After messaging Cherry asking if she could swing by the Doggy Depot, to look after Sybil until I could arrange her a doggy passport, I headed off to locate the ticket sales desk, though took a detour to the bathroom. I could have my old room back, spend some time bonding with the ’rents. Who knows, maybe Mother would grow to like me again, now I was crawling home and she could land a big, fat ‘I told you so’ on my shoulders.
Whatever lay ahead, at least now I knew. I’d never have to look back over my shoulder.
I reached the door for the ladies’, though soon felt the uncomfortable closeness of someone behind me. Moving aside didn’t help, my steps were simply matched. Before I knew what was happening, a gloved hand clamped over my mouth and an arm snaked around my neck as I was sent hurtling through the bathroom door, rushing for the row of porcelain sinks ahead.
Inside the bathroom, a lady in a New York Mets sweater was splashing her face with water.
‘Get out!’ my attacker bellowed at her.
Before I could plead for help, she’d already grabbed her holdall, bowed her head and rushed out. A hand was now jabbing at my back as I shuffled forward in an unnatural movement, my lower body hitting the sink bowl while my middle bent over. I tried to scream as he grabbed a fistful of hair, but nothing came out. My windpipe stuttered under the pressure, shouts of pain through gloved fingers little more than stifled groans.
In the mirror my captor loomed, sporting a deep-blue suit, gold-flecked tie and black beanie hat. ‘When I take my hand away, you won’t scream. I can’t be held responsible for what’ll happen if you do.’
He removed his hand and I breathed freely, remaining bent over the sinks now only to catch my breath.
‘You fu . . .’ I managed, holding the sides of the washbasin.
‘Watch your mouth, bitch. This is a family feature,’ Evan said, addressing my reflection. Folding his arms, he took a step back while I grabbed at my throat.
‘How did . . .’
‘Come on, of course I found you. Where else would you go but home? Though honestly, who goes on vacation and doesn’t pack their passport?’ There was my UK passport, waving idly in his hand. ‘You’ve been looking for it, right?’
‘Only since I moved into your apartment.’ I coughed, still massaging my throat.
‘I couldn’t let you leave. I just couldn’t find your US one. You obviously hid it well.’
‘I don’t have a US passport.’
‘Dual nationality. That’s what you told me when you reported Joe’s abuse. And if I had your only passport, how were you planning to get home? A leisurely swim across the Atlantic?’ Evan jumped forwards and, with a quick elbow in my face, he tore at my jacket. ‘You haven’t let it out of your sight. You’ve had it with you the whole goddamn time.’ It didn’t take him long to retrieve my one chance at freedom from the inside lining. At least he didn’t find the money.
I dared to look him right in the eyes. ‘Give it back.’
‘You’re giving me orders now, miss I’m-too-delusional-to-get-out-of-bed? How long have you known about my drugging experiment? Except you know a little more than that.’
I looked away. ‘Who are you?’ I asked through clenched teeth.
He cocked his head to the side. ‘But I’m Evan. Loveable, saviour, all-round good guy Evan.’
‘I thought I was supposed to be the one on Angel Dust.’
He edged forward, patting his jacket. ‘Keep talking, honey. I’m dying to shoot you in the head.’
‘What, in the middle of one of the busiest airports in the world? You wouldn’t make it out alive.’
‘Who said anything about here? And I shot Joe, didn’t I? You think I don’t have the balls?’
‘You didn’t shoot Joe. He works for you.’
‘Well, that’s the ten-million-dollar question, isn’t it?’ Evan drew back his jacket to reveal his shoulder-holstered gun. ‘You’re walking out of this airport with me.’
‘I’ll scream.’
‘No. You won’t.’
We emerged from the bathroom, shuffling across the floor like a pantomime horse. Evan stood behind me with a hand on my shoulder and the gun barrel tickling my back. As he forced the weapon deeper into my spine, I felt nothing short of sick.
‘Try anything and I’ll kill you in front of everyone,’ he murmured in my ear. ‘I don’t care what happens to me but I think you value your life higher than death or prison, my Cute Little Rich Bitch.’
‘And is that part of the plan?’
‘Just keep walking.’
