by Harlan Coben
Scott shrugged a well? at him.
“I am not your typical assassin for hire.”
“Uh huh.”
“I have rules.”
Scott waited.
“For example, I only kill men.”
“Wow,” Scott said. “You’re a prince.”
Scanlon ignored the sarcasm. “That is my first rule. I kill only men. No women.”
“Right. Tell me, does rule two have anything to do with not putting out until the third date?”
“You think I’m a monster?”
Scott shrugged as if the answer was obvious.
“You don’t respect my rules?”
“What rules? You kill people. You make up these so-called rules because you need the illusion of being human.”
Scanlon seemed to consider that. “Perhaps,” he allowed, “but the men I’ve killed were scum. I was hired by scum to kill scum. I am no more than a weapon.”
“A weapon?” Scott repeated.
“Yes.”
“A weapon doesn’t care who it kills, Monte. Men, women, grannies, little kids. A weapon doesn’t differentiate.”
Scanlon smiled. “Touché.”
Scott rubbed his palms on his pant legs. “You didn’t call me here for an ethics class. What do you want?”
“You’re divorced, aren’t you, Scott?”
He said nothing.
“No children, amicable split, still friendly with the ex.”
“What do you want?”
“To explain.”
“To explain what?”
He lowered his eyes but only for a moment. “What I did to you.”
“I don’t even know you.”
“But I know you. I’ve known you for a long time.”
Scott let the silence in. He glanced at the mirror. Linda Morgan would be behind the glass, wondering what they were talking about. She wanted information. He wondered if they had the room bugged. Probably. Either way, it would pay to keep Scanlon talking.
“You are Scott Duncan. Thirty-nine years old. You graduated from Columbia Law School. You could be making a great deal more money in private practice, but that bores you. You’ve been with the U.S. attorney’s office six months. Your mother and father moved to Miami last year. You had a sister, but she died in college.”
Scott shifted in his seat. Scanlon studied him.
“You finished?”
“Do you know how my business operates?”
Change of subject. Scott waited a beat. Scanlon was playing a head game, trying to keep him off balance or some such nonsense. Scott was not about to fall for it. Nothing he had “revealed” about Scott’s family was surprising. A person could pick up most of that info with a few well-placed keystrokes and phone calls.
“Why don’t you tell me,” Scott said.
“Let’s pretend,” Scanlon began, “that you wanted someone dead.”
“Okay.”
“You would contact a friend, who knows a friend, who knows a friend, who can reach me.”
“And only that last friend would know you?”
“Something like that. I had only one go-between man, but I was careful even with him. We never met face to face. We used code names. The payments always went to offshore accounts. I would open a new account for every, shall we say, transaction, and I closed it as soon as the transaction was completed. You still with me?”
“It’s not that complicated,” Scott said.
“No, I guess not. But you see, nowadays we communicate by e-mail. I’ll set up a temporary e-mail account with Hotmail or Yahoo! or whatever, with fake names. Nothing that can be traced back. But even if it could, even if you could find out who sent it, where would it lead you? All e-mails were sent and read at libraries or public places. We were totally covered.”
Scott was about to mention that this total coverage had eventually landed Scanlon’s ass in jail, but he decided to save it. “What does this have to do with me?”
“I’m getting to that.” Scott could see that Scanlon was warming up to his own tale. “In the old days—when I say old days, I mean, eight, ten years ago—we did it mostly with pay phones. I’d never see the name written. The guy would just tell me over the phone.”
Scanlon stopped and made sure that he had Scott’s full attention. His tone softened a bit, became less matter-of-fact. “That’s the key, Scott. It was by phone. I’d only hear the name on the phone, not see it.”
He looked at Scott expectantly. Scott had no idea what he was trying to say, so he went, “Uh huh.”
“Do you understand why I’m stressing that it was done by phone?”
“No.”
“Because a person like me, a person with rules, could make a mistake with the phone.”
Scott thought about that. “I still don’t get it.”
“I never kill women. That was rule number one.”
“So you said.”
