by Lis Wiehl
“Do you want money? I’ve got some cash. Or I could give you my ATM card and my PIN.”
Joey wished she wasn’t looking right at him. It would have been a lot easier to shoot her while her face was turned away, and she was talking to the kid. Maybe he would make them kneel on the floor and then shoot them in the back of the head.
Should he lie to her? Would it make it easier to kill them, make her more likely to cooperate, if he told Sara all he wanted was money? He reminded himself to take her purse when he left. Sissy had said to make it look like a robbery gone wrong.
Joey found he couldn’t lie, not with her brown eyes boring into him. “I don’t want your money.”
Sara took a deep breath. “You can do anything you want to me, just leave my son alone. Don’t hurt my son. Look, I’ll lock Noah in his room. He hasn’t even seen your face.” She still had her kid’s face pressed into the curve of her waist.
Joey gave a slight shake of his head. “I don’t want to—” He wasn’t going to say the word rape out loud, especially not in front of the kid. “I don’t want that. Look, lady, somebody wants you taken care of. For good. So that’s what I’m here to do.”
“And my son?” Her voice had dropped to a whisper.
Joey kept his own voice soft. “If he was here, they said to do him too.”
“So Noah’s just, just—an afterthought?” Her eyes flashed. “You would do something like that to a kid, and it would be for no reason? Just because he was here?”
Joey didn’t have an answer.
“Why are you doing this?”
“If I don’t kill you, they’ll kill me.”
“Who?” Sara’s brow furrowed. “Who wants me dead?”
The hand holding the gun was shaking now. Joey steadied it with his other hand, wrapping his fingers around his knuckles, just like he had seen a million guys do it on TV and in movies. He was so afraid of shooting her. And her kid. Even if he shot them in the back of the head.
What if they made sounds? What if it took more than one shot? What if they tried to crawl away? He had a feeling they wouldn’t die all neat and quick the way it always was on TV.
But Joey was even more afraid of Sissy.
“I can’t tell you who it is. Just someone.”
Sara’s mouth fell so far open that Joey could see the flash of silver fillings in the back. “What? No, no! It’s Ian? Ian wants you to do this?”
Sissy’s boyfriend. The guy who had driven away. Joey didn’t say anything.
“But how could Ian—And his son? His own son?” Sara doubled over as if she had been punched in the stomach.
Joey thought about correcting her. But in a way Ian had set this thing into motion. So he stayed silent.
“Mommy,” the boy protested, twisting his head back and forth. “You’re hurting me. Let me go!”
But even though the news had clearly gutted her, Sara was still careful to keep her son’s face pressed against her side.
It was pathetic, really. As if Joey could let him live. The kid had seen him in the park, after all.
For a long moment the room was silent except for the sound of the woman’s breathing.
Joey knew he should hurry her along. Get this thing done and get out of here. Before one of the neighbors realized just how out of place a beat-up gold El Camino looked parked down the street. Before the mailman came or a friend stopped by.
Sara took a shaky breath, steadied herself, straightened up. Her eyes looked into his. And she didn’t see him as an animal, or a criminal. She looked past the melted patchwork skin of his face. Joey felt like she saw inside his soul.
“You can’t do this,” Sara whispered. “I know you can’t.”
He pointed the gun straight at her chest, but even with both hands it was shaking so much from side to side that it seemed possible he might miss her altogether.
And there was a long moment that stretched out until it seemed it would break. He looked into her unblinking eyes. Even the kid was quiet.
What was he? What—who—was Joey Decicco? Was he just Sissy’s errand boy? Or was he something more?
“Look, just lie down, Sara,” Joey found himself saying. “Just lie down. Both of you. And try to look dead.”
“What?” Her head snapped back. “Why?”
“I’m supposed to take a photo of you. For proof. And then you have to get out of town. Right now. Just start driving and don’t stop. And don’t talk to anyone. Not your family. Not your friends. And get as many miles away from here as you can before anyone figures out that you’re not really dead.”
