Read Online Tell No Lies by Gregg Hurwitz - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Gregg Hurwitz
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trying to get his head to change lanes. But no, it was the same film reel of images. A red front door, already cracked. Crimson stalactites hanging from the lower lids of Marisol’s eyes. A bulky figure turning around in the foyer, that featureless mask finding Daniel where he hid. And the gloved hand lifting the digital camera, snapping a parting shot.
An image of Daniel preserved in that camera. Right now. Somewhere in the city stretched out before him.
Again he found his gaze arrested by the wraithlike statues across the street. Faceless. Nothing more than shadowed recesses beneath the cowls. A drift in the clouds cast the carved figures in a different light, and again he was yanked back to Marisol Vargas’s dining room, frozen in the darkness, trying to vanish into the wall as the killer’s broad shoulders pivoted, bringing that ghastly smooth face into view.
Phantom sounds replayed in Daniel’s head. The blade across Marisol’s throat. Blood pattering on the kitchen tile.
He should’ve gone through that front door quicker. He shouldn’t have paused outside the kitchen before rushing the killer. One second. One second earlier might’ve saved her life.
A bead of sweat tickled his cheek. He averted his eyes to the Embarcadero and beyond, where the Bay Bridge forged across to Oakland, but still he could see the white smudges in his peripheral vision, the goddesses beckoning like sirens.
The chirpy voice phased back in. “… and you’re just a hop, skip, and a jump to Chinatown.”
“Right,” he said. “I used to work right there.” He pointed past the reddish gleam of the Bank of America building to the penthouse office where he and the team used to shuffle Evelyn’s assets around on various monitors. “Different building, same view.”
He remembered the grind of that old life, the days blurring together as he made money make money, something at which he was genetically proficient. His lunch breaks he used to take in the very courtyard they were looking down on. Sipping coffee on a bench, dwarfed by the centerpiece, a two-hundred-ton sleek black granite sculpture titled Transcendence but cynically known the Financial District over as “Banker’s Heart.” And hemming in the whole affair, trim boxes of topiary, as constrained as he felt in his overpriced suit. A landscape of the mind if ever there was one.
And then meeting Cris, which he would like to say changed his life.
But it didn’t. Not really.
What had changed his life was thinking he was going to lose her.
That moment of reckoning, seared into his brain.
* * *
They sit, practically levitating above their chairs with anticipation. The words come in jagged and hard, separate pieces of some indigestible whole. When it’s over, they blink dumbly at the doctor.
“I didn’t even know you could get heart cancer,” Cris finally says.
The doctor looks unusually nervous for someone who does this for a living. Perhaps because Brasher money paid for half of the oncology wing when some great-great-uncle had prostate cancer and the UCSF Medical Center was still fledgling. Or more likely because this is serious fucking business. “A left-atrium myxoma,” he says across the desk. “We generally see it on the right side—”
“Well,” Cris says, “at least I’m special.”
Her heart, assailed. The thought leaves Daniel breathless.
He pushes words through the fog that has enveloped him. “So what next? Surgery? I mean…?”
“For surgery we remove the tumor along with five or so surrounding millimeters of the atrial septum. But the margins of Cristina’s tumor are poorly circumscribed, merged with the surrounding tissue. We don’t want to cut that much healthy tissue.”
Side by side in their chairs, Daniel and Cristina by some unspoken agreement do not make eye contact, but their hands have found each other and they clutch, hard, sweating.
“So?”
“We’ll get her on the heart-transplant list immediately and hope
An image of Daniel preserved in that camera. Right now. Somewhere in the city stretched out before him.
Again he found his gaze arrested by the wraithlike statues across the street. Faceless. Nothing more than shadowed recesses beneath the cowls. A drift in the clouds cast the carved figures in a different light, and again he was yanked back to Marisol Vargas’s dining room, frozen in the darkness, trying to vanish into the wall as the killer’s broad shoulders pivoted, bringing that ghastly smooth face into view.
Phantom sounds replayed in Daniel’s head. The blade across Marisol’s throat. Blood pattering on the kitchen tile.
He should’ve gone through that front door quicker. He shouldn’t have paused outside the kitchen before rushing the killer. One second. One second earlier might’ve saved her life.
A bead of sweat tickled his cheek. He averted his eyes to the Embarcadero and beyond, where the Bay Bridge forged across to Oakland, but still he could see the white smudges in his peripheral vision, the goddesses beckoning like sirens.
The chirpy voice phased back in. “… and you’re just a hop, skip, and a jump to Chinatown.”
“Right,” he said. “I used to work right there.” He pointed past the reddish gleam of the Bank of America building to the penthouse office where he and the team used to shuffle Evelyn’s assets around on various monitors. “Different building, same view.”
He remembered the grind of that old life, the days blurring together as he made money make money, something at which he was genetically proficient. His lunch breaks he used to take in the very courtyard they were looking down on. Sipping coffee on a bench, dwarfed by the centerpiece, a two-hundred-ton sleek black granite sculpture titled Transcendence but cynically known the Financial District over as “Banker’s Heart.” And hemming in the whole affair, trim boxes of topiary, as constrained as he felt in his overpriced suit. A landscape of the mind if ever there was one.
And then meeting Cris, which he would like to say changed his life.
But it didn’t. Not really.
What had changed his life was thinking he was going to lose her.
That moment of reckoning, seared into his brain.
* * *
They sit, practically levitating above their chairs with anticipation. The words come in jagged and hard, separate pieces of some indigestible whole. When it’s over, they blink dumbly at the doctor.
“I didn’t even know you could get heart cancer,” Cris finally says.
The doctor looks unusually nervous for someone who does this for a living. Perhaps because Brasher money paid for half of the oncology wing when some great-great-uncle had prostate cancer and the UCSF Medical Center was still fledgling. Or more likely because this is serious fucking business. “A left-atrium myxoma,” he says across the desk. “We generally see it on the right side—”
“Well,” Cris says, “at least I’m special.”
Her heart, assailed. The thought leaves Daniel breathless.
He pushes words through the fog that has enveloped him. “So what next? Surgery? I mean…?”
“For surgery we remove the tumor along with five or so surrounding millimeters of the atrial septum. But the margins of Cristina’s tumor are poorly circumscribed, merged with the surrounding tissue. We don’t want to cut that much healthy tissue.”
Side by side in their chairs, Daniel and Cristina by some unspoken agreement do not make eye contact, but their hands have found each other and they clutch, hard, sweating.
“So?”
“We’ll get her on the heart-transplant list immediately and hope
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