“So if you wanted to put a hit on someone named Billy Smith, I’d figure Billy was a man. You know, with a y. I’d never think Billy would be a woman. With an ie at the end. You understand?”
Scott went very still. Scanlon saw it. He dropped the smile. His voice was very soft.
“We talked before about your sister, didn’t we, Scott?”
Scott did not respond.
“Her name was Geri, am I right?”
Silence.
“You see the problem, Scott? Geri is one of those names. If you heard it on the phone, you’d assume it would be with a J in the front and a y at the end. So fifteen years ago, I got a phone call. From that go-between man I told you about. . . .”
Scott shook his head.
“I was given an address. I was told exactly what time ‘Jerry’ ”—Scanlon made quote marks with his fingers—“would be home.”
Scott’s own voice seemed to come from very far away. “It was ruled an accident.”
“Most arsons are, if you know what you’re doing.”
“I don’t believe you.”
But Scott looked at the eyes again and felt his world teeter. The images flooded in: Geri’s contagious smile, the unruly hair, the braces, the way she stuck her tongue out at him during family gatherings. He remembered her first real boyfriend (a dork named Brad), her not getting a date to the junior prom, the gung-ho speech she made when she ran for student council treasurer, her first rock band (they were awful), her college acceptance letter.
Scott felt his eyes well up. “She was only twenty-one.”
No response.
“Why?”
“I don’t get into the whys, Scott. I’m just a hired hand—”
“No, not that.” Scott looked up. “Why are you telling me this now?”
Scanlon studied his reflection in the mirror. His voice was very quiet. “Maybe you were right.”
“Right about what?”
“What you said before.” He turned back toward Scott. “Maybe after all is said and done, I need the illusion of being human.”
three months later
chapter 1
There are sudden rips. There are tears in your life, deep knife wounds that slash through your flesh. Your life is one thing, then it is shredded into another. It comes apart as though gutted in a belly slit. And then there are those moments when your life simply unravels. A loose thread pulled. A seam gives way. The change is slow at first, nearly imperceptible.
For Grace Lawson, the unraveling began at the Photomat.
She was about to enter the photo developing shop when she heard a somewhat familiar voice. “Why don’t you get a digital camera, Grace?”
Grace turned toward the woman. “I’m not good with that techno stuff.”
“Oh, come now. Digital technology is a snap.” The woman raised her hand and actually snapped, just in case Grace didn’t know what the word meant. “And digital cameras are sooo much more convenient than conventional cameras. You just erase the photos you don’t want. Like computer files. For our Christmas card? Barry, well
, he must have taken a zillion pictures of the kids, you know, snapping away because Blake blinked or Kyle was looking the wrong way, whatever, but when you shoot that many, well, like Barry says, you’re going to get one that’s pretty decent, am I right?”
Grace nodded. She was trying to unearth the woman’s name, but it wouldn’t surface. The woman’s daughter—Blake, was it?—was in Grace’s son’s class in first grade. Or maybe it was last year in kindergarten. Hard to keep track. Grace kept the smile frozen to her face. The woman was nice enough, but she blended in with the others. Grace wondered, not for the first time, if she was blending in too, if her once great individuality had joined the unpleasant swirl of suburban uniformity.
The thought was not a comforting one.
The woman kept describing the wonders of the digital age. Grace’s frozen smile began to ache. She glanced at her watch, hoping Tech Mom would pick up the hint. Two-forty-five. Almost time to pick up Max at school. Emma had swim team practice, but another mom was driving the carpool today. A carpool to the pool, as the too-jolly mother had reminded Grace with a little tee-hee. Yeah, funny stuff.
“We have to get together,” the woman said, winding down. “With Jack and Barry. I think they’d get along.”
“Definitely.”
Grace took advantage of the pause to wave good-bye, pull open the door, and disappear inside the Photomat. The glass door closed with a snap, ringing a little bell. The chemical smell, not unlike model glue, hit her first. She wondered about the long-term effects of working in such an environment and decided the short-term ones were annoying enough.