Sara shook her head. “If we just lie on the ground, we won’t look dead. Not dead enough anyway. Look, put the gun away. Put the gun away and I’ll help you make it look real.”
Sara looked down at her kid and then lifted her hand away, already believing that Joey would do what she had asked. And in that moment, the moment when the gun was still pointed at her, Joey could have shot her.
The kid saw him think about it. His mouth started to open. But then Joey slipped the gun back into his waistband.
Sara walked into the kitchen and began opening up the cupboards. “In high school we did this play,” she said over her shoulder, “and we had to make stage blood.” She took out a clear bottle of corn syrup and a tin of cornstarch. “Good thing I didn’t clean out the cupboards when I moved out. Now all I need to remember is where I kept the—” Her hand closed on a small box. “Here it is. Food coloring. You need red and just a tiny bit of blue.”
Joey and the kid watched as Sara used a fork to mix the concoction in a glass with a little water, finally adding one drop of blue, then another until it was just the right color and consistency. And at the end, the three of them were looking at what appeared to be a glass full of blood.
“Cool!” the kid said with a grin.
Joey stuck his finger in and then wiped a trail of “blood” along his forearm. It looked like blood. It also looked like it had been applied, not like it was from a wound. He lapped it off, sweet and sticky, while he thought.
“Can I try some?” The kid bounced on his toes.
“Maybe you could both let some dribble out of your mouths?” Joey suggested. “If we try to put it on your chests or something, I think it will just look too fake.”
“Okay, Noah,” Sara said, “I need you to try some, but don’t swallow most of it. Let it stay in your mouth. We’re going to play a little game. That’s all. Just a game. For fun.”
“To fool Daddy?”
“Yes, honey . . .” Sara’s voice caught. “To fool Daddy.”
And finally she lay with the child on the wooden floor, her arm half sheltering him, the “blood” running from their slack mouths, their eyes unfocused.
It was a bad photo. But photos from cheap cell phones always were.
It still might be good enough to fool Sissy. Long enough for Joey to get his money and hightail it out of here. Go down to Mexico or someplace warm where $10,000 went a long way. Long enough for Sara to put some distance between herself and Sissy’s anger.
Long enough that this photo would never become a reality.
CHAPTER 44
Southeast Portland
Korena came to Clark’s apartment a few minutes after he got off work. She had asked him to leave his door unlocked so the neighbors wouldn’t hear her knock. Wouldn’t peek outside and see her standing there.
By the time she slipped in the door, Clark was already having second thoughts. Had he really told Korena he was willing to do anything to keep her safe from her husband? Willing even to kill? But at the sight of her swollen eye, looking even worse than it had a few hours earlier, his resolve hardened.
She flew into his arms, kissing his face, murmuring “Thank you! Thank you!” in his ear.
Later, in bed, she explained her thinking to him.
“Did you ever see that movie Strangers on a Train?”
“No. It’s really old, right?” In the gathering darkness, Clark coul
d just make out the side of her face, her perfect cheekbone, the dark pool where the bruise framed her eye.
“Yeah. In the movie, two people who meet on the train each have someone they want dead. They decide to trade murders. And they figure the police will never catch them because the killer won’t have a motive. They’ll just be a stranger. That’s like our situation. I’d be the first person the cops would look at. I can’t kill Joey, even though it’s in self-defense.” She pushed herself up one elbow. “But when you do it, no one would ever tie it to you.” She leaned down and kissed his forehead. “You haven’t told anyone about us, have you?”
“No.” It was mostly true. The day before, Clark had hinted to his mother that he had a girlfriend. His mom had squealed and wanted to know all about her. But he hadn’t said much.
“Then it will be perfect. No one knows we know each other. The police will look at me, of course. But I’ll make sure I’m someplace busy so I’ll have an alibi. And they’ll never connect it up with you, because why would you kill a stranger?”
