The painting was dark, midnight blue water filled with floating bodies and frozen faces staring helplessly at the sinking ship above them while more people fell to the sea below. The crash of the Titanic. It was eerie looking into those faces. I could tell which ones were on the verge of death by their eyes, some of them with already dilated pupils and the blank gaze of faded life. Then I noticed something; a bright yellow rubber duck wearing a sailor hat in the midst of all that darkness.
I burst out laughing, unable to contain myself with the shock. It was so weird! And utterly inappropriate. I couldn’t believe anyone as upper crusty as the Wrights could own something that was actually amusing.
Frank glanced at me as if he hadn’t realized I was there.
I cleared my throat and looked down at my scuffed up shoes. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be funny. I certainly didn’t know much about art. “Sorry.”
He moved a little so he could stand behind me, setting his hands on my shoulders. “He likes to twist historical scenes.”
So the painter was famous. No wonder the Wrights owned a piece. If I’d learned anything about the rich people we killed, it was that art didn’t have to be good if the artist was famous. But this painting was good. At least I thought so. It was funny. And the corpses were utterly realistic. “You’ve heard of him?”
“I’d like to go now,” he said distantly. When I looked over my shoulder he was already heading toward the door.
I followed him, feeling thoroughly out of place. Ever since I’d learned that Frank was heir to a fortune, I’d become more and more aware of how low class I was. Shit like that didn’t used to bother me this much, because I knew it didn’t bother him, but being in that house, making such a shameful blunder with the painting, I longed for Middle America. Frank could be impressed by me in Middle America. I knew what I was talking about there.
“It was really well done, Frank. Even more realistic than the movie, not that I saw most of the movie because Mark rented it for me and I was sort of otherwise occupied, but I saw enough to know that the painting was better, and I just thought it was funny because I wasn’t really expecting to see that ducky there with all the bod—”
He stopped and held my mouth the way he always did when I started on a nervous rant. Then he removed his hand and kissed me. “What’s wrong with you?”
I bit my lower lip. “Are you sure you want to marry someone who doesn’t know anything about art?”
“Vincent!” he scoffed. “I love you.”
“Even though I laughed at the painting?”
“It’s supposed to be funny, V,” he said, and he hugged me, smoothing his hand over my hair.
“But you got so upset.”
He laughed. “Baby, it wasn’t that. I just wasn’t expecting to see the painting in their home. I know the artist.”
“Oh,” I said, “he’s famous because he’s dead.”
Frank got a look on his face like he’d tasted something dreadful. “He isn’t dead,” he said defensively. “I…I don’t want to talk about him here. Let’s go.”
I let him lead me out, trying to settle my mind and not think of Frank having an artist ex-boyfriend. He’d certainly fucked like he was experienced the first time we did it, but he said I was the only man, or boy he’d ever been with.
We drove for a long time in silence, getting an unnecessary distance from the house. I fought to keep my mouth shut as anxiety pulsed through me. Frank pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the car. “He’s a friend.”
“Friend,” I repeated. I felt sick. “He’s important to you?”
“Very.”
“Yet you’ve never mentioned him,” I said. Frank wasn’t like all the other men I’d been with, men who never introduced me to their family or friends because I was a dirty little secret, but I couldn’t help but feel the déjà vu of shame. Had he told his artist friend as little about me as I’d been told of him? “Does he know about me?”
“No.”
I got out of the car, wrapping my arms around myself as I headed up the road, shaking my head and trying to decide whether I should cry or kill him. I could hear Frank’s footsteps behind me. I only ever heard him when he wanted me to know he was coming. I spun away from him, facing the trees. “You’re ashamed of me.”
“That is absolutely not true,” he said, hugging me from behind, his arms around my shoulders like a double holster. I loved when he did that. “I haven’t spoken with him since before we met, Vincent. I…he’s not in this business. He’s completely defenseless. After what happened with Bella, I decided that it would be best not to see him anymore. It would be safer for him and his mother if I wasn’t in their lives.”