In the vast departure hall we were consistently ignored. Even with the late hour, the desks for flights to Miami, Tucson and Vegas were oversubscribed. I stared at the blank faces, hoping someone would catch my eye, searching for the Mets lady and trusting she’d raised the alarm. It was hopeless. We were invisible. We were just another couple, trying to get home.
One final push, and we were out through the revolving doors.
‘Get in the car,’ he grunted, the gun no longer hidden.
I was pushed toward a large black car parked in the loading zone. The memories floated back, of Joe sunbathing on his bonnet wearing an achingly cool smile.
‘Get the hell in!’
I climbed onto the back seat, shaking inside but with an intact outer shell. In unrivalled fear, I backed up against the door, discretely tugging the handle, but Evan had already climbed in behind and deadlocked the vehicle. Retrieving a black cable tie from a bunch in the driver’s seat pocket, he reached for my wrists as my shoulder smacked the door armrest.
‘Get off me!’ I screamed while struggling over the seat, kicking at his legs. ‘Evan, what are you doing?’ My hands turned white as he yanked on the cable tie to bind my wrists.
Visibly unnerved, he peered out through the tinted windows. ‘God damn, quit screaming! Keep your mouth shut or I’ll tape it up. How’d you like that?’
I continued to fight and struggle as Evan grasped his woollen hat and pulled it over my face. The whole world turned black.
‘Evan!’ I screamed, thrashing over the seats and blindly kicking at the doors.
Then I heard the engine turn over as the vehicle roared to life.
‘You don’t mind if I punch you in the head, do you? Just to stop you screa . . .’
THIRTY-SIX
Opening my eyes, the darkness remained.
We were travelling at speed. A highway. At least the car was still moving. At least there wasn’t soil in my mouth.
The pain was searing, like someone had bound my hands, veiled my face and punched me in the head, my breath hot and damp against the hat. Squirming and struggling felt like a token gesture for the piece, the cable tie only biting into my flesh as I did. For all that was out there, beyond the veil ahead of me, the fear was negotiable and the only thing I had left.
Were it not for my binds, the gentle rocking of the car as I lay over the back seats would have left me strangely serene. It could’ve been the sea, lapping the yacht Will and I would’ve hired in the Seychelles; it almost slipped my mind I was being driven to my death.
‘Finally. She wakes.’ Evan’s voice felt far away, like he was in another room.
With the hat over my eyes, my reply was little more than a murmur.
‘What’s that?’ he asked. ‘Say again?’
I felt the car swerve as Evan must’ve reached behind him, and it wasn’t long before I was unmasked. Through the window I glanced into a starless sky, the clouds sagging like water balloons. From the back of the car, the hum of the city and my soundtrack to the last few months was strangely muted. There were no horns, screeches or sirens crescendoing. Maybe I didn’t need the incidentals anymore.
With a face half-hidden in shadow, Evan smiled ever so slightly, his stare fixed on the nothingness ahead. I’d barely noticed the packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes tucked into the passenger seat pocket, barely realised this wasn’t Evan’s car at all.
‘Where are you taking me?’ My voice
was raspy, like it was someone else’s. Shit, my head hurt.
‘Ah, you’re going to like it there. It’ll be like summer camp. There’re activities.’
‘I never went to summer camp.’
‘Wow. Sounds like one shitty childhood you had there. But we both know it wasn’t.’
‘Evan, tell me where we’re going,’ I croaked, covertly wrestling with the cable tie. I had to keep him talking until I could wrestle free. The bunch of cable ties stuck out of the rear seat pocket. I just had to snap my binds, reach for one, pin him to the seat by his neck and . . .
‘Want a clue where we’re headed? I’ve got a shovel in the trunk, and, if you’re lucky, I might even let you dig your own hole.’
I couldn’t tell if I was breathing. Maybe I wasn’t.
‘Let’s have some music. I can’t seem to shut you up tonight.’ Reaching to the radio and tuning the station to classical, Vaughan Williams seeped out between the darkness. ‘I’m more of a Beastie Boys kinda guy, but this’ll do. We’ve got a while before the woods. I’m up for some exposition. Don’t you want to know?’