“Uh-huh,” Clark said. He wished he could slow things down. Think about them more. “But won’t they notice that we’re, um”—dating wasn’t the right word—“seeing each other?”
“We’ll have to be careful, sure,” she said. “But I’ll bet we can work something out.”
And then her next kiss turned into something more.
It felt like Clark had been standing forever. His feet hurt. Korena had woken him up at three so that he would have time to pick a hiding spot. He’d had maybe ninety minutes of sleep.
He was dressed in army-green pants and a brown sweater. Not hunter’s camouflage, even though he owned some, because, as Korena had pointed out, camouflage would make people look twice.
Clark’s back was braced against an old Douglas fir. In front of him was a manzanita bush, with its reddish bark and stiff, twisting branches. And cradled in his arms was his rifle.
He had considered using a .223 round. For a direct hit to a vital area it would be plenty. But what if something went wrong? He had ultimately decided to go with a .308 caliber round, in case he missed the vitals or Joey was wearing a heavy jacket. Even in those cases, a .30 caliber round would be a killer.
Clark had been a hunter since he was twelve. His family ate what they killed. His parents and his cousins and uncles all had trucks with campers on the beds, and during hunting season they took off for a week or two at a time. Slept out underneath the stars. The rules didn’t really apply out in the woods. You could drink even if you were a kid. You didn’t have to go to school. You didn’t need to wash, and you took care of your business behind a tree. And you could eat all the junk food you wanted. Some of his best memories were of hunting trips.
Clark was tucked away in the trees two hundred yards from the little parking lot at the far end of the park. The darkness and the silence reminded him of all the times he had waited in the dawn for a deer to walk by. Forest Park had been left more or less as natural as its namesake, full of trees and ferns. It wasn’t the kind of park that had play structures, basketball courts, or off-leash dog parks. Twenty minutes ago a coyote had loped by a hundred feet away, its yellow eyes regarding Clark without fear.
And now a gold El Camino pulled into the parking lot.
An electric shock—equal parts terror and thrill—jolted from Clark’s head to his heels. But he had to make sure it was Joey. Korena’s ex-husband, who thought that he owned her.
When the guy got out of his car, one look at his face was all it took.
“He’s got scars here,” Korena had said, touching the perfection of her cheek. “From the fire he set that killed his family. Be careful. Shoot him from far away. You don’t want to get close to him.”
This guy’s skin was a patchwork, some sections pale or ruddier than others. The skin on one side of his face seemed stretched too tight.
Was that what made him be so mean to Korena, those scars? Clark felt a flash of unexpected sympathy. When no one wanted to look at your face, you could feel less than human. You could get angry. When you could hear people talking about you behind your back, or you saw them point and whisper, then part of you was angry all the time.
As Joey waited for what he thought would be Korena, his expression wasn’t happy, the way Clark had thought it would be. Maybe it was just hard to tell, what with the scars. But he looked—anxious. His head was turning from side to side as he paced next to the car. Looking for his ex-wife. Expecting to claim her for good.
“I told him I would meet him at Forest Park tomorrow at dawn,” Korena had said to Clark. “I told him I was ready to go back to him.”
“But why the park?”
“It’s where we first . . .” Her voice trailed off. “It was a special place to us. Before. Before he turned all violent.”
Clark hadn’t wanted to hear any more. It was bad enough to think of her ex-husband hurting her. It was worse to think of Korena welcoming his touch.
Joey didn’t look that big, not nearly as big as Korena had said. Someone who was hurting you probably just seemed bigger. He was maybe a little over five foot ten, trim, wearing jeans and a plaid flannel shirt over a black T-shirt. His hair was brown and so curly it stood up around his head like an Afro.
He didn’t look like a monster. He just looked like a guy who had had a run of bad luck.
Clark wavered, until he thought of the bruise on the inside of Korena’s arm. Her swollen, purple eye. This man wouldn’t stop until he killed Korena. Killed her. Clark couldn’t let that happen.
