Chapter 4

Content warning for a reference to Neal drowning in the past. We don't witness it.

St. Louis. Wednesday, December 3, 2003.

Neal guessed it was a bit morbid, to visit the scene of his death. But going to St. Louis meant facing his ghosts. So he drove to the lake and remembered.

It had been Danny Brooks' eighteenth birthday. It fell on a weekday, meaning the real celebration with his friends would wait until the weekend. On the actual birthday there was just a pizza with his mom. She'd offered him a beer but he refused. He hated the smell of the stuff, and wished she'd stop being buzzed all the time. He was certain she'd be back in rehab before he finished high school. Ellen dropped by with a cake. Afterward Danny mentioned his plans to enroll in the police academy. Ellen made another argument for going to college and exploring more alternatives first, but Danny had found an academy that would let him attend while going to college and had his heart set on it. He insisted he wasn't going to change his mind about following in his father's footsteps.

That's when Ellen told his mom it was time for some honesty, adding, "If you won't tell him, I will." His mom reacted by going to the fridge for another beer, so Ellen led him to the front porch and turned his life inside out.

His mom wasn't the orphaned only child she'd claimed to be. Her maiden name was Caffrey, and she had two siblings: a brother in the Air Force and a sister who was a professor. Her parents lived in the D.C. area. Ellen wasn't his aunt or even related to them at all, and her name wasn't really Ellen. His dad wasn't dead, wasn't the hero his mom always described him as. Instead, James Bennett was a criminal, a dirty cop, a murderer. Danny's birth name was Neal Bennett. And they had been in Witness Protection from the time he was three years old.

Ellen showed him newspaper articles about his dad, and his mom's birth certificate – things she'd borrowed from the U.S. Marshals because he was eighteen now, old enough to know everything. She'd convinced them that Danny... No... that Neal should hear the truth from "family" first, and that he should meet with the Marshals after school tomorrow, to talk about his options. He couldn't even grasp what that meant. What options?

It was too much to take in. He wanted to lock himself up in his bedroom, but his mom was still in the living room, and he couldn't face her right now. He was afraid of what he'd say, and what she'd say. So he went to his car, not acknowledging Ellen's, "Be careful."

The car wasn't anything special. It was almost ten years old and needed a paint job, but he'd paid for it himself and took good care of it. It was his. Or Danny's. So weird to think of himself as someone other than Danny. But it felt as if he had been split into two people.

Naïve, trusting Danny was a good student who had a good shot at being named valedictorian. He liked art, and he wanted to be a cop. He'd learned a lot about cops, about guns, about catching criminals. It had been an obsession, to be like his sainted dad.

Neal was nothing. A blank. No, not true. Neal was the son of a drunk liar and a criminal. From the east coast, apparently. He had to hide, or someone would try to kill him. That's what WITSEC was about, right? You hid because you were in danger. When he thought about the things Ellen had taught him – how to blend into a crowd, how to notice exits and sneak out of places – he realized she hadn't been teaching him how to catch the bad guys. She taught him how to run away, in case whoever they were hiding from found them.

There was a fast-food place, a place Danny liked, so he pulled in, got a drink and fries from the drive-thru, tossed his wallet onto the passenger seat, and kept driving. It had been raining earlier but it was clear now, the weather mild and the car's air-conditioning unreliable. He rolled down the windows and made his way to a road that followed the edge of a lake. Danny loved that road, enjoyed taking the winding curves. He decided Neal liked to drive fast and didn't care as much about getting a ticket.

Neal hit a slick spot, while going much too fast. The car slid off the road and landed in the lake, tossing Danny's wallet out the window. When another driver pulled him to the shore, Neal wasn't breathing. The driver performed CPR until the EMTs arrived to take over. At least, that's what they told him when he woke up in the ambulance.

He always considered that moment in the ambulance as the point when Danny died, and he became Neal. That's the name he gave in the hospital when they couldn't find any ID on him, and it's the name he kept when he went to Chicago and decided that Neal was a criminal, like his old man. And a liar, like his mom. But not a drunk.

Sometimes he wondered what the Marshals had told people about Danny Brooks. Did they say he ran away? Or did they pull his car out of the lake and say he'd died, even if they never found a body? He'd slipped out of the hospital and gone back to the house before leaving St. Louis. His mom slept deeply when she'd been drinking and didn't wake when he returned that night. It was easy to grab a few things – some clothes, some cash and a fake ID he'd made – and to leave a note for his mom and Ellen. The note told them that Danny was gone and had survived the lake as Neal. And it said he wouldn't contact them again.

Afterward he'd researched WITSEC and the Marshals, and confirmed he'd been right to make that promise. They wouldn't want him in contact with his family, would consider such contact dangerous. Even when he was at his angriest with his mom and Ellen, he didn't want to endanger them. He left them alone.

He should continue to leave them alone, now. But Neal still had time on his hands. Pulling over at the spot his high school car had slid into the lake didn't take long. It wasn't like he'd brought flowers or anything, and he didn't want to linger at the place where he'd drowned. It wouldn't hurt to drive through his old neighborhood. It was on the outskirts of downtown, which he'd have to go through anyway to reach the bar where he was going to meet Roland.

Chances were the Marshals had moved his mom and Ellen away long ago. Just because his note had promised he wouldn't return, that didn't mean the Marshals would be inclined to believe him.

Sure enough, the house where he'd grown up had a tricycle in the front yard now. There was a toddler running around, and the woman chasing her looked nothing like his mom.

But Ellen's house... Ellen's house had that same truck parked in front. Same truck, same license plate.

Neal had to keep driving. Stopping to stare would be suspicious. He couldn't simply pull over and knock on her door, no matter how much he wanted to talk to her. Anyway, he had no idea what he would say, and it was time for the meet. Roland wasn't a man he wanted to annoy. Danny had died in St. Louis, but Neal didn't intend to die here.