Persuader

And Elizabeth, and Richard. The mechanic and Beck himself could stay to face the music.
    I could hear the sea from the kitchen, loud and clear. The waves crashed in and the relentless undertow sucked back out. Pools filled and drained, the gravel rattled across the rocks. The wind moaned softly through the cracks in the outer porch door. I heard frantic cries from the gulls. I listened to them and sipped my coffee and waited.
    Richard came down ten minutes after me. His hair was all over the place and I could see his missing ear. He took coffee and sat down across from me. His ambivalence was back.
    I could see him facing up to no more college and the rest of his life hidden away with his folks. I figured if his mother got away without an indictment they could start over somewhere else. Depending on how resilient he was, he could get back to school without missing much more than a week of the semester. If he wanted to. Unless it was an expensive school, which I guessed it was. They were going to have money problems.
    They were going to walk away with nothing more than they stood up in. If they walked away at all.
    The cook went out to set the dining room up for breakfast. Richard watched her go and I watched him and saw his ear again and a piece of the puzzle clicked into place.
    "Five years ago," I said. "The kidnap." He kept his composure. Just looked down at the table and then looked up at me and combed his hair over his scar with his fingers.
    "Do you know what your dad is really into?" I asked.
    He nodded. Said nothing.
    "Not just rugs, right?" I said.
    "No," he said. "Not just rugs."
    "How do you feel about that?"
    "There are worse things," he said.
    "Want to tell me what happened five years ago?" I said.
    He shook his head. Looked away.
    "No," he said. "I don't."
    "I knew a guy called Gorowski," I said. "His two-year-old daughter was abducted. Just for a day. How long were you gone for?"
    "Eight days," he said.
    "Gorowski fell right into line," I said. "One day was enough for him." Richard said nothing.
    "Your dad isn't the boss here," I said, like a statement.
    Richard said nothing.
    "He fell into line five years ago," I said. "After you had been gone eight days. That's the way I figure it." Richard was silent. I thought about Gorowski's daughter. She was twelve years old now.
    She probably had the Internet and a CD player and a phone in her room. Posters on her walls. And a tiny dim ache in her mind about something that had happened way in the past. Like the itch you get from a long-healed bone.
    "I don't need details," I said. "I just want you to say his name."
    "Whose name?"
    "The guy who took you away for eight days." Richard just shook his head.
    "I heard the name Xavier, " I said. "Someone mentioned it." Richard looked away and his left hand went straight to the side of his head, which was all the confirmation I needed.
    "I was raped," he said.
    I listened to the sea, pounding on the rocks.
    "By Xavier?" He shook his head again.
    "By Paulie," he said. "He was just out of prison. He still had a taste for that kind of thing." I was quiet for a long moment.
    "Does your father know?"
    "No," he said.
    "Your mother?"
    "No." I didn't know what to say. Richard said nothing more. We sat there in silence. Then the cook came back and fired up the stove. She put fat in a skillet and started heating it. The smell made me sick to my stomach.
    "Let's go for a walk," I said.
    Richard followed me outside to the rocks. The air was salty and fresh and bitter cold. The light was gray. The wind was strong. It was blowing straight in our faces. Richard's hair strung way out behind him, almost horizontal. The spray was smashing twenty feet in the air and foamy drops of water were whipping toward us like bullets.
    "Every silver lining has a cloud," I said. I had to talk loud, just to be heard over the wind and the surf. "Maybe one day Xavier and Paulie will get what's coming to them, but your dad will go to prison in the process." Richard nodded. There were tears in his eyes. Maybe they were from the cold wind.
    Maybe they weren't.
    "He deserves to," he said.
    Very loyal, his father had said. Best buddies.
    "I was gone eight days," Richard said. "One should have been enough. Like with the other guy you mentioned."
    "Gorowski?"
    "Whoever. With the two-year-old girl. You think she was raped?"
    "I sincerely hope not."
    "Me too."
    "Can you drive?" I said.
    "Yes," he said.
    "You might need to get out of here," I said. "Soon. You