But it went well. It went perfectly.

It just never, not in a million years, occurred to Jan she’d run into someone she knew after they got away. Once they were miles from Promise Falls.

If only Dwayne had picked someplace else to get gas. The needle had been a quarter tank off empty. He could have gone another sixty, seventy miles, but he wanted to start off with a full tank. Psychological, he said.

So outside Albany, he gets off the highway near one of those big malls. And guess who’s filling up right next to them?

“Jan?” Leanne Kowalski said. “Jan, is that you?”

The dumbass.

On cue, like he knew she was thinking about him, Dwayne said, “We’re making good time. Should be in Boston pretty soon.”

“Great,” Jan said. The fact was, the closer they got to Boston, the more on edge she felt. She told herself she wasn’t being rational. It was a big city. And she hadn’t been there in half a decade. What were the odds anyone was going to recognize her? And it wasn’t like she and Dwayne were planning to spend a lot of time there.

“So let me ask you this,” Dwayne said. “You feel kind of bad for him?”

“I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t feel bad about leaving my son,” she said.

“No, not the kid. Your husband. I mean, the poor bastard, he’s not going to know what hit him.”

“What do you think would be better?” she asked. “Would it be better to have every cop in the country wondering where I’d run off to, have them looking for me? Or would it be better to have them thinking I’m already dead?”

“Listen, I’m not saying you did the wrong thing. It’s fucking brilliant, that’s what it is. Acting all depressed, but just for him, letting him think one thing, setting it all up so the cops will think another. I’m in awe, okay? I’m in fucking awe. All I’m saying is, you did live with the guy for a long time. How’d you do that, anyway? Stick with him only as long as you needed him? Make him think you cared about him when you really didn’t?”

Jan looked at him. “It’s just something I do.” She went back to looking out her open window, hot wind blowing in her face.

“Well, you did it good,” Dwayne said admiringly. “You ask me, it’s okay if you don’t feel bad about it. That’s probably even better. No sense striking off on a new life feeling all guilty about what you did to get it. But I just keep picturing the look on his face. When he finds out what you told the guy at the store. When he finds out you never went to the doctor. And when they can’t find you on those park cameras. The guy’s got to be shit-tin’ himself.”

“Let’s talk about something else,” Jan said.

“What do you want to talk about?”

“When’s the last time you talked to your guy who wants to buy our stuff?”

“The day after I got out,” Dwayne said. “I call him up, I say, you’re never going to guess who this is. He can’t believe it. He says he gave up on me long ago. I never got a chance to call him after I got picked up for the assault thing, so when we didn’t show years ago, he just kind of gave up on us. So I say, hey, I’m back, and we’re still ready to deal. He goes, shit, are you kidding me? He figured maybe I was dead or something. The other thing he said that was kind of interesting was, there was never anything in the news about it, I mean, about the diamonds actually going missing. He said there was something in the paper about some guy got his hand cut off, but nothing about diamonds.”

“That’s not surprising,” Jan said.

“How you figure?”

“You don’t go reporting illicit diamonds stolen,” Jan said. “There’s not even supposed to be any of them anymore, not since that whole diamond certification thing got going back in 2000. The Kimberley thing. You never saw that movie because you were in jail, the one with Leonardo Di-Caprio, all about Sierra Leone and-”

“Don’t you mean the Sierra Desert?” Dwayne asked.

“That’s the Sahara Desert.”

“Oh yeah. Okay.”

“Anyway, even with the certification thing going on, and the whole industry clamping down, there’s still a big market in illicit diamonds, and you don’t go to the cops whining about having some ripped off, even as many as we got. Did you know that al-Qaeda made millions off the sale of illicit diamonds?”

“No shit?”

“Yeah,” she said, holding her hand out the window, pushing against the wind.

“So what we did, in a way, was help fight the war on terror.” Dwayne grinned.

Jan didn’t even look at him. You had to be careful, she thought. You started thinking he was dumb as shit, it made you forget he could also be very dangerous.

Funny thing was, he didn’t mind inflicting pain, but he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. Complex, in his own stupid way.

“So who is this guy?” Jan asked.

“His name’s Banura,” he said. “Cool, huh? He’s black. But really black. I think he’s from that Sierra place you mentioned.”

“How do you get in touch?”

“I got his number written down in my pocket. He lives on the south side, in Braintree.”

“Does he know we want to do this tomorrow?”

“I didn’t tell him an exact day. I was kinda just putting him on alert.”

Jan said she thought it would be a good idea for him to get in touch. Banura might need time to start pulling the cash together, in anticipation.

“That’s a good idea,” Dwayne said.

Jan didn’t want to be around the Boston area any longer than she had to. Get the merchandise, exchange it for cash, get the hell out.

They got off the turnpike and Dwayne went looking first for a place to fill up. While he was pumping gas, Jan wandered into the store to look around. She was twirling the sunglasses rack when she noticed the heavy-set woman next to her. The woman was leaning over, telling her daughter to stop whining, and she’d slung her purse over her shoulder and onto her back.

It was open. Jan was staring straight into it.

She didn’t care about the woman’s purse. She had enough cash to get to Boston, and once they delivered the diamonds, there was going to be more money than she knew what to do with.

But the woman’s cell phone might come in handy.

Jan pulled it off in one clean move. She leaned over the woman as if to reach for something on a shelf, one arm going for a package of two cupcakes, the other sliding down into the purse, grabbing hold of the slender phone, and slipping it into the front pocket of her jeans.

She bought the cupcakes-they were Ethan’s favorite; he liked to eat around the little white squiggle across the chocolate icing and save it for last-and got back to the truck about the time Dwayne was done filling the tank. She tossed the cupcakes through the window, got in, and handed him the phone once he was behind the wheel.

“Phone your guy,” she said.

By the time they decided to each have a cupcake, the icing had melted to the cellophane wrapper.

Jan worked carefully to peel it away, and she managed to free one cupcake with relatively little damage. She handed it over to Dwayne, who shoved the entire thing into his mouth at once.

The second one turned into a horror show. Most of the icing lifted off, so she bared her teeth and scraped it off the wrapper.

A technique she had learned from her son.

“Look, Mommy.”

Ethan’s in the car seat, Jan’s up front, driving home from the market. She glances back, sees that he’s not only managed to peel the icing from the wrapper in once piece, like a layer of pudding skin, he’s eaten along each side of the white squiggle. He’s lined it up along the underside of his index finger. His mouth is a mess of chocolate icing, but he looks so proud of himself.

“I have a squiggle finger,” he says.

Dwayne snapped the phone shut. “We’re good to go, tomorrow. I told him we should be there about noon. Maybe even earlier. The banks open at what, around nine-thirty, ten? We hit mine, we hit yours, and unless you stashed your half in fucking Tennessee or something, we should be done pretty quick. Sound good to you?”