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“How’s Nan?” Michael asks. He always liked Ken’s wife.
“She’s doing as well as can be expected. The nurses and doctors at the new facility are first-rate. She even recognized me on my last visit.”
Nan’s dementia has gotten much worse since Michael left. He sometimes wonders if the three men are being punished for their roles in a pointless war: his own wife’s cancer, Mac’s wife’s stroke, and Nan’s dementia. He shakes it off.
“I’m glad the new facility is working out for her.”
“I wanted to thank you again for covering it. Our insurance company had her with a low-cost provider and it was terrible and—”
“You never have to thank me for anything, Ken. Ever.” He doesn’t need to say more. Beyond that godforsaken desert, Ken Walton saved Michael and his daughter two times: first helping them escape Philadelphia and start anew in Kansas, then four years later when O’Leary’s goons found them. No amount of money in the world could repay that.
“It’s so much money, I—”
“You’re forgetting, it’s not my money,” Michael says, if only to quell whatever guilt or pride is causing his old friend to raise the topic. In the years since he stole O’Leary’s $10 million, Michael made shrewd investments, doubling the amount. He’s thought of transferring the money back to O’Leary, buying his way out of this mess. But this is about more than money to Shane O’Leary.
Ken clears his throat. “Speaking of our friends from Philadelphia, I think it’s only a matter of time until they find you again. That guy who got away that night, the one with the missing fingers, called to warn me that someone’s found him.”
Michael’s mind loops back to that summer night. Him killing O’Leary’s two men. Ken and Mac running into the woods after the man who’d abducted Michael’s daughter, returning with him subdued. Michael shoving the man to his knees, putting the gun to his forehead. Mac and Ken intervening. Saying enough is enough. Michael remembers Ken crouching down to eye level to the man.
The guy was crying. “They made me,” the abductor said. “I owed O’Leary money. They’d already…” He’d held up his hands showing where they’d amputated his fingers. “They said they weren’t going to hurt her. They were just going to use her as leverage.” Leverage to get back the money Michael had stolen.
Ken had exhaled. “This is one of those moments in life, a crossroads of sorts, son.” He looked deep into the man’s eyes. “The question you have to ask is whether you’ll ever gamble again.”
The abductor mouthed the words, Never again, as he sobbed.
“And the next question is whether, if you had some money”—Ken had looked over at Michael, who’d reluctantly nodded—“you’d have somewhere you could start over as someone new? Because as far as O’Leary knows, you helped kill his men. You double-crossed him.”
Ken’s voice breaks through the memory. “You have to be ready in case they find you.”
“I’m so sorry I got you into this,” Michael says.
“Just like I never have to say thank you, you never have to say sorry. I wouldn’t have made it back home without you and Mac. And I’d do this all over again to protect you and your daughter.”
Michael feels that lump in his throat again. “You tell Mac that I’m ordering him to pull through this.”
Ken chuckles. “He’ll probably snap out of it just to remind you that you don’t outrank him and can’t order him to do squat.”
“I’m counting on it, my friend.”
47
LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS
Poppy sits on her bed, seven scraps of paper with deep fold creases spread out before her. The coded notes that Alison Lane sent Poppy’s brother back in high school. Dash also gave her the key: a book called The Little Prince. The handwritten notes are short—a series of numbers—so it shouldn’t take her long to decode them. Dash said they were locations where they would meet in secret. He said it had been innocent—they would talk about life, her loneliness, his fears about the future. They kissed once, he said, but that’s as far as it went.
Poppy eyes the first note. It has 30–15–7 written on it. Chantelle had told Poppy that the codes usually make the first number the page of the book, the second the line, the third the word. She flips to page 30, counts to line 15, then traces her finger to the seventh word. She writes the word in the Notes app on her phone and realizes that this could take a while. She should get some sleep. But she’s still wired from the hospital, from her brother’s confession. Was that what it was? A confession? More like an unburdening. Dash has carried this with him since he was seventeen. Poppy’s father has always kept secrets—things he didn’t talk about from his time in the war—but Dash’s secrets have pushed Poppy’s world off-kilter.
She continues decoding. The first note says: The park, 10. The park at ten o’clock. Poppy reaches for the next note, and continues. Her legs are cramping from sitting on the bed, so she lies down, the book in front of her. She examines the cover. A simple watercolor of a boy standing on a barren asteroid gliding through space. On her phone, she types in the title. There are several entries for The Little Prince: literary analyses, a New Yorker story, SparkNotes. Poppy remembers it being assigned reading at their high school, the only reason Dash owned the book, but she doesn’t remember much more about it.
She clicks on Wikipedia. She reads that it’s a novella written by a French author. The story is about a pilot who crashes in the desert who meets a young boy who tells the pilot his life story. The boy is a traveler who lived on an asteroid and has gone planet to planet where he meets their lone inhabitants: a king who demands obedience but has no subjects, a drunk who drinks out of the shame of drinking, a geographer who has never been anywhere, and so on.
Poppy thinks she’ll read the book again. She wonders why Alison Lane loved it so much. It seems like a kid’s book. But maybe she felt like the alien boy, alone, trying to find meaning in her travels. Poppy looks up at her Beyoncé poster and decides, yeah, she needs to get some sleep—she’s waxing a little too poetic. But she needs to try to decode the note found in Alison’s car. She pulls up the photo of the note on her phone. It has several lines of numbers, each with a three-digit sequence. She spends the next fifteen minutes trying to decode the note, flipping through the pages of The Little Prince.
The message is gibberish.
It’s not the right book.
Defeated, Poppy says a prayer for her father, her mother, and Dash. And she closes her eyes and falls into a restless sleep.