Page 50

Forty

Seamus remains inside Room B, which now suddenly contains two bodies. Hovering by the door to the bathroom, he watches Anna start off down the car. He chases after her, catching up in three long strides and tugging her to a halt.

“Where are you going?”

“To see Sal and Lapsford,” Anna says. “Because one of them is the killer.”

Seamus turns Anna around to face him. “Let’s just think about this for a second.”

“We don’t have that much time. Look who’s been targeted so far. Edith. Herb. Judd himself. He was working with someone to take the others out. I suspect he then planned to kill them last. But whoever it is got to him first.”

“Then explain what happened to Agent Davis,” Seamus says. “You said Judd just tried to kill him in the galley.”

Anna edges down the corridor, forcing Seamus to follow along. “That’s what he thought, but it might not have been Judd. And since you and Dante were back here, that leaves only two people. Sal and Lapsford.”

Even though Reggie Davis has nothing to do with what happened twelve years ago, Seamus understands why someone would target him. He’s with the FBI. Of course they’d go after the person who plans to arrest them the moment they reach Chicago.

“Which one do you think did it?” Seamus says.

“Lapsford.”

That’s Seamus’s guess, too. Throughout the whole journey, he’s been the most vocal about getting off the train.

He even faked having a heart attack to do it.

Then there’s the fact that Lapsford was the only one seemingly uninterested in searching for Judd.

While Seamus chalked it up to a selfish act from an equally selfish man, maybe the real reason Lapsford wasn’t concerned is that he already knew Judd was dead.

“Let’s say you’re right,” Seamus says. “What’s your plan? If he knows you’re on to him, he might do the same thing he did to Reggie.”

“I’ll pretend to check in on them. Ask a few questions, see if I can trip him up.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No,” Anna says. “That’ll make him suspicious. Let me do it alone. I’ll yell if I need you.”

“What if you can’t?”

Anna pats the pocket of the jacket she’s wearing. Reggie’s jacket, Seamus realizes. “I assume you also have his gun.”

“Of course,” she says.

Seamus says no more. He’s fully aware that Anna knows how to use one. He taught her himself.

“Be careful,” he says as she sets off for the preceding car. When she’s gone, he turns to Dante, still hovering on the edges of the room. “Roll up your sleeves. It’s time to move Judd’s corpse back to his room. Again.”

The second time proves easier than the first, if only because there’s less distance to travel.

Instead of several cars, they only need to carry him to the next room.

As they do, Seamus thinks about the first time they hauled Judd’s body to his room, wondering how he missed all the signs that he was still alive.

Surely he should have noticed Judd breathing, felt a pulse, or seen some form of movement.

But Judd dead feels as lifeless and heavy as he did when he was merely playing dead.

Seamus’s hands start to tremble as they lower the body onto the bed in Room C. The tremor is so bad that he’s forced to let go early, making the corpse land with an ungainly flop.

“Everything okay?” Dante says.

Seamus grabs the sheet and covers the body. “Yeah. Just a hand cramp.”

But it’s more than that. To keep Dante from seeing his shaking hands, he shoves them into his pockets and leaves the room. His destination is the observation car, where he can have a moment alone. After the past hour, he needs it.

Outside, the sky has lightened to a muddy gray.

Not yet night, not yet morning, but still storming.

Surrounded by the observation car’s windows, Seamus feels like he’s trapped inside a snow globe.

An unappealing thought that nonetheless summons a long-forgotten memory of being lost in a blizzard on his way home from school.

He was six or so when it happened. The whiteout conditions made everything unrecognizable, turning familiar streets into strangers.

One wrong turn led to another and soon he was stumbling through knee-high snow with no idea where he was.

The whole time he only got colder and more panicked while the snow fell harder and faster.

Just when he was about to give up and let the storm take him, a figure appeared through the wintry haze.

His brother, Sean.

Seamus, hungry, shivering, and borderline hypothermic, ran to him. “I thought I was going to be lost forever!” he cried.

“You’ll never be lost as long as I’m around,” Sean said.

It wasn’t a lie. When his brother was alive, Seamus always knew he’d be found. But now Sean’s gone and Seamus feels forever lost.

He yanks his hands from his pockets. The tremor’s gotten worse.

Seamus retrieves the pillbox, which he’s carried with him all night.

Now it shakes in his hand so much that the remaining five pills inside rattle together.

Seamus lifts the lid and stares at them.

He didn’t plan on using another one. Not this soon.

But his hands, moving as if they have minds of their own, insist on it.

As Seamus plucks a single pill from the box, he hears Anna calling his name. Faint and far away at first, it grows louder with each passing second. Seamus drops the pill back into the box, which is returned to his pocket. Then he’s out of the observation car and quickly moving through the train.

He meets Anna at the front of Car 13. She’s in a full-fledged panic, grabbing his arm and dragging him forward. “It’s Lapsford,” she says. “He’s having a heart attack.”

Seamus hesitates. “For real this time?”