“Mother?” I whispered in shock. This was getting worse by the second. Where there was a mother, there was a father. And Frank loved children. “Don’t tell me he’s your fucking kid.”
“He’s like my little brother.”
God, everyone was family with him. Where did that leave me? “And his mom?”
“It isn’t like that. I met them when Casey was twelve. The two of them. She was all he had. His father is useless. He didn’t give a shit about either of them. I saw him, saw them, struggling to make ends meet, and I knew that if something happened to her, if she died, he’d be lost. The same as I was. So I offered to help. Casey is so amazing. You’d love him. You will love him, when you meet him.”
I turned around, my arms falling to my sides. “I can meet him?”
“Both of them.”
“You have a problem, Frank,” I said. “It isn’t healthy for you to distance yourself from people you care about.”
He nodded, taking his scolding like a child who knows he’s been bad.
“Do you miss him?”
“Very much,” he said, and he smiled the way he had when Bella’s condition had gotten better and she’d gone for retail therapy in Paris, genuine happiness in his face. He didn’t like talking about most things, but Casey was obviously not one of those. There was a new light in his eyes.
“He paints?”
Frank beamed like a proud father. A proud older brother. “He’s something else. Even when he was a kid, he had this gift. It’s incredible to watch him. He’s…he likes drawing me. I tell him not to, but he does it anyway.” He paused, looking away as pain flashed in his eyes, turning them cold. “And he drew her. My mother. I described her, how I looked like her when I was little, and he…”
I hugged him, not waiting for him to really get upset. It must’ve been killing him to be away from them. No wonder he never mentioned it. He was trying to forget. “Do you think he’ll like me?”
“He’ll love you. Mags will too. Maggie, his mom. I’m proud of you, Vincent. I’d tell Charlie about us in a heartbeat if I could.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I overreacted.”
“I forget how insecure you can be.”
“The term is high maintenance.”
“You’re worth it.”
“You’re high maintenance too, you know.”
Frank smiled. “Casey says I’m a drama queen.”
I laughed. “Casey’s right. You let him talk to you that way?”
“I’d let you talk to me that way if you weren’t so much fun to punish.”
“Any other family members I should know about?” I asked.
“Not that I’m aware of,” he said.
Frank had sounded sincere, but his words didn’t sit right. It wasn’t until later that I remembered where I’d heard them before; a plotline familiar enough that I couldn’t place which soap opera it had most recently come from, foreshadowing a visit from a psychotic relative that left the heroes in grave danger.
I had a nightmare that night for the first time in a year.
Frank sat beside me on a towel, dressed in long pants and a black undershirt with only his feet bare though I was down to a skintight light blue Speedo. He was doing fairly well on his excursions with me to the beach, but I knew it was becaus
e he was distracted. That’s what the Speedo was for. Not only did my being nearly naked keep his focus when we took a break from surveillance, it gave him ample opportunity to scowl at anyone else who looked my way, and that made him feel in control of his surroundings while the ocean crashed upon the shore.
We weren’t the only beachgoers with binoculars that day. Pale tourists were everywhere, walking sheepishly across the hot sand in flip-flops, taking pictures and scoping out the horizon or carrying metal detectors in the hope of striking it big. Frank had thought they were for detecting landmines until a three hundred pound man in a swimsuit smaller than mine started digging at our feet like a puppy dog, only to find a fifty cent piece and an extremely disconcerted Frenchman glaring at him. He’d steered clear of us after that. Thank God.
“Can you see them?” I asked, relaxing back with Frank’s sunglasses over my eyes. I knew I wouldn’t tan, but I could still hope.
“It looks a bit windy out there, they must be below deck,” he said, offering me the binoculars.
I briefly lifted my sunglasses to look his way. “I’m taking the day off.” I said, lowering them again and resuming my position as stress-free birthday boy.