To reduce any sway, he pressed his back against the rough bark of the tree. He raised the rifle until it was tucked into his shoulder and pointed at the sky. His trigger hand was on the stock and his supporting arm on the fore-end stock. He was well within range. He flipped off the safety.
In a single smooth move, Clark brought the rifle down, tucking his supporting arm into his hip as he did so. His rested his cheek against the stock. As he exhaled, he squeezed the trigger, just the way his dad had taught him years ago.
But Joey must have caught sight of the movement, because he suddenly darted to the left. The bullet zinged past him. And quicker than Clark would have thought possible, the guy was running like a jackrabbit, zigzagging from side to side.
With Clark right behind him.
Then Joey reached into the back waistband of his jeans and pulled out a gun. A gun! Korena had been right. Joey had wanted to kill her. And the only way to stop him was to kill him first.
Rather than turn and fire at Clark, Joey kept running, kept zigzagging, taking big leaping steps. Then he caught his toe on a rock half buried in the dirt. Suddenly he was airborne. His gun flew fifteen feet away.
He landed hard on his hands and knees. He started to get up, but then he looked over his shoulder and saw Clark running toward him, the rifle pointed right at him. He rose to his knees, clasping his hands in front of him like he was praying. Or begging.
“Hold on,” he said. “You don’t need to do this.”
Clark circled around him. Not saying anything. He could have shot him in the back, but that didn’t seem right. It would have been cowardly. He had been taught that you owned what you did. You ate what you shot. You served quail breast for dinner and spit the bird shot into your napkin. You didn’t hunt deer just for the venison steaks or, even worse, only for the rack to put on your wall. Even the not-so-good bits you turned into spicy deer sausage or pepperoni.
“You’re just a kid!” Joey said when he saw Clark’s face. “Did Sissy put you up to this?” He snorted a laugh. “You’re just as big an idiot as me. She’s got us all dancing to her tune. We’re just her puppets. So what are you going to do now? Shoot me in my face? Not so easy when you’re ten feet away, is it? You can’t do it, can you? Can’t look right into my eyes and—”
Clark pulled the trigger, and Joey fell back in a boneless sprawl. Flooded with horror, Clark turned and vomited. Nothing came up but strings of yellow bile.
“Why?”
“The cell phone will have my number on it. He calls me all the time. I don’t need one more thing linking us.”
“And his wallet?”
She had shrugged. “If his wallet is gone, they might think it’s a robbery.”
Clark couldn’t imagine a robber going so far as to shoot some guy who had only an El Camino to show for his sorry life. Still, he found the cell phone and wallet in the back pocket of the guy’s jeans. He pulled them free, then wiped the phone, the wallet, and his fingers clean on the guy’s pants. Trying not to think about the wetness his fingertips had touched.
Should he get the gun? But then what? He and Korena didn’t need to protect themselves, not anymore. Not now that Joey was dead. And the gun would throw the police off. Make it look like a fight.
Instead of what it was. An ambush.
Even though he was no longer directly looking at the thing that had once been Joey Decicco, Clark gagged again.
CHAPTER 45
FBI Portland Field Office
In the middle of the afternoon, Dixie, the FBI’s receptionist, stuck her graying head into Nic’s cubicle.
“Hey, could you talk to this citizen? She and her kid just walked in off the street. She says they’re the targets of a murder for hire.”
Nic was getting to her feet when Dixie added, “Oh, and I asked Leif if he could assist you.” Nic shot her a look, but she was already walking back to her desk.
Dixie was always talking Leif up to Nic and vice versa. She was unaware that her efforts had already been nipped in the bud.
Nic took a deep breath. She and Leif still worked together, she reminded herself. That meant they passed in the hallway, nodded at each other in meetings, and acted like there had never been anything between them. She was a professional. She could handle this.
A haggard woman with messy dark hair stood in the lobby. She was shifting from foot to foot and looked ready to bolt. One hand gripped the shoulder of a little boy. He had dark hair like his mother, and wide brown eyes that looked more curious than traumatized.
