Chapter 9: What Deals Cost
The next seventy-two hours moved like a machine.
I watched most of it from the edges.
Dante's people came and went.
Lawyers arrived — real ones, not Ferris.
Two men I didn't recognize spent an afternoon in the office with Dante and left with a briefcase.
A woman named Agent Hale, federal credentials, sat across from Dante for three hours on the second day and left without the briefcase but with a folder that had not been there when she arrived.
I stayed in the compound.
Dante had asked me to, and I had agreed, partly because he was right that it wasn't safe yet, and partly because I had run out of reasons to pretend I wasn't deeply embedded in something I couldn't walk away from cleanly.
Rosa brought me books.
Actual paper books, from a shelf somewhere in the house.
She didn't ask what I liked.
She brought a thriller, a memoir about a woman who sailed around the world alone, and a battered copy of a novel I'd read in college and loved.
I didn't ask how she knew.
I just read.
On the third morning, Dante knocked on the door of the room I'd been given.
"May I come in?"
It was the first time he'd asked.
"Yes," I said.
He sat in the chair by the window.
I sat on the edge of the bed.
Outside, the men near the tree line were still there, but there were fewer of them now.
Two instead of four.
"Vanessa signed the cooperation agreement last night," he said.
"What does that mean for her?"
"It means she provides full testimony against Caruso.
Names, dates, communications, the mechanic, the intermediary chain.
Everything." He paused.
"In exchange, the charges against her are reduced significantly."
"She walks away?"
"She doesn't walk away.
She faces consequences.
Reduced ones." He looked at the window.
"I didn't design the agreement to protect her.
I designed it to make sure Caruso has nowhere left to stand."
"Is that enough for you?"
He was quiet for a moment.
"It has to be."
I looked at him.
At the bandage on his temple, smaller now, the edges of a bruise yellowing around it.
"How are you?" I asked.
Not about the case.
Just that.
He seemed slightly surprised by the question.
"I'm functional."
"That's not what I asked."
He looked at me.
Then, slowly: "My wife tried to have me kjlled.
My brother may or may not have been involved in the early planning.
A lawyer I trusted for three years was working against me." He paused.
"My mechanic is in federal custody.
My Thursday nights are apparently not as private as I believed." He stopped.
"So.
Not well.
But functional."
"I'm sorry," I said.
"About the marriage.
Whatever it was or wasn't — that's still a betrayal."
He didn't answer immediately.
"She told me, during the conversation at dinner," he said finally, "that she had never wanted any of this.
The life.
The arrangement.
That Caruso had offered her a way out and she had taken it." He turned the thought over.
"I don't know if that's true or if it was something she said because she thought it would help her case."
"Does it matter?"
"It matters in the sense that I'd like to understand it." He looked at his hands.
"I don't need her to be a monster.
I just need to understand what actually happened."
"Maybe you won't ever fully understand it," I said.
"Maybe that has to be enough."
He looked at me for a long moment.
"You're very direct," he said.
"I'm a waitress.
We don't have time not to be."
He almost smiled.
More than before.
Almost there.
"Caruso's arraignment is tomorrow," he said, standing.
"After that, the immediate threat is resolved.
You'll be able to go home."
"Okay."
He moved toward the door.
Stopped.
"Cara." He said my name the same way he had in the car, the first night.
Like he'd known it longer than he had.
"I owe you something I don't know how to repay."
"You don't owe me anything."
"I owe you my life."
"Then live it better than Vanessa was planning to," I said.
He stood in the doorway for a moment.
Then he nodded once, and left.
I looked out the window at the two remaining men by the tree line.
Then I picked up the novel Rosa had brought me and found my page.
May you like
I had forty pages left.
I was going to finish it before I went home.