The kid working—Grace’s use of the term working being overly generous here—behind the counter had a white fuzz pellet under his chin, hair dyed a color that’d intimidate Crayola, and enough piercings to double as a wind instrument. One of those wrap-around-low headphones snaked around the back of his neck. The music was so loud that Grace could feel it in her chest. He had tattoos, lots of them. One read STONE. Another read KILLJOY. Grace thought that a third should read SLACKER.
“Excuse me?”
He did not look up.
“Excuse me?” she said a little louder.
Still nothing.
“Yah, like, dude?”
That got his attention. He snarled up, narrowed his eyes, offended by the interruption. He removed the headphones but grudgingly. “Stub.”
“Pardon me?”
“Stub.”
Ah. Grace handed him the receipt. Fuzz Pellet then asked her for her name. This reminded Grace of those damn customer service phones that ask you to dial in your home phone, and then as soon as you get a real live person, they ask you for the same phone number. Like the first request was just for practice.
Fuzz Pellet—Grace was warming up to this nickname—flipped through a file of photo packets before extracting one. He ripped off the tag and told her an exorbitant price. She handed him a Val-Pak coupon, one dug out of her purse in an excavation that rivaled the search for the Dead Sea Scrolls, and watched the price drop to something closer to reasonable.
He handed her the packet of photographs. Grace thanked him, but he already had the music plugged back into his cerebrum. She waved in his direction. “I come not for the pictures,” Grace said, “but for the sparkling repartee.”
Fuzz Pellet yawned and picked up his magazine. The latest issue of Modern Slacker.
Grace hit the sidewalk. The weather was brisk. Autumn had shoved summer aside with a patented gust. The leaves hadn’t really started turning yet, but the air had that apple-cider quality to it. The shop windows had started up with the Halloween decorations. Emma, her third grader, had convinced Jack to buy an eight-foot blowup Homer-Simpson-as-Frankenstein balloon. It looked, she had to admit, terrific. Her children liked The Simpsons, which meant that maybe, despite their best efforts, she and Jack were raising them right.
Grace wanted to slit open the envelope now. There was always an excitement with a newly developed roll of film, an opening-a-gift expectation, a hurry-to-the-mailbox-even-though-it’s-always-bills rush that digital photography, for all its conveniences, could never duplicate. But there wasn’t time before school let out.
As her Saab climbed up Heights Road, she took a small detour so that she could pass the town’s lookout. From here, the skyline of Manhattan, especially at night, lay spread out like diamonds on black velvet. The longing tugged at her. She loved New York City. Until four years ago, that wonderful island had been their home. They’d had a loft on Charles Street down in the Village. Jack worked on the medical research for a large pharmaceutical company. She painted in her home studio while scoffing at her suburban counterparts and their SUVs and corduroy pants and toddler-referenced dialogues. Now she was one of them.
Grace parked behind the school with the other mothers. She turned the engine off, picked up the Photomat envelope, and ripped it open. The roll was from last week’s annual trip to Chester for apple picking. Jack had snapped away. He liked being the family photographer. He considered it paternal manly work, taking the photos, as if this was a sacrifice a father was supposed to make for his family.
The first image was of Emma, their eight-year-old daughter, and Max, their six-year-old son, on the hayride, shoulders hunched, their cheeks reddened by wind. Grace stopped and stared for a moment. Feelings of, yes, maternal warmth, both primitive and evolutionary, rocked her back. That was the thing with kids. It was the little things that got to you. She’d remembered that it had been cold that day. The orchard, she knew, would be too crowded. She had not wanted to go. Now, looking at this photograph, she wondered about the idiocy of her priorities.
The other mothers were gathering by the school fence, making small talk and planning play-dates. It was, of course, the modern era, post-feminist America, and yet, of the roughly eighty parents waiting for their charges, only two were male. One, she knew, was a father who’d been laid off for more than a year. You could see it in his eyes, his slow shuffle, the missed spots when he shaved. The other guy was a stay-at-home journalist who always seemed a little too anxious to chat up the moms. Lonely maybe. Or something else.
