Page 35 of To Die For

“And you never askedherwhere the money really came from?”

Shore said, “Tried to, once. But, man, she ain’t want to go there, so’s I dropped it. Alice was real nice, but you ain’t want to get on her bad side. No way, no sir.”

Rose added, “She pretty much did what Dwayne wanted, but that don’t mean she agreed with everythin’ Dwayne wanted neither.”

“Okay, thanks for the info.” Devine gave them his phone number. “If someone shows up and gives you trouble or you think of anything else helpful, or just need to get in touch for anything, call me, okay?”

The men said they would, thanked him profusely, and Devine drove away thinking:There but for the grace of God…

CHAPTER

14

PRU JACKSON SLOWLY MADE THEsign of the cross, just in case anyone was watching. She was actually surprised her hand had so instinctively followed the correct motions, because Jackson and God had not been on speaking or praying terms for a long time now. She picked up the dying woman’s hand and looked down into a face that used to resemble her own.

Children visited their dying mothers in hospice all the time, she told herself. However, it didn’t make it any easier to navigate, knowing that she had plenty of company in her personal sorrow.

There had been a definite risk in Jackson’s coming here to say goodbye, but this woman was worth the risk. She had also come prepared, just in case they might still be looking for her, though they had no reason to believe she was still alive. Yet they were the sort who never stopped looking.

But I’ll never stop looking for them, either.

Jackson was dressed as a woman around her mother’s age. Every line, every wrinkle, every eye pouch was exquisitely done. Jackson’s feigned slow-motion manner and wobbly gait were also spot-on for an unhealthy older woman.

The name she’d written down in the visitor’s log was Karen Crawford, who had been a neighbor of her mother’s from long ago, until Crawford had retired to Florida to live in a modest Caribbean blue-painted cottage a half-mile walk from the beach. Crawford had no idea that Molly Jackson’s spitfire of a daughter had assumed her identity to visit her dying mother.

Jackson had reinvented herself in a form that was not sodifferent than the role she had occupied on behalf of the United States government—the shining beacon on the hill until it came time to kill, destroy, disrupt, displace, and generally screw over others who stood in the way of the Stars and Stripes. She had been very good at organizing and then executing such operations, and had been awarded plaques and promotions for her Herculean efforts on behalf of a grateful country. And then her world had come tumbling down, and years of her life had been spent in a hellish nightmare that not even Orwell could have come within five hundred miles of in his deepest, darkest ruminations.

Her father, now dead, had always been a nonentity in her life, fleeing the responsibility of parenting when Jackson was only six months old, after impregnating her fortyish mother against her wishes. But her mother had loved her only child and raised her to be a strong, independent, resilient, and tenacious person. And an adult Jackson had realized that her skill set and other personal qualities could help her become a once-in-a-generation superstar in the field of espionage.

And when she had risen to the zenith of her profession, at a relatively young age, she was sacrificed for another prize that was deemed more vital to the national interest. And at that point, when the decision had been made, nothing, not her past work, or skills, or connections, could save her. Basic human decency might have carried the day in her favor, but apparently no one she worked with had any.

Once that symbolic door closed behind her, she had survived in brutal captivity for two long years that felt like fifty, where the resolute, painful sameness of every day was eclipsed only by moments of terror and agony that she never managed to see coming. Jackson had endured things she had never meted out on those whom she had targeted, because Jackson possessed hard moral stops.

Her captors had no such issues.

It had taken another two years after her escape simply to rebuild her body. She had still not yet fully recalibrated her mind past the ordeal, but she no longer had any hard moral stops.

Her full given name was Prudence, a term with a definite understanding. She considered herself that. But also so much more.

She bent down and kissed her mother goodbye.

Using a walker, she slowly made her way down the hall with clumsy motions of her seemingly diminished arms and legs.

There was a man in a suit hovering near the front desk when she came into the lobby. Jackson looked at him without seeming to. He stood out so much, he might as well have been flashing his government badge to everyone passing by.

So they know or more likely suspect I’m still alive?

She worked her way up to the front desk, adjusted her glasses, and smiled at the suit. She purposefully fumbled with the pen, which government man politely picked up and handed to her. She wrote her name in an old lady scrawl of cursive.

“Thank you, young man,” she said in an elderly person’s croak and then she headed out after surreptitiously palming the pen. Her prints were on a restricted database.

She had had the cab wait for her, and the driver loaded her walker into the trunk after helping her into the rear seat.

The cab drove off as she glanced in the side mirror. The watcher in the government suit had not even bothered to come to the doorway to see her off. Standards had surely fallen since her time there.

But there was another explanation.

They suspect it’s me and are playing dumb. And they have a tail on me right now.

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