“Who ordered it?”
“I can help you but…you’re gonna kill me anyway, so the longer I…the longer I…” He winced from internal pain before eking out his point. “The longer I hold back, the longer I stay alive.”
He tried to climb out. No luck, too steep. He took another moment to catch his breath before returning to the negotiation table.
“So why don’t w-we try a deal?” he said, wincing. “Let’s find a way…to guarantee…my life…and I’ll tell you a name.”
“No.”
He stared at me.
My single syllable arrived with such finality that he lost all his leverage and could only gawk back at me. Two men locking eyes. I wasn’t trying to scare him. I’d always wanted my enemies to regard me as respectful and polite.
“Wait,” he said. “Wait, wait. Look, I could lie to you, but I’m not gonna lie, I’m just gonna come clean and tell you I don’t know who ordered the hit.”
“You probably just have one functioning lung,” I told him. I could see that his wound was pretty bad. “That’s hardly a game changer. You climb out, you rest for a month, then you’ll regain full health. The catch…is…you can’t climb out without my help.”
“Go to hell.”
“Eventually, yes. But I’m looking for an answer.”
He didn’t provide one. He was going to die very soon.
“I’m asking one more time, then I’m walking away to let your blood drip into the Atlantic.”
“No! We negotiate.”
“I’ll tell you what.” I flipped my cylinder out to reload. I left one cartridge in my hand for dramatic effect. One cartridge. I did all of this very slowly and with a certain panache. “I don’t negotiate but…Do you like strategy games, Byron?” I placed the cartridge on the pavement between us. “This isn’t exactly Russian roulette.” He was petrified. “See, instead of four empty chambers and one bullet…I have one empty chamber and four bullets.” I spun the cylinder with a classic silent whir. A Wheel of Misfortune. I snapped it in, then abruptly pointed the gun at him and, with no overture, immediately pulled the trigger.
Click! Empty.
“Aagh! You’re insane!” he said, heaving for breath. “You’re insane. I heard about you.”
This got my attention. I lowered my gun. I lowered my voice. “I’m not insane. I have a love of literature and grain-fed meat, but insane? Not true.”
I spun the cylinder again.
“I’m telling you,” said Byron. “I don’t…The…”
I aimed the gun at him.
“I don’t know!”
I pulled the trigger again. Click.
Miraculously, I mean quite miraculously, the hammer had clicked on what was the lone empty chamber yet again, twice in a row. The odds of this were astounding. Twenty-five to one. At which point, at last, to everyone’s relief, Byron decided all bets were off and spoke rapidly and earnestly. “Okay, okay, okay, wait, okay, listen,” he said. “There was only the initial communication from the lady at the county, that’s it. That’s it. Okay? Nobody told me the source because it’s political, okay? Because Croatian business is absolute, okay? And none of us can risk being part of something inside the family.”
“Hang on.”
“None of us can. Okay? That’s why we don’t ask.”
“Hang on,” I said. “The lady at the county? What does that mean?”
And then he told me all I needed to know. “City, I mean. Not county. The city council. Allison. That lady who handles the docks. It comes from her.”
“Allison? Why the hell didn’t you say that?”
“I thought you wanted the source.”
“Allison O’Hara? I just wanted to know who told you.”
“Ohhhhhhhh, thank God,” he exclaimed with profound relief. “Thank God. Then please, please, yes. Help me up.”
“No,” I replied. I shot him. “Time for me to buy a bigger fridge.”
Chapter 21
Cutting up cadavers is gross. Truly. I’ve seen it in TV shows and I get ill just hearing a character talk about it.
I left the dock, and left the old osteoporosis fellow alive and kicking. Was this stupid? Of course. But it was my guess that the gentle relic wasn’t here in the US with the best of paperwork. He would maintain his low profile.
Then I was heading home with a car full of three dead bodies. I had propped the trio upright in their seats so that to anyone else on the road it’d seem like they were just drunk passengers. I was driving home with all the evidence against me in one place.