I’d made it. I was legal, and very much alive, with a handsome fiancé at my side and a job that allowed me to get paid while lying on the beach. Life was good, though I was sore all over from a marathon of sex in the most expensive waterfront hotel in the area, and Frank had given me eighteen years worth of birthday spankings, my skin still pink under the blue spandex.
All my apprehension over this hit had melted away at the stroke of midnight, when Frank collected the proceeds from our bet, declared it official, and tied me to the bed for the next twenty-four hours. Even the death of Charlie’s sister was gone from my mind, declared as an accident by the non-grieving brother as well as Frank’s associate. Frank said it was probably just paranoia to begin with, brought on by the boat job and the fact that he’d once killed a man for Charlie the same way she’d met her fate.
“Tell me more about Casey,” I said, pulling the sunglasses over my hair and rolling onto my front. Frank had barely shut up about his brother since I found out about him, but he got so animated at the sheer mention of his name that it kept me interested.
Casey had been the light of Frank’s life before he met me. He was always smiling, incapable of being angry, and he made friends everywhere he went. Frank absolutely adored him, and said that everything the kid touched turned to gold. The term kid was used loosely, as he was four years older than me, a fact that I could tell made Frank feel like a cradle robber. But Casey really was still a kid, because he was naive of everything bad with the world, and had very little common sense.
Both Frank and Maggie affectionately called him Spacey Casey, since he would literally forget his head if it wasn’t attached to his neck. He’d leave the house to run a simple errand and would come back ten hours later having done this exciting thing or met that interesting person, only to have forgotten why he went out to begin with. He couldn’t be on time if his life depended on it, because everything was a delightful distraction.
On more than one occasion he’d seen something pretty on the side of the road and walked into traffic, and he had a very bad habit of telling burly men they had “the prettiest bone structure” and asking to draw them. Yet no one had ever harmed him. Despite being nice to the point of vulnerability, he was a great judge of character. It had been Casey’s encouragement that forced Maggie to invite the brooding man in black Armani into their lives.
Frank told me that Casey had once seen a construction worker whistle at a friend of his in a pink sundress, and he’d spent the next several days perfecting a painting of the man wearing the dress without adjusting the size for his much larger frame. Then he hopped the fence of the construction site and presented it to him. Not only did the man not beat him within an inch of his life, he ended up marrying his friend. Casey was best man/bridesmaid at their wedding, and he wore the pink dress. Apparently he was quite in the habit of cross-dressing, though Frank was pretty sure his bisexuality was only a stage.
He’d never been in a fight. He never even got beat up in school for being weird, which Frank assured me he most certainly was. He’d had every hair color under the sun, though his mom drew the line at piercings and tattoos. Casey was fluent in French, had gone to art school in Paris and Florence and London, and he loved to travel, sending Frank books from all the countries he visited, the fancy kind with hard covers and ribbons inside for bookmarks.
Casey had also been the one to tell Frank that he’d meet the love of his life someday, and that he’d better not let me go. Frank hadn’t believed him, even though Casey couldn’t lie to save his life.
“Case had this piece, spent almost a year perfecting it. An exact reproduction of the Mona Lisa. Exact. It was amazing. Apart from the different canvas size, no one would’ve been able to tell the difference. But his canvas was longer than the actual work, and with this added length he showed his artistic perspective of what made her smile,” Frank paused, his ears going red. Then he shook his head, and rubbed his face. “I thought it was scandalous. He thought it funny. Soon to Be Moaning Lisa he called it. Mona Lisa holding a brand new vibrator. His mother’s got it in her living room.”
I laughed. I couldn’t wait to meet him. “Do you think he’ll draw me?”
“I think I’ll have to fight him for time with you. You’d better start practicing how to sit still.”
“He can draw us together!” I said excitedly. Frank wouldn’t even allow me to take a photograph of him, forcing me to carry around one of his driver’s licenses whenever I felt the urge to be sentimental, but I had a feeling he wouldn’t be able to say no to Casey.
