Page 44 of The Lie Maker

Cayden said, “I did some research online and they seem to be going between eight and fifteen, depending on the condition. And the condition of this one is the shits. Those little bubbles on the fender rust?”

“It’s not as bad as it looks. I mean, you might have to put a little money in it, but it’s still a Porsche, right? Why don’t you make an offer?”

“How about twenty-five?”

Earl thought he’d heard wrong. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Twenty-five thou. Cash.”

Earl said, “I don’t get it.”

“Don’t get what?”

“You haven’t even driven it. You haven’t seen it in the light. And you want to offer me eight thousand more than I’m asking?”

“If you’re not interested, just say so.”

“No, listen—but I don’t get why—”

Cayden smiled and put a hand on Earl’s shoulder. “If all I wanted was the car, you’d be right thinking I was crazy.”

Earl let that sink in. “What do you mean, if all you wanted was the car?”

“I want your help with something. You’re in a unique position to be able to assist the person I represent. I’ll give you twenty-five grand now for the car, but if you come through for us, we’d be willing to top that up with another five.”

“Come through for you? Who the fuck are you?”

Cayden smiled. “Your guardian angel.”

Twenty-Six

Jack

I had time, on the way back to being dropped off at my place, to tell Gwen more of the story. Or at least those parts I knew. To this day, there was a lot I did not know about my father’s placement in the witness protection program. And even the stuff I thought I had right could be wrong.

“My mom and dad had a lot of fights over it,” I said, still in the van’s third row, Gwen in the middle, turned sideways, her right arm hanging over the back of the seat. “As a kid, you only picked up bits and pieces, you never quite got the full picture. I mean, I was nine. Not old enough to know the ways of the world, but old enough to be worried sick by them.”

“Sure,” Gwen said. “So your dad was Michael Donohue—undoubtedly known by another name for the last two and a half decades—and your mother’s name is?”

“Was. Rose.”

“Okay. So, Michael and Rose were arguing. About what?”

“The thing is, they’d had problems for a while. Although it’s hard, as a kid, getting a sense of what it was. They were less attentive to each other, less affectionate. Dad slept on the couch a lot of nights. Sometimes he wouldn’t come home at night and my mom had no idea why and she’d try hard not to act worried about it. This was before the shit hit the fan. Before the police showed up one day and arrested my father.”

“Go on.”

“It was really early. We were all asleep. It was, like, five o’clock. And there’s this bang on the door and they came right in. I think it was FBI guys. I remember the letters on the back of their jackets. Anyway, there’s, like, a team of them, and they came into the house like storm troopers. I was a big Star Wars nut back then, had all the action figures, and that was what they reminded me of. Imperial storm troopers, except they weren’t all dressed in white. So they come in, march up the stairs, and go straight for my parents’ bedroom. Well, all the bedrooms, because they wouldn’t have known which one was theirs. Because they came into my room, flicked on the lights, and there’s this guy with a gun and I start screaming and I can hear my mom screaming, too, and my dad yelling at them. And I get out of bed, but the guy tells me to stay in the room, but I look out in the hallway and there’s my mom in her nightgown and my dad in his boxers being ushered out of the bedroom and taken downstairs, and it’s just a huge fucking commotion, you know?”

“Must have been horrible for you,” Gwen said. “Traumatizing.”

“You think?” I said. “All the yelling and screaming seems to go on forever. I hear someone reading my dad his rights and then they allow him to come back upstairs and get dressed, my mom swearing at them the whole time that they have no business being there, that she’s going to sue their asses off, all that shit. My dad gets dressed, and to this day I can remember what he wore. He put on his best suit, a dark navy one, with a crisp white shirt and a blue tie with these little diamonds on it, and the capper was, a folded handkerchief peeking out of his jacket pocket, you know? Like, if they were going to haul him out of the house, he was going out looking like a man. Looking professional.”

Gwen managed a wry smile. I wondered, in her career, how many times she might have been part of such a scene. Maybe not in her current role, but I had no idea what she’d done before joining the witness protection service. I could picture her barging into houses before sunup, upending people’s lives, throwing her weight around.

“The last thing my dad does before they take him out is he shouts at Mom: ‘Call Abner!’ I thought, Who the hell’s that, but learned quickly, because that was the beginning of a lot of calls with Abner Bronklin, who was my dad’s lawyer, at least at the beginning. Anyway, even after they took my dad away, they weren’t done. They went through the entire house, looking for things. Documents, evidence, whatever they could find. This was around the time people were all getting home computers. Those big monitors and those huge towers with all the guts inside, the slots you put discs into. We had a couple of those, and they took them away. They even searched my room, figuring it would be the perfect place to hide something. I mean, who’d hide stuff in their kid’s room, you know?”

“Did they find anything in there?”

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