“This is for Maria,” I said to my carpool as we first hit the road.
“This is for Maria,” I said again as I dragged each body to the door of our Kolpak 1010 freezer system.
I had to remove some more of the cardboard containers—a stack of at least four hundred dollars’ worth of Whole Foods premium cut.
Couldn’t let it all go to waste, so I used some of the grass-fed beef to make dinner for Updike. Real dinner. Candlelit. Folded a linen napkin into his collar. Put a quilted cushion below his hind feet. He deserved it.
He sat upright on the chair, two paws on the edge of the table. The whole thing was defying every domestic rule imaginable for him. He stared at me, riddled with canine insecurity. You sure about this?
“It’s all you, buddy,” I said. “Eat up.”
He bent down and nibbled, then stopped to look up at me. Still hesitant.
“C’mon, have confidence, pal.” Me telling him what I needed to hear. “Life’s about confidence.”
He nibbled again. Eyed me again. Nibbled more. Eyed less. Then soon he was burrowing his head in the bowl. I sat there and smiled at the first pleasant tableau I’d beheld in weeks. I’d tried to distract myself with my book, right there at the table. Le Parfum. But after two attempts I couldn’t distract myself. Each sentence only served to remind me of the urgency of the next step. My next step. Her.
Allison O’Hara.
Allison was a “fixer.” Why would a fixer be a link in this food chain? City council was the title she threw around town, but what Allison actually did was troubleshoot the docks—the dingy, violent world of the Mafia shipping trade, smoothing out whatever kinks the “family” might encounter. I would’ve never connected a lady like her to a Harvard kid.
This was my brain at work, searching for a way to get to her. Did she hike alone in the woods? Did she walk to church on Wednesday nights through a dark parking lot? I had to discover the best opportunity. I even searched my house for explosives to use on her entourage. Didn’t have any. Getting to her meant getting past her legion of stewards, which she would have armed to the hilt. But my dinner with Updike gave me an idea.
Chapter 22
Allison ate at Tidal Moon every week—one of those fancy restaurants with no name on the front, no advertising in town. It had wooden interiors, leather chairs, and real towels in the bathroom, handed to you by a real human immigrant.
Tidal Moon was Allison’s venue of choice for girls’ night out. For a bachelorette like her, who led a carefully marketed life—Louboutins, Dolce bag, Chanel blush—a midweek meal was legitimate PR.
I was lurking in the alley behind her restaurant.
I’d waited a couple of hours for her chauffeur to pull up and drop her off at the back entrance. That moment never came. It was already 9:15 p.m. I’d been confidently eyeing her bodyguard, who was chain-smoking in the back, and after crouching in the shadows long enough to cramp both my upper thighs, I finally walked over.
But there was nobody there. I’d been eyeing the silhouette of a torn tarp, wafting in the wind.
“Gotta be kidding me,” I said to myself.
I retreated back into the shadows until a new bad plan presented itself. The sous-chef opened up the back door to the main kitchen and propped it open while he walked out a bag of trash. “Dinner,” I said to myself and entered the restaurant.
I didn’t have a tie but I did have on a decent dress shirt. I unb
uttoned the top buttons, tousled my thinning hair, flung my thirty-nine-ninety-nine-dollar Mervyn’s jacket in the trash, and thereby resembled the general douche who ate there. An unmolested walk through the busy kitchen led me to the dining room, where a cluster of intimate dining tables stood between me and my target.
Allison.
Designer heels and a minimal amount of cocktail dress—she wasn’t here to be sipping a Bordeaux, she was here to be seen sipping it. Hiding herself at a remote table to seem like she didn’t want attention, yet likely going to the bathroom at least thrice an hour so she could parade past fellow diners.
“Caution, Mike,” I cautioned myself.