“I think so.”

Anna keeps tugging, eventually getting him into the previous car.

Dante is already there, helping Sal prop Lapsford up as they guide him back to his room.

Despite the frenzy, Seamus assumes Lapsford is again faking illness.

One last desperate attempt to stop the train now that Chicago is less than three hours away.

Seamus follows them into the room. “Get him onto the bed.”

This proves more difficult than expected.

The others crowd around Lapsford, all jostling limbs and bumping elbows.

It doesn’t help that Lapsford is an unruly patient, writhing when he should be lying still, fighting them off instead of letting them help.

After heaving him onto the bed, they face their next big task—figuring out what to do next.

Lapsford opens and closes his mouth like a fish on dry land, gasping for air. The effort turns his face beet red, making Seamus fear he has only minutes, if not seconds, before he passes out.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” he demands.

Lapsford clutches his chest. “My heart.”

With Anna, Sal, and Dante huddled around him, Seamus takes Lapsford’s wrist and checks his pulse. It taps out like Morse code, irregular and unintelligible. Anna was right. This is real.

“What do we do?” she says, panicked.

Seamus pulls the pillbox from his jacket and retrieves one of the chalky white tablets. He holds it out to Anna with a trembling hand. “Give him this.”

Anna eyes the pill with suspicion.

“It’s a muscle relaxant,” Seamus says, reading her mind. “It might slow his heartbeat enough to keep him alive until we reach Chicago.”

When Anna takes the pill, Seamus notices the way Lapsford eyes its transfer from his fingers to hers. He licks his lips and swallows, as if rehearsing how to get the pill down his throat as fast as possible.

Lapsford, Seamus understands, wants it.

Anna knows it, too, and dangles the pill over Lapsford’s mouth, which yawns open.

“Can you talk?” she says.

Lapsford’s voice is a desperate rasp. “Yes.”

“Then tell me why you did it. Was it just for the money?”

Lapsford stares at the pill, eyes wide and begging. Anna pulls it farther away from his mouth.

“Answer me,” she says. “Did you destroy my family just for the money?”

Seamus looks across the bed to her, startled. “Jesus, Anna. Just give it to him.”

“Not before he answers,” she says.

“Yes,” Lapsford hisses.

Anna keeps the pill away from his mouth, silently taunting him with it. “Do you ever think about my family? Do you think about what you did to them?”

Lapsford, no longer able to speak, gives the smallest of nods.

“Anna,” Seamus says. “The man is dying. Give him the pill.”

“One more minute.”

“He doesn’t have that long!”

To Seamus, Lapsford seems to be fading fast. His breathing has shallowed to nothingness, and his eyes go dim. The last flicker of a candle before it goes out.

“What about those soldiers who died?” Anna quickly says. “Men like Seamus’s brother. Do you think of them?”

This time, Seamus waits for an answer. He watches, breathless himself, as Lapsford nods almost imperceptibly.

The faint motion releases an anger that Seamus tries hard to keep hidden.

Lapsford helped plan the murder of his brother.

And Sal, standing in a corner of the room wringing her hands, then helped to cover it up.

In that moment, Seamus would kill them both if he knew he could get away with it.

Since he can’t, Anna’s plan is the next best option.

Making them suffer.

For the rest of their days.

But Lapsford’s suffering might be at an end. He can no longer seem to move his head. His breath, if it exists at all, is undetectable. The only reason Seamus knows he remains alive is that his pupils continue to zero in on the pill still pinched between Anna’s fingers.

“I bet you try hard not to think about them,” she tells Lapsford.

“But they force their way into your mind. All those boys you decided to sacrifice. I think they haunt your nightmares. Just like you’re haunted by the fear that everyone is going to find out what horrible things you’ve done.

And, trust me, everyone will find out. Even if you die a minute from now, I’ll make sure they know. ”

It might be less than a minute, Seamus thinks.

Sensing there’s no time left, he reaches out and snatches the pill from Anna’s fingers.

He then shoves it into Lapsford’s gaping mouth, his fingers sliding over his tongue as it’s pushed to the back of his throat.

There’s a glass of water by the bed, which Seamus brings to Lapsford’s lips and tips back.

A violent, choking cough rattles through Lapsford.

For a moment, Seamus thinks it’s too late and that the man is in the throes of death.

He braces himself for that sad, final breath.

But soon the coughing and rattling cease.

They’re followed by a disquieting pause in which Seamus is visited by warring emotions.

He wants Lapsford to live and he wants him to die and he hates himself for feeling both of those things.

Lapsford begins to breathe again, the sound ending the fraught silence.

When Lapsford looks at Seamus, he sees a light in the other man’s eyes that hadn’t been present mere seconds before.

Seamus checks Lapsford’s pulse again, feeling it greatly calmed.

The pill seems to be working. Whether that’s a good or bad thing remains unclear.

Especially once Lapsford finds his voice again.

“You should have let me die,” he murmurs.