Page 29 of The Lie Maker

“Hey,” he said as I handed him the envelope.

“Hope she likes it,” I said.

That prompted a grin. “She’s hard to please. Whatever she says, don’t take it personally. It’s just her style. She wouldn’t be where she is now if she was happy with work that was ‘good enough.’”

“Noted,” I said.

He opened the van door, tossed the envelope onto the seat next to him, gave me a little salute, and took off.

Gwen called four hours later.

“I have notes. You’ll have them back shortly.”

My new friend didn’t even get out of the van when he returned. He powered down the passenger-door window, leaned over and handed the manila envelope to me without comment, put the window back up, and was gone.

I glanced at the front of the envelope and saw that Gwen’s notes started there. She’d crossed out “For Your Eyes Only” and scribbled, “Don’t be cute.”

Once upstairs, I took a beer from the fridge, twisted off the cap, and took a seat on my Ikea couch. I slid my pages out of the envelope and had a look at them. She’d taken a red pen to them, circling words, scribbling notations in the margins. Correcting typos, for Christ’s sake. On the last page, where my own text only went down to the halfway point, were the real notes.

Among them:

— Why Niagara Falls? Would Chicago be better? Or maybe someplace out west, like Wyoming, that fewer people would be familiar with?

— I don’t see our guy having a border guard father. He has no regard for the law, so a parent in any kind of enforcement makes no sense. He’s good with tools. Maybe he works at a hardware store.

— You’ve got TV shows. What about movies? Our witness likes movies.

— Our guy needs a part-time job when he was in his teens. Not a fast food place. He’s kind of a foodie. Play on that.

How the hell was I supposed to know he was a foodie or a movie fan when Gwen had given me virtually no information on him?

Sure, I had a nice profile here, but he was fictional in every possible way. Maybe none of this worked. I had him meeting the love of his life in a chemistry class, but what if that was the one subject he never took? He didn’t know cadmium from kryptonite. How would he bluff his way through that if his new identity happened to bring him into contact with a science professor from the local university? Somewhere I’d come up with horseback riding as a hobby, but what if he had a bad back and couldn’t do that?

I was a tailor making a suit for a man I hadn’t measured.

The entire process was flawed.

I picked up the hotline to Gwen.

“This isn’t working,” I said when she picked up.

“What’s the problem?”

“I need more information about the witness. About who he really is. What makes him tick. I’m flying blind. Writing blind.” I took a breath. “I want a meeting.”

“A meeting.”

“With your witness. Before you ship him off to wherever he’s going, I’d like to spend some time with him. Even an hour. To get a sense of who he is. Then I can come up with background stories that suit him.”

“There are security issues. Look, there are people out there. Bad people who would very much like to find him. Putting you two together could put him, and you, at risk.”

“I figure you’re good at that sort of thing. Security. It’s right in the name of your agency.”

“I’ll get back to you,” she said.

“When?”

“I’ll get back to you when I get back to you.”