‘Know what?’ I couldn’t stop my voice trembling. I was imagining the hole; imagining me in the hole. There had to be a way, to snap the cable tie before I was between the fallen branches and small ferns, in the hole Joe had recently vacated.
‘Hell, you’re going to die anyway. What does it matter if I tell you?’
As Evan’s eyes stared out from the mirror, glistening with excitement like a child’s at Christmas, I could see he’d been itching to tell me all about his macabre plan.
‘Okay, I’ve got a question for you. For ten points, is Joe dead, or did he survive that bullet to the chest?’
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t playing along with Evan’s stupid game.
‘Answer the goddamn question,’ Evan ordered, a gun nonchalantly pulled from his shoulder holster before he aimed it between the seats towards me. ‘Is. Joe. Dead?’
I kept my words to myself, concentrating on the binds, not the gun.
‘No comment? Nothing at all? Let me help. A gun filled with blanks, a guy on the floor covered in cow’s blood . . . Hate to break it to you, but you never saw him buried in that grave because, hell, he never was.’
Withdrawing the gun, Evan appeared to be waiting for me to compliment his brilliance. At least I knew he wouldn’t shoot me. I had this master plan to hear all about first.
Of course Joe wasn’t dead. Of course I’d seen him on the South Shore, taking Evan’s briefcase of money, though that Joe had been unrecognisable from our last embrace, so much so, I’d mistaken him for Mr F. Clean-shaven, and with his weight appearing to have halved, for the first time cheekbones had emerged from under his olive skin. The worn biker jacket had hung off his frame like there was nothing left of his sinewy outline. It was like he’d dissolved.
‘I hit Joe with 5-in-1 cartridges, honey. I shot him with blanks. He was wearing a blood pack. Joe never died. I never put him in the trunk of my car and never buried him in the hole. I wrapped a mannequin in the carpet and weighed it down with bags of flour. All that trouble, and you ran away? But then, what wife helps bury their murdered husband in a shallow grave? For sure, not a nice girl like you.’
My head was swimming. The carpet. The gun. Next, he’d be telling me Joe wasn’t an alcoholic.
‘I saw Joe,’ I said, not realising I’d spoken out loud.
Evan glowered at me in the mirror. ‘That’s it? That’s all you’ve got to say? I’m baring my soul here.’
‘Joe stood by the bed and smiled at me. At your apartment.’
‘Honey bunny, you were drugged up on Angel Dust, on PCP. Of course you thought he was a ghost back from the dead. Not literally I mean, not like he is now . . . never mind!’ he yelled, punching the steering wheel. After a long pause, he calmed his tone. ‘Forget what you know about your life.’
‘Because it’s a lie?’
He wagged a finger at me. ‘The dumb blonde has grown a brain. Not clever enough to see who Joe was before you married him though: a violent drunk you’d soon crave an escape from. Then who comes along but a good-looking cop? He’s generous and caring and promises to protect you from that evil husband of yours. Joe threatens to kill you with a knife ‒ Charlie ‒ and leaves, then when I pick you up outside your hotel, what do you know happens? Joe appears, kidnaps you, and then I shoot him. You’ve been saved and incriminated in one fell swoop.’
‘Incriminated?’
‘Joe is one of my snitches. He doesn’t mind ratting out his friends for a buck or two, and one night over too many beers, he tells me about the hot new wife he’s been burdened with. What’s the catch, I ask. It was great, at first, he says, falling over himself to convince a high-end chick he was more than UPS’s finest delivery boy. By the time he realises what the hell he’s done, you’re already hitched. At first I figure it’s another of Joe’s sob stories, until he made a fatal mistake, and told me your name. Believe me, you wouldn’t be tied up on the backseat of a car if he hadn’t. Ms A. Clarke, daughter of Howard Clarke, the once joint owner of a successful investment company right here in Chicago. Do you know who your daddy’s partner was all those years ago? A guy who was driven to drink himself to death. Michal Francis Thomasz. Your daddy’s partner was my father.’
Out on the highway, the lights began to blur. Everything began to blur.
‘Come on, honey. You’ve pieced it together by now, right? Mrs Petrozzi, tied up on the back seat, what was the name of the company?’
