A Cool Breeze on the Underground by Don Winslow Page A

drowned the memories and numbed the feelings, and who went out looking for sex instead of love because she didn’t know the difference, and who maybe had it buried real deep in the past until Daddy took her again, except this time she was old enough that she’d never forget, and old enough to know what it meant. And you thought you knew this kid, Neal. You thought you had her pegged. You never learn, do you?
    “Where’s the note?” Neal asked when Liz was finished,
    “Is it important?”
    “It will be when I take it to the cops, and if you destroyed it, Mrs. Chase, it makes you guilty of a half dozen crimes I can think of.”
    “You’re going to the police?”
    “Soon as I get dressed. You want to come with me?”
    “My husband—”
    “Fuck him.”
    She held up for another second or so and then she lost it. Suddenly. As if she’d been stabbed in the heart and the pain had just hit her. It seemed like the beautiful face aged ten years in the seconds that she held back the tears, and then they came out in wracking sobs.
    “My baby. My poor little baby. She needs so much help. She needs me and I don’t know where she is! I have to tell her! I have to tell her!”
    “Tell her what?” Neal asked, and if she said something like “That I love her,” he was about ready to smack her in the mouth.
    “On top of everything else, what she must be thinking! I have to tell her, at least that.”
    “Tell her what, Mrs. Chase?”
    She settled herself down, he had to give her credit for that. She drew herself back from the edge of hysteria and settled down to help her daughter. She caught her breath and spoke quietly—slowly.
    “He’s not her father.”
    Whoa and double whoa.
    She had turned around while Neal put his clothes on, and she sat patiently while he poured himself a drink and tossed down half of it. If he smoked, he would have lit one up.
    “Does the Senator know that Allie isn’t his?”
    She nodded.
    “Since when?”
    “I suppose Allie was eight or nine. We had a terrible fight. I threw it at him.”
    “But you never told Allie.”
    “I’d been meaning to.”
    “Where’s the note, Mrs. Chase?”
    “In a safe-deposit box—my own.”
    Smart lady.
    “Does anyone else know about it?”
    “No.”
    “So the Senator doesn’t know that you know that—”
    She shook her head. “I haven’t said anything to him about it. If I did, I’d have to leave him, and if I left him, I wouldn’t get the help I need to find Allie, would I?”
    No, lady, you probably wouldn’t.
    “Are you going to the police?” she asked.
    “No.”
    Because you’re right, Mrs. Chase. If I take this to the cops, it’s all over. I’m off the case, the Senator is out of office, Friends loses interest, and Allie gets to read about it in the foreign edition of Newsweek and will bury herself even deeper than she already has. No winners.
    So the basic rules apply. John Chase is a wealthy member of the U.S. Senate, and he might be President someday, and he has money in the bank. So he gets to rape his stepdaughter and get away with it and also get someone like me to clean it all up. Neal Carey, Janitor to the Rich and Powerful.
    And that son of a bitch is counting on Allie’s shame to shut her up while she’s posing for “The Waltons Go to Washington” pictures, and then he’ll stick her away in some really faraway school someplace, maybe one of those Swiss jobs. And I’m going to help him do it. Because it’s better than having that kid out there thinking she’s had sex with her own father and quite possibly dying over it. And because I want to finish college one of these days.
    “There’s something else to think about, Mrs. Chase. If Allie needs drugs, and food and shelter and all that, and she doesn’t have money … she’ll do anything to get it.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You know what I mean.”
    “Allie would never do that.”
    “Yes, she would. You’re doing it. I’m doing it.” And we ain’t even