Sharks - Matt Rogers (classic books for 11 year olds txt) 📗

Slater hung back, letting Lyla handle the dissociation and detachment on her own. She would come out the other side eventually, and when she did she’d either be weaker or stronger. Despairing of what people are capable of, or relishing the strength of the human spirit in the face of evil.

For Slater, it was always a bit of both.

In the terminal, they collected their bags. Back in Freeport, Lyla and Caleb had fussed about in their home for fifteen minutes while everyone else waited out front, keeping guard. But no one came for them. Walcott’s forces had been razed to the ground. Lyla and Caleb re-emerged with two suitcases stuffed to the brim, containing all their treasures and worldly possessions, and then they’d been off.

Now, Lyla clutched her faded tan suitcase by the handle and said, ‘What happens now?’

King handed her a smartphone he’d bought en route to Grand Bahama International Airport. He’d spent most of the short flight loading the device with everything she’d need.

Lyla turned it over in her hand. ‘What’s this?’

‘Your new phone.’

‘I have a phone.’

‘Get rid of it. Start fresh with this one. There’s a banking application installed, connected to an account with five hundred thousand U.S. dollars sitting in it. The login details are in the notes application. It’s all yours.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t want it.’

‘It’s not payment to look the other way. And it’s not for you. It’s for Caleb. Give him a life. Give him a proper education. Help him move on from these last few turbulent days. Help him understand.’

‘How can I?’

‘We don’t know the answers to everything,’ King said. ‘All we’re good at is putting bad people in the ground.’

‘Like my husband?’

‘He wasn’t all bad,’ Slater said, ‘but he put himself in the ground.’

Lyla nodded.

She was inwardly crippled by all sorts of turmoil, but for the sake of Caleb she’d locked it deep within her until she found some solitude to let it out away from prying eyes and ears.

She said, ‘How’d you get the money?’

‘By making a career out of this,’ King said. ‘Helping people who need the help.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I realised I never said it. For what you did.’

‘You don’t need to. Your life’s been turned upside down. We don’t deserve your thanks.’

‘It would have gone worse if you weren’t there,’ she said. ‘Far worse. And you know it.’

They did, but they didn’t say it.

It’d only be massaging their egos.

They weren’t about that.

Lyla said, ‘And all the loans Dylan was collecting … those people are free now.’

‘Some of them shouldn’t have taken them in the first place,’ Slater said. ‘But some of them didn’t know any better. You saw first-hand the extent of the disaster. Some of them had nowhere else to turn. Grand Bahama’s better off without him.’

Caleb tottered into earshot and Slater went quiet.

The kid gripped Lyla’s wrinkled hand and peered up at King through her fingers. ‘Grandma says we have to go.’

‘Not just yet,’ Lyla said. ‘I said in a bit. I’m talking to our friends.’

‘Are our friends coming with us?’

Lyla gazed down at him. ‘No, they’re not. It’s just you and me for a while.’

‘And Grandpa?’

‘I already told you. Grandpa’s gone away for a while.’

Caleb pouted, but the kid was resilient.

Violetta led him away.

With people streaming past them, Lyla said, ‘Where will you go?’

‘We’re going to stay here for a week or so,’ King said. ‘We need to decompress.’

‘I don’t blame you.’

‘And yourself?’

She stared past them, into dead space. ‘I haven’t figured it out yet. But I will.’

She sighed.

Then she said, ‘I think I’ll be decompressing for the rest of my life.’

‘There’s hope, Lyla,’ Slater said. ‘You can’t change the past but you can change this moment right here. And the next, when it comes.’

She paused. ‘You’re wise beyond your years, Will.’

‘Trying my best.’

She turned to King and said, ‘Don’t forget how you interacted with Caleb. Don’t forget how precious that was.’

‘I won’t.’

She gave him a knowing look.

He returned it.

She fetched Caleb, and took him by the hand, and whispered in his ear.

He looked over, his face sad, but there was understanding his eyes.

He said, ‘Bye. I’ll keep eating my vegetables.’

King flexed an arm.

The kid laughed, and let Lyla lead him away by the hand. She didn’t look back, but Caleb did several times. Then finally they mingled with the crowds around the baggage carousel and were gone.

Violetta and Alexis came over from where they’d been distracting Caleb.

Violetta said, ‘I’ve booked a place for five days. We can extend our stay if we need. Let’s reassess closer to the end date.’

Slater said, ‘Any chance Dylan owns this one, too?’

‘Does it matter if he does?’

Not anymore, Slater realised.

They flowed out of the terminal into the sunshine, leaving the Walcott dynasty as nothing more than a bad memory.

91

A day later, overlooking a chunk of Cable Beach from their oceanfront villa in Nassau, Slater stared at the sum on the laptop screen with his hands interlocked behind his head.

$425,010,580.17.

The last time he’d accessed his portfolio, in an Airbnb next to John Paul Jones Park in Brooklyn, he’d negotiated for Alexis’ life. Shadow figures in the U.S. government had hacked into his accounts, contacting him via descriptions in money transfers to demand he give himself up in order to save his girlfriend from a similar fate. The money itself had been his for a couple of years, stolen from an organised crime triad in Macau after he’d decimated them to save Shien, a young girl abducted into the world of sex trafficking.

Since Brooklyn, he noted, his diversified investments had gained almost three and a half million dollars in interest. It had been a solid few months for the market. Money makes money, so long as you’re financially disciplined enough to invest it and leave it be. It’s perhaps the most unchanging law of the universe. Lenders make millions through interest rates, and the customers lose money they don’t even have.

A giant mathematical vortex, sucking in hopes and dreams and fattening bank accounts that