Last Chance to Die Noah Boyd (best novels to read txt) 📖

I’d learn. He then had me go down and mix the mortar, bring it up, and watch him rebuild it.”

“That’s awful. But at least you learned how to do it, right?”

Vail laughed with a tinge of anger, not at her but at what he was about to recall. “This wasn’t some apprenticeship hazing or poor parenting technique, this was him getting even.”

“Even for what?”

“Who knows? For having to raise me by himself. I don’t know. It seemed as if his whole life was about getting even with everyone. That’s who he was.”

“That happened a long time ago.”

Vail laughed again, and this time it had an edge to it that told her she was being naïve. “If that had happened once, it would probably be the kind of story you’d laugh at during a Thanksgiving meal, but every time I finished something after that, he would send me to clean up while he stayed behind. I never knew until the next morning whether he’d torn it down or not. Sometimes I wouldn’t sleep, wondering if I had pleased my father, which is very important to a fourteen-year-old, especially if there was no one else around. He did it the rest of the summer. If we stopped somewhere for lunch and he started drinking whiskey, I didn’t have to wonder—tearing it down would be automatic.”

Kate understood now why Vail’s approach to work was so intense, why it crowded out everything else. She thought about when she’d recruited him on that Chicago rooftop to help with the Pentad case six months earlier. After she made her appeal, he worked almost in a rage. She thought it was because of what she’d said, but now she wondered if it wasn’t because she was invading his privacy, at a time when he held at bay the demons his father had left behind. A feat that became impossible when someone else might be able to detect the tiniest flaw. It had to be why he never stopped working on a case, even after it was solved. “Have you ever thought about confronting him and showing him what you’ve accomplished?”

“Accomplished? I’m a bricklayer.”

“Actually, you choose to be a bricklayer. Maybe you continue to do it because it’s the only way to show your father how wrong he was. You need to go see him and tell him what you’ve done, your education, your work with the FBI.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I just can’t.”

“Why not?”

“All right, I won’t.”

“That’s your father. You can’t put the rest of your life on hold because of one bad summer.”

“You’re right, it was only one summer, because by the time I turned fifteen, I could lay brick as well as he could. And, more important, I was much faster, which translated into more money. Not that I ever saw any of it. But when I was sixteen, he found a new way to ‘parent.’ That entire summer we worked building a hospital, a huge job. There were other contractors on the site—roofers, Sheetrockers, carpenters, everything. I was always big for my age, so he started lining up fights for me. On Fridays he would have me fight grown men for their paychecks. The first time I lost. Three of my ribs were broken. But he was very reassuring. He told me it was all right, because he’d get better odds the next time. Maybe that’s why I’ve never looked forward to paydays. When I turned seventeen, I refused to do it anymore. The next year was—to put it mildly—contentious.”

“When’s the last time you saw him?”

“My eighteenth birthday. I got up in the morning and packed. He was eating breakfast. I stopped and looked at him. I suppose I wanted him to have some remorse, maybe even try to stop me, but I think he actually looked relieved.”

She pulled on Vail’s arm to get him to start walking. He took one last look at the pieces in the window. After a few blocks of silence, she said, “Am I really the only one who’s seen your sculptures?”

“Even though I told you I didn’t want you to look at them, yes.”

“Then I’m glad I didn’t follow orders. That one of me is—”

“I destroyed it.”

“What?”

“A few nights after you left, I sat in front of it, drinking. Finally I got drunk enough to see the truth, so I broke it down.”

“What truth? It looked exactly like me.”

He stopped and faced her, putting his palm on her cheek. “One of the things I like best about you is that you really don’t understand your own beauty. I understand it better than you do, and I don’t understand it at all. I had to do that bust of you, to try to understand exactly what it is about you that haunts me. When I destroyed it, I destroyed my obsession with perfection. You’re right, me being a bricklayer is about not being judged. But destroying that bust of you was the healthiest thing I’ve ever done.”

Tears started down Kate’s face. She buried herself against his chest. “Who are you?”

“Haven’t you been listening? For better or worse, I’m a bricklayer.” Vail took out a handkerchief and handed it to her. “If it’s any consolation, since then—for the first time ever—I’ve kept the things I’ve made, all of them. I think I’m actually starting to like what I make.”

Kate gave him his handkerchief back and took his arm again. “And will I get to see them?”

“You’ll have to come to Chicago.”

“Uh-oh.”

“That’s right, Katie, there is an admission price.”

They started walking again. “I’m hungry.”

“I hope you’re speaking biblically.”

“I’m talking seafood, Vail, and as much of it as you can afford.”

“Well, aren’t you the demanding little fugitive?”

“If I were, I wouldn’t be dating a bricklayer pretending to be an FBI agent pretending to be a sculptor.”

“If I remember my time in the Bureau correctly, everybody was pretending to be an agent.”

“That’s the problem, no one pretends anymore.”

Kate put the key in the lock and turned around to face him, flattening her back against the