Page 63 of The Lie Maker

“What do you want?” There was an edge to his voice, and he struggled to rein it in.

She hesitated. “I wondered if you wanted a cup of coffee.”

He thought about that for a moment. “That would be lovely,” he said, leaning in to give her a light kiss on the forehead. “What would I do without you?”

As she headed for the kitchen, he wondered how much she had heard.

Thirty-Four

May1997

Michael thought it would take him a long time to get over what he’d done. He didn’t know whether to be pleased, or distressed, that it didn’t.

Sure, he was on edge on the way back from Chicago. If he’d planned, from the outset, to kill Gartner, and hadn’t floated that idea of helping him get his twins into an Ivy League college, he would have had everything worked out, been far more methodical. It wouldn’t have gone down the way it had, in a mad panic trying to save his own life when that dumb bastard came at him with the tire iron.

When things happened spur of the moment, there were too many ways for it to go south. Too many variables. Too many things you couldn’t control.

At least Gartner had stopped his treasured Charger in an area of disused buildings. While it was possible there’d been someone lurking somewhere who’d seen what happened, Michael did not think so. He put up all the windows in the Charger because they were tinted, reducing the likelihood that an individual or a surveillance camera might see him behind the wheel. He wiped down the car and abandoned it in an alley a few blocks away from where he had left his rental. Drove back to Indianapolis, flew home.

He got lucky.

And not for the first time.

On the flight home he thought back to when he was sixteen, the guys he used to run with, the shit they got into. Petty thefts, small-time drug dealing, turf wars, always trying to prove you were tougher than the other guy. Fights over nothing that spiraled out of control.

A kid could get killed. And Michael was the one who’d killed him. He and his buddies had slipped into the back of a liquor store, hauled out into the alley half a dozen cases of hooch. Too much to carry by hand. In the time it took to bring the car around, some other guys, part of a gang from a few blocks over, were running off with their haul.

Had to teach them a lesson.

Within a week, Michael and his friends met up with them one dark night out back of a Wendy’s. Someone handed Michael a gun. What happened after that remained, even to this day, a blur in Michael’s mind. Lots of shouting, a tussle. Michael felt someone jump him from behind. The gun fired. A kid from the other gang went down. Blood all over his head. Everybody ran.

Michael at least had the presence of mind to throw the gun into the Charles.

He was scared shitless and figured he’d be arrested. Every day that went by he imagined the police were getting closer to solving the murder and coming to get him, but it never happened.

In the subsequent months, during which Michael’s own father sussed out what his son had done and gave up trying to set him straight, Galen Frohm took an interest. Michael was smart enough to know he needed to find another path, get off the street, make something of himself, and allowed himself to be taken into Frohm’s care. The man could be his ticket out of an early prison sentence, or worse.

All these years later, Michael couldn’t help but wonder what Frohm had known from the outset. His father must have told Frohm what he’d done. Had Frohm interceded on his behalf somehow? Paid off some detective to look the other way? And did he see in Michael someone he could mold to do his dirty work in the future?

Once he was back in Boston, Michael went to see his boss.

“It’s done,” he said.

Frohm smiled. “Good.”

“I wasn’t going to do it. I thought I could persuade him. But I couldn’t make that work.”

Frohm frowned. “Never second-guess me, Michael. Next time you’ll know better.”

Next time.

“It was always the plan, wasn’t it?” Michael asked. “Here I thought you were taking me in, rescuing me, helping me get on a straight path. It wasn’t that at all, was it? You brought me into the fold because you knew I had it in me. But you needed time to develop it, nurture it, build a sense of loyalty. Because you knew there would be times when you needed someone to do what I just did.”

Frohm smiled. “If I am anything, Michael, I am a good judge of character.”

It was hard to know whether to take that as a compliment or an insult, but Michael knew it to be the truth. Frohm did know who he was, and the sooner Michael accepted it, the easier it would be to move on.

Michael had come to terms with the kind of man he was. An emboldened one. A man to whom the conventional rules did not apply. He’d learned it was possible to kill a man in America and get away with it. Not just once, but now twice. Michael began to absorb Galen Frohm’s worldview as if by osmosis, to believe in his own entitlement. There were givers, and there were takers. You had to choose which you wanted to be.

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