Someone knocked on the car window. Grace looked up. Cora Lindley, her best friend in town, signaled for her to unlock the door. Grace did. Cora slid into the passenger seat next to her.
“So how did the date go last night?” Grace asked.
“Poorly.”
“Sorry.”
“Fifth-date syndrome.”
Cora was a divorcee, a little too sexy for the nervous, ever-protective “ladies who lunch.” Clad in a low-cut, leopard-print blouse with spandex pants and pink pumps, Cora most assuredly did not fit in with the stream of khakis and loose sweaters. The other mothers eyed her with suspicion. Adult suburbia can be a lot like high school.
“What’s fifth-date syndrome?” Grace asked.
“You’re not dating much, are you?”
“Well, no,” Grace said. “The husband and two kids have really cramped my style.”
“Pity. See—and don’t ask me why—but on the fifth date, the guys always raise the subject . . . how should I word this delicately? . . . of a ménage à trois.”
“Please tell me you’re joking.”
“I joke with you not. Fifth date. At the latest. The guy asks me, on a purely theoretical basis, what my opinion is on ménage à trois. Like it’s peace in the Middle East.”
“What do you say?”
“That I usually enjoy them, especially when the two men start French-kissing.”
Grace laughed and they both got out of the car. Grace’s bad leg ached. After more than a decade, she shouldn’t be self-conscious about it anymore, but Grace still hated for people to see the limp. She stayed by the car and watched Cora walk away. When the bell rang, the kids burst out as if they’d been fired from a cannon. Like every other parent, Grace only had eyes for her own. The rest of the pack, uncharitable as this might sound, was scenery.
Max emerged in the second ex
odus. When Grace saw her son—one sneaker lace untied, his Yu-Gi-Oh! backpack looking four sizes too big, his New York Rangers knit hat tilted to the side like a tourist’s beret—the warmth rushed over anew. Max made his way down the stairs, adjusting the backpack up his shoulders. She smiled. Max spotted her and smiled back.
He hopped in the back of the Saab. Grace strapped him into the booster seat and asked him how his day was. Max answered that he didn’t know. She asked him what he did in school that day. Max answered that he didn’t know. Did he learn math, English, science, arts and crafts? Answer: Shrug and dunno. Grace nodded. A classic case of the epidemic known as Elementary-School Alzheimer’s. Were the kids drugged to forget or sworn to secrecy? One of life’s mysteries.
It was not until after she got home and gave Max his Go-GURT snack—think yogurt in a toothpaste-like squeeze tube—that Grace had the chance to take a look at the rest of the photographs.
The message light on the answering machine was blinking. One message. She checked the Caller ID and saw that the number was blocked. She pressed play and was surprised. The voice belonged to an old . . . friend, she guessed. Acquaintance was too casual. Father-figure was probably more accurate, but only in the most bizarre sense.
“Hi, Grace. It’s Carl Vespa.”
He did not have to say his name. It had been years, but she’d always know the voice.
“Could you give me a call when you have the chance? I need to talk to you about something.”
The message beeped again. Grace did not move, but she felt an old fluttering in her belly. Vespa. Carl Vespa had called. This could not be good. Carl Vespa, for all his kindnesses to her, was not one for idle chitchat. She debated calling him back and decided for the time being against it.
Grace moved into the spare bedroom that had become her makeshift studio. When she was painting well—when she was, like any artist or athlete, “in the zone”—she saw the world as if preparing to put it on canvas. She would look at the streets, the trees, the people and imagine the type of brush she would use, the stroke, the mix of colors, the differing lights and casts of shadows. Her work should reflect what she wanted, not reality. That was how she looked at art. We all see the world through our own prism, of course. The best art tweaked reality to show the artist’s world, what she saw or, more precisely, what she wanted others to see. It was not always a more beautiful reality. It was often more provocative, uglier maybe, more gripping and magnetic. Grace wanted a reaction. You might enjoy a beautiful setting sun—but Grace wanted you immersed in her sunset, afraid to turn away from it, afraid not to.