I could see that she was seated with the young wife of our young mayor. Evenings like this were a business move for Allison and I was about to thwart it. A passing busboy was all I needed. The first one to glide by held a tray full of several unfinished soup bowls. I nonchalantly dipped three fingers in the brightest-colored bowl. And thus equipped, I walked over to Allison’s table.
I approached her friend from behind. “So sorry to interrupt,” I said with neighborly grace, “but I think they just spilled something on you and…I’m kinda worried it’ll set in.” While leaning over to say this, I’d placed my sullied hand upon her shoulder blade and smeared a free sample of crème du tomato on her clothing. “This is silk, isn’t it?”
“Oh, my God, are you frickin’ serious?” she said.
“Without ice water,” I said, “the stain is…eternal.”
She was wearing a Ralph Lauren jumpsuit. Retail price twelve hundred ninety-nine dollars, I’m sure. She would have to completely disrobe to clean it.
She didn’t even thank me.
“Unreal,” she said, getting up, ready to fire whoever she could fire, marching to the restroom, where she would soon be half naked and scrubbing and cursing.
Allison barely had a chance to process any of this before I sat down in the newly open seat so deliberately, so casually, that the most she could do was launch the “Wh” of “What the f…?”
I placed the napkin in my lap and picked up a menu.
“I hear the duck’s good,” I told her without looking up. “Me, I avoid fowl.”
I paused to truly read the menu. I actually was hungry, and the array of entrées that each cost more than my jacket back in the trash can were described quite appetizingly. That’s when she piped up.
“If this is a game,” she said in hushed syllables, “I’m in no mood.”
“Being in no mood is itself a type of mood.”
“I have people who can hurt you,” she said. “They’re in the lobby.”
I looked up at her for the first time, my stern countenance prepared. I’d resolved to hide any attraction I’d feel for her once I actually saw how pretty she was, face-to-face. But when it finally happened, I had no chance.
She was all I feared she’d be.
“Is everything okay here?” said the waiter.
He must’ve caught sight of our fracas from afar because he was suddenly at my side, attentive to Allison’s demeanor.
She kept looking at me and neither smiled nor frowned. “Everything’s fine,” she said to him.
The waiter glanced at me, then glanced back at her. “Are you…?” he began. “Are you sure that you…?”
…don’t want our staff to beat him to a deep-fried pulp?
“I’d like you to get him a drink,” said Allison, dispatching the waiter with the following: “He’ll have a triple IPA. With lime. Quartered.”
Chapter 23
She knew my drink. Jesus Christ, she knew it. Which was both hot and terrifying.
“Look,” I said to her, “I’m not here to drag this out.”
“You’re a moth,” she said. “You’re hovering by the flame because you have nowhere else to look. Get out of the house.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Get out before I have you singed.”
“I thought you wanted me to stay. You just told the waiter—”
“I wanted to avoid a scene.”
She was right. I had nowhere else to look.
“Listen,” I said. “I don’t know why Goran Šovagović Mesic was a name that passed across your desk…and part of me doesn’t care…but whatever the reason, you’re gonna tell me who put it there.”
She wasn’t listening. She was glaring at me—bored, annoyed.
“Or I make calls,” I whispered.
That’s when her face suddenly lit up. And the calculating woman subsided as a tiny laugh bubbled out of her.
“Wow,” she said, sitting back in her seat. “You really are at a breaking point, aren’t you?”
“What? No.”
“The legendary Mike Ryan. The contract killer. At my table. Trying to play it cool but…isn’t quite…”
I couldn’t move.
She leaned back in to say, “It’s okay if you’re losing your good judgment.”
“I am not.”
“Prove it.”
She sat there a moment to let her remark incubate. Prove it?
Then after a smirk, she relaxed, reclined, and recrossed her legs, letting her calf graze my shin, which she pretended not to notice.
“Follow me,” she said.
She got up. I had to hurry to stay with her, her long legs striding forcefully across the marble.
The next minute was a blur.
“On my tab,” she said to the maître d’.
