“You’ve been very helpful,” Oscar Fine said.

“Yeah, well, you know, it’s the least I can do, considering.” Dwayne attempted another smile. “So, whaddya say, I bring her in here, and you let me go?”

“I don’t think so,” Oscar Fine said, and shot Dwayne Osterhaus in the center of his face. “There’s no reason I can’t go out and talk to her myself.”

Oscar Fine offered his apologies to Banura. “I have made a mess, and I accept full responsibility for that.”

Banura was looking at the blood and brain matter on the wall behind where Dwayne had been standing. The bullet had gone through his head and out the back.

“I seen worse,” Banura said.

Oscar Fine wrote a number on a piece of paper on Banura’s work-table. “Call that number, tell them Mr. Fine told you they’d handle things. They’ll come and take care of all this. Cleanup as well as removal.”

“Appreciate it,” Banura said.

“But you might as well wait a few minutes until I have the other one,” he said, and Banura nodded.

“Do you have any other way out of here?” Oscar Fine asked. “Someone could be watching this door.”

“No,” he said. “This is all walled off from the rest of the house, only access is from the back door. You can’t even get to the furnace from here. There’s another set of stairs down in the regular part of the house. But there are cameras.”

“Show me.”

Banura led Oscar Fine over to the worktable, where in addition to his jeweler’s tools there was a keyboard and an ultra-thin flat-screen monitor. Banura tapped a couple of keys, and suddenly the screen was divided into equal quadrants, each one offering a different view of Banura’s property.

“There’s a wide-angle camera on each side of the house,” he said.

Oscar Fine leaned in, looking at the upper right corner, which was a view of the street out front of the house, with the driveway off to the far right. He could see the pickup, but given the angle and the way the light was reflecting off the windshield, it was difficult to make out who, if anyone, was inside. There was no one on the passenger side, and too much glare to determine whether anyone was behind the wheel.

“Hmmm,” he said.

The camera mounted at the back door showed no one in the yard, which appeared to be empty by design. No storage shed to hide behind, no trees with broad trunks. Just a flat yard of dead grass bordered by a six-foot plank fence.

Banura pointed to the lower left quadrant.

“You see that?”

Oscar Fine had missed it. “What?”

“There was-look.”

In the upper right image, the pickup truck was starting to back up.

The moment after Dwayne disappeared around the corner of the house, Jan thought, I’m outta here.

She was working out possible scenarios in her head for what was going on:

Banura was a moron and didn’t know the first thing about diamonds. Unlikely.

The woman in the jewelry store was a moron and didn’t know the first thing about diamonds. Ditto.

Banura knew they were fake, didn’t like being conned, and was going to teach them a lesson when they returned. Possible, but why wait until 2 p.m.? Why not teach them a lesson earlier?

Banura needed time to set something up. That seemed likely. But Jan didn’t think it had anything to do with getting the money together.

Could he have been in touch with Oscar Fine? After all these years, could that man still be putting the word out, reminding those in the business to be on the lookout for a large quantity of fake diamonds? And a particular woman who matched her description?

Get out of here, she told herself.

She had her hand on the key, got ready to turn it. All she had to do was start the engine, put the truck in reverse, get on the interstate, put as much distance as possible between herself and the greater Boston area.

And go where?

All these years, she’d had a plan. Get out of Promise Falls, head to Paradise. But she needed the cash from those diamonds to buy her ticket.

Worthless.

She waited all that time to get what she wanted, never stopping to think for a moment she might already have something.

That phony life was a real life.

A real house.

A real husband.

A real son.

All traded away for this. A long shot. A chance to have enough money to live the rest of her life on her own terms, playing only herself. All so she could head to that mythical beach. She’d never even figured out where it was. Tahiti? Thailand? Jamaica?

Did it matter?

And when she got there, she could dream of telling her mother and, especially, her father, Fuck you. I’m here, living the life, and you’re not.

The beach seemed far away now.

She was sitting in a pickup truck outside Boston, waiting for some clueless ex-con to show up with six million dollars, wondering whether her entire world was about to go to shit.

She took her fingers off the keys and reached into her purse. Tucked into a side pocket was a photo, creased and tattered. She took it out, held it carefully, the photo as light and fragile as a fallen autumn leaf. She looked into the face of her young son.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. She set the photo on the seat next to her.

She sat there another moment, her hand on the keys, ready to bail. But there was part of her that still wondered: What if.

What if, by some fluke, Dwayne had called it right?

Everything told her he had it wrong. But what if he walked out with the money and she wasn’t there?

She needed a sense of how things were going.

Jan left the keys in the ignition and got out of the truck, first grabbing the gun she’d been unable to persuade Dwayne to take. She walked down the side of the house, rounded the corner, and went up to the door.

Didn’t knock. Just looked at it. Wanted it to open. Didn’t want it to open.

Very faint noises, muffled by the heavy door, came from inside. The hint of a voice, high-pitched, whiny. The kinds of noise she could imagine Dwayne making.

She caught a few phrases.

“… swear to God, I never… I was all, hey, let’s… get some stronger tools… know what I’m saying? I’d drive the limo…”

Jan didn’t need to hear any more. She’d been sold out. They’d be coming for her next. Any second now that door would be opening.

Should she wait, shoot whoever came out? No, not good, just standing there. It was just as likely she’d be the one to end up taking a bullet. She moved off the door, pressed herself up against the house, and in doing so happened to look up and saw the tiny camera mounted below the eaves.

She’d spent so much time at Five Mountains, scoping out where all the closed-circuit TV cameras were, she thought she might have noticed that one sooner. If there was one there, there was probably one on each side of the house.

They might already know she was out there, waiting by the door.

She had to run.

She bolted, rounded the corner of the house, grabbed the handle on the driver’s door with her left hand, the gun still in her right. She jumped in, dropped the gun onto the seat, and turned the ignition.

The engine didn’t catch the first time.

As she turned the key a second time, she noticed a figure coming out from behind the house. A man in a long jacket, wielding a gun in his right hand. It was pointed in her direction.

The engine caught and she threw the column shifter into reverse and had her foot on the gas even before she’d turned to make sure no one was there. She threw her right arm over the seat, turned around, bounced from the driveway to the street and cranked the wheel.

The windshield shattered.

For a millisecond she looked back in the direction of the shot, saw the man with the gun.

Saw the left arm with no hand at the end.