Page 137 of The Chain

“Come on, spill.”

Now it’s Ginger’s turn to sigh. “You know what your problem is, Olly? You’re completely bloodless. You’re like Spock or something. You should probably see someone about that. It’s not normal.”

“This is serious, Ginger. This is crash-bag, fake-IDs, flee-the-country stuff.”

“How much do we have in Switzerland?”

“Enough.” Olly goes to the gun cabinet, unlocks it, and opens it. “I always thought that if we were going to go down, it would be because of you tangling emotions with business.”

She smiles. “Christ, Olly, that’s how everybody goes down in the end. Didn’t you know that? You can’t fight biology.”

“You can try,” he says.

68

Back in the master bedroom, Marty is looking through the plate-glass window at the oak-tree stump between the house and the swampy, scrubby woods beyond. Snow is falling in big powdery flakes on the river and the living trees and the dead oak. It’s a frickin’ Robert Frost poem.

Lovely down here. Ginger undersold it. This is no crazy old cabin in the middle of a swamp. This is some spread. A beautiful house. Art on the walls. Expensive shit. The old man, Daniel, must have a chunk of change. And as advertised, he’s a character.

The kids are loving it and Ginger is loving showing it off. She’s a good one, he thinks. Rachel was a mistake. They were both so young. He’d told everybody that he’d fallen in love with Rachel reading her brilliant book reviews in theCrimson,but that was crap. It was a physical thing. They really didn’t have much in common.

When you got past thirty, you had better judgment. Tammy was merely a fling, but Ginger’s different. Special. With her he could settle down. Live in the city. Have a couple more—

“I was just thinking about you,” he says as Ginger comes back into the room holding her handbag.

A strand of red hair is curling down between her breasts.

He has a sudden urge to throw her on the bed and ravish her.

“Ginger, do these doors lock? I know there’s kids wandering around, so I—” he begins, but something in his peripheral vision catches his eye.

He turns to look at it.

“What is that?” he says to Ginger.

“What?”

“Is that someone coming toward the house from behind that tree?”

“Where?”

“I thought I saw someone coming through the snow. Yeah, look…oh my God! You’re not going to believe this, but, um, I think that’s my ex-wife,” Marty says.

Ginger takes the Smith and Wesson .38 out of her handbag and points it at his head.

“I believe you,” she says.

69

Rachel puts the shotgun against her shoulder and aims it at the guard.

“Hold it right there,” she says.

The guard spins to face her. “Whoa! Take it easy, lady. I don’t think you know what you’re doing with that thing,” he says.

“You’ll be thinking something else when I blow you in half with it,” Rachel replies.

Pete picks up his .45. “Drop the shotgun, pal,” Pete says.