I expelled one long breath. ‘T&C Associates. Thomasz and Clarke.’
Evan clapped his way through twenty seconds before grinning like the Joker. ‘Overnight, Howard, his beautiful wife and cute little daughter disappear, along with the ten million dollars my pa and your pa siphoned from the Great American Public. Ten million. Everything they stole. I was twenty-one, fresh out of the Academy and scared shitless with a gun on my belt. I had more to worry about than a father who never asked for anything but his whisky. Then Howard bullies my dad into this crazy Ponzi scheme, hoping my father wouldn’t last the year. Howard knew when they came looking for the money, there’d be a dead man to blame and he could make off with the cash. It meant I’d never see a dime. The old man then let that money-grabbing bitch take what was left of my inheritance and ended his life in a drunken stupor. But then you fall into my lap, slumming it with my snitch on the South Side. I couldn’t have written a better ending. Finally, you could suffer in their place; Howard’s and my father’s.’
It’d cut further into my wrist, but I’d managed to hook the cable tie around a piece of metal protruding out from the seatbelt buckle. Given enough friction, and time, I could cut myself free.
‘My Cute Little Rich Bitch. That’s what I used to call you; not Joe’s usual trailer trash for sure. It’s been fifteen years, I know, but my father told me enough about Howard. I knew he wouldn’t have squandered the money. He would’ve made sure you were provided for. So, how could I take it back? What I was owed and more? You might’ve been married to Joe, but there was no pre-nup and he didn’t know shit about the money. You didn’t tell him, did you? Blackmail was the only sensible option. I did some digging, but what do you know? Apart from the money itself, you and your family were squeaky clean. Yeah, there was some psyche ward shit, which gave me the drugging idea, but nothing to blackmail you over. You were boring. This is why you wanted Joe? Jesus, bitch, how cliché can you get?’
‘Fuck you, Evan,’ I sneered, kicking out at the door in frustration.
Evan’s hands rose from the steering wheel in mock surprise. ‘Not so boring now, not so Cute Little Rich Bitch! A feisty one I made here. You can thank me later.’
‘Thank you?’ I breathed.
‘Come on, I’ve met that stiff upper lip, tea-drinking fool. He wasn’t good enough, was he? So you ran away and married the first exciting guy you came across, which happened to be Joe. Stage one was set. Joe would treat you like crap so you’d
want to leave him. After waving two hundred grand in his face and then promising more, I didn’t have to ask twice. That’s the man you married, honey.’
After I strangled Evan with the cable tie, Joe was next.
‘I mean, stage one wasn’t perfect, I admit. You could’ve run to the cops, which you did, but at least I was the one who took the statement.’
I let out a strained laugh. ‘That’s why Zupansky didn’t know about the report.’
‘Why would I file it? So the cops could go arrest Joe? Then came stage two. You’d leave your husband and fall into my arms.’
I dared another laugh. Evan was becoming more delusional by the minute. ‘And why would I ever do that?’
‘I know, I was coming on too strong. I took the hint and got a girlfriend.’
‘Brandi?’
‘You weren’t taking the bait. You were supposed to leave Joe’s shitty apartment and move in with me, but instead you book a room at the Four Seasons? Talk about gratitude. I saved your goddamn life! You weren’t falling for me, you didn’t trust me, but if I had a girlfriend . . . there was no threat. You wouldn’t assume I wanted to be anything other than friends. When you finally moved in, she took a long walk off a short pier.’
I hoped not literally. ‘I think she had a lucky escape.’
‘You know what? I think you’re right.’
Not that I was dying to know, but: ‘What was stage three?’ The binds had begun to loosen. If he focused on the story, he’d spend less time focusing on me.
‘You don’t have any secrets? I invent some. Joe dies, you’re involved, and bam! Instant blackmail material. You became my accessory to murder. Now you couldn’t run to the cops. The jeopardy was enough to keep you from buckling under the pressure and shooting off your mouth to the police. Joe wanted to divorce you. I offered a way out that paid. He just had to kick you in the head a couple of times and pretend to be an alcoholic, to give him something to blame his change of character on. Come on, don’t look at me like that. Everyone as a price.’
The Good Kind of Bad Page 33
