.