“Leave me out of this,” he said, picking up the binoculars again because I’d embarrassed him. Thirty-two years old and he’d never grown out of the you-can’t-see-me-if-I-can’t-see-you stage.
I flicked some sand on his pants and snuggled closer to him. The sun was starting to go down and it had gotten too cold to be wearing next to nothing. Hopefully the heat wave they promised for next week would arrive as planned. The water wasn’t warm enough for a lengthy midnight swim, even in my new wetsuit.
Frank absentmindedly put his arm around me. His attention was elsewhere. They must’ve come above deck.
Lawrence and Rachel spent most of their time on the yacht, fucking and snorting piles of cocaine. When it wasn’t windy, they did it out in the open with as blatant a disregard for the law as he had for his vows.
He didn’t love his wife, and didn’t care who knew it. Diane had an equal aversion to her husband, though she had wisely seen his most recent affair as an investment opportunity. Rachel Fields apparently had quite a few run-ins with the law; a history of stalking boyfriends as well as her issues with drug abuse and psychiatric problems. Daddy always got her off with less than a slap on the wrist, but there’d been enough trouble for the Wright’s lawyer to spin it his way, and squeeze every last cent from her dear daddy for ruining Diane Wright’s life.
I could see it now, “oh, the humanity, think of the children!” and within a year she’d be married to her expensive lawyer, the unfortunate children barely noticing that their father had been replaced by a new man.
Frank had taught me all along to keep things professional, to distance myself from our victims and never sympathize with them. It was a bad path to be on if you started feeling sorry for the people you had to kill, and it could prove not only bad for business, but potentially deadly as well.
He had to force retirement on several of his colleagues over the years for letting a hit live, and there was no way to tell how many more had met their fates through lack of judgment, their mark reminding them of someone they cared about and getting the better of them.
That had been the deciding factor of letting me take over the job. He couldn’t stay detached after seeing Casey’s painting in their home. They made him think of his brother, and h
e refused to have Case on his mind while he was working.
It didn’t matter that I’d meet his surrogate family one day, or that I felt like I knew them already from his descriptions. To Frank I was still outside of it. I wouldn’t see Lawrence or Rachel and think of the painting. I’d think of work.
What Frank didn’t realize was that I couldn’t detach the way he did. I never had. He saw them as a job, end of story. I’d always connected them to someone else; men who’d hurt me, bad guys from television, sometimes even myself, like Jennifer, who’d lost her life due to her survival technique.
It didn’t stop me from doing what I was supposed to do. I wasn’t sure whether that meant I had more of a conscience than Frank or less of one. It didn’t affect me either way.
But these people were extra special to me, because for them I thought of Frank’s father; of the will and his in-laws, hunting us down out of arrogance and greed. I’d take pleasure in killing them, imagining that their deaths would bring Frank the freedom and anonymity that was taken from him. And I’d do all of this while he was safely on the shore, waiting to take me in his warm embrace, to dry me off and make me his husband.
“What are they doing?” I asked, pulling on my shirt, still full of the heat it had absorbed throughout the afternoon. I left my bottom half bare, hoping to gain some last minute color from the sun, though I could already see that it would be more pink than brown.
“He’s fucking her over the helm. Christ, they’re really going at it.”
“Let me see!” I said, snatching the binoculars from his hand and holding them to my eyes. I wasn’t a huge fan of watching hetero sex, but I knew most of Frank’s sexual education had come from his voyeurism, and his proven ability made it worth a look whenever our marks were getting some.
Frank insisted that it didn’t turn him on to watch people fucking any more than it turned him on to watch them cooking dinner. Even when marks were attractive he didn’t look at them that way, though we had picked up a few useful bits of information for our home life, and some very interesting positions.
Chance Assassin: A Story of Love, Luck, and Murder Page 28