This woman rendered me a heap of gibberish. I struggled to decipher what was happening as she stopped near the valet to chat with some guy—her chief goon, I think—who then maybe went to look after her soiled girlfriend.
Allison took me around the outside of the restaurant, guiding us toward the riverfront. She was taking me to the park behind the main road. It was late but the public restroom was still lit.
We entered the women’s side and she bolted the door behind us. We were alone.
I spoke first. “You certainly—”
She slammed me up against a wall.
If this was a kiss it was going to be wild and decadent. My eyes involuntarily closed. My mouth involuntarily softened. “Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be,” Karenina said unto Vronsky. I then looked up to find that, yes, Allison’s lips were hovering inches away from mine and that, yes, also, well, okay, she now had a gun in her hand, pressed into the softest part of my heart.
Chapter 24
I’ve been held at gunpoint before. Instead of thinking quickly or wisely, you fixate on one lone, pervasive thought.
You can’t believe it’s actually happening.
“Back up,” said Allison. “Get on your knees.”
“If you’re…If you’re gonna kill me…”
“Now!” she shouted.
I couldn’t believe this was happening. She nodded for me to move toward the rear. My spine complied. My mind raced clumsily for a way, some way—despite the indications that I truly was losing my edge—to reduce her control of the situation.
“Am I here to confess?” I asked.
I could guess what she’d told her henchman just now: to get permission from the top. Permission to kill me.
So I blurted out the only thing that could catch her attention. “You had sex with him, didn’t you?”
She had no reaction.
“Goran,” I specified. “You had sex with Goran.”
She didn’t respond right away, and by right away I mean there was a trillionth of a second too long in her eye contact with me as her brain improvised her retort.
“No,” she said.
Wait a minute.
“Why would you even think that?” she said.
She was lying. I had completely, idiotically, randomly stumbled upon the crux of her only position on this chessboard.
“He’s a good-lookin’ kid,” I said. “He has money. Adrenaline. Yet would still be a bad decision on your part. A decision that would need…I dunno…c
leanup. I’m not saying you were the first hand to stir the pot. I’m saying you were willing to approve it.” I’d found it. I needed to get her to overthink. “Because let’s be real, Allison: the request would’ve had to go through you. Which you would’ve had to, under normal circumstances, veto.”
She contemplated my tone. She was mapping out the various routes for our predicament. She could smell my conviction. She knew that denial wouldn’t work.
“Did you tell anyone?” she asked.
That’s what she wanted. That’s why she’d brought me here—so she could survey the damage she’d done. That’s why I wasn’t dead yet.
“I get it now,” I said. “The IRA and Croatian Mafia. Literally in bed together.” I’d connected her two worlds through the back door.
“Whether or not any of this is true, I need to know if you’ve told anyone this stupid theory.”
“I’ve been on your side of the interrogation table, Allison.” I started speaking with just enough smugness to enrage her. “In fact, I was just interrogating someone this morning when—”
“Did you tell anyone?!”
Blam.
She’d leaned in too close and in a dizzying flurry of fingers I’d grabbed for her gun so that, within an instant of our two sets of hands gripping one tiny weapon, I discharged it.
We were now tugging on it. Both of us.
Not sure yet where the bullet had gone. My muscles were flooded with adrenaline. Our web of limbs hit the wall, her grip versus my grip. She elbowed me in the jaw, sharp jabs from her 130-pound frame, until I was soon pinning her back. Three of our four hands now held “our” gun so that it was aimed at the side of her head while our fourth hand—my left hand—was free to grip her chin.
I was winning the battle and she knew it. So, quick thinker that she was, she flipped the script.
Her body changed, she stopped trying to kick me, she stopped trying to elbow me, she popped her palms open in surrender. She started to laugh.
“I have something,” she said.
“Don’t move.”
She didn’t move. She laughed harder. The bullet had pierced her tricep. Our faces were inches apart.
The 13-Minute Murder Page 25
