Risina and I are in New York, holed up in the St. Regis Hotel on East 55th Street. I have more money than I know what to do with and it might be safer to break my routine and stay somewhere with a little more polish than the usual unkempt inns I frequent when on assignment. Over the years, I collected staggering fees for completing my work. Since the money held no allure for me, I rarely spent any of it; instead, I socked it away in accounts all over the world. My fence kept credit cards up to date for me, and I have safety deposit boxes in over a dozen major cities containing the right plastic and right identities. Holding two of them in my wallet right now reminds me how important it is to find a new fence when this is over if Archie doesn’t come out of it alive.
I like New York and its dense population. It’s an easy city to get lost in; it’s often advantageous to be a needle in a stack of needles.
I need to work out my thoughts. Usually, I’ll just talk to myself, but it’s nice to have someone to bounce ideas off of. “I think Spilatro put the wheels in motion by kidnapping Archie and then watched them turn. He marked Smoke the whole way, and everything played out how he hoped. I get summoned out of hiding, delivered to his door. He doesn’t want to negotiate though, doesn’t want to talk, just wants to kill me. Hence the collapsed scaffolding. But that didn’t work.”
“Then why didn’t he pop you with a bullet when we walked through Kirschenbaum’s front door? When he could’ve surprised us?”
“You think I’d’ve let him? I don’t get surprised, Risina. I was prepared for a bodyguard to pull a gun. I just wasn’t prepared for that bodyguard to be Spilatro.”
She considers that for a moment, then, “But why? Why does he want to kill you? You’ve never encountered him before. He hasn’t been linked to any of your past jobs, has he?”
“I don’t know yet. If I had a good fence like Archie, or even a half-decent one like Smoke, at my disposal, he could be gathering information on Spilatro right now to help me figure out the connection between him and me. But I don’t.”
She runs her hands through her hair, a habit that gives away when she’s stumped. She opens her mouth but I interrupt, “There is one thing we have to do now…”
“What?”
“In response to a kidnapping, the family usually follows a playbook. They get a ransom note and focus on what the kidnapper wants. They look at the ask and the risks and make a decision whether or not to give the kidnapper his demands, hoping for some sort of break after the exchange, after their loved one is returned safely. But they’re looking at it backwards.
“If Archie is still alive-and that’s a big ‘if’ as far as I’m concerned-then giving me up isn’t going to get us anywhere. He’ll kill me, then kill Archie. There’s only one way to take down a kidnapper.. you have to find something or someone he loves and take it from him. Flip the game on his head.”
Her eyes track and her head nods as she sees it. “We kidnap something of his right back.”
“That’s right. Then see if he wants to talk to us about making an exchange. Not Archibald Grant for me. Those are his terms, his playbook. We take something or someone Spilatro holds precious and make the exchange about that. We have the leverage. Not him.”
“We stay on offense like you said before.”
“Exactly. But listen to me, Risina, this is going to get worse, much worse. It’s going to get brutal, it’s going to get ugly, and we’re probably going to have to spill some blood in order to get Archie back. If Archie’s already dead, we’re going to destroy whomever or whatever Spilatro holds close to him, and then we’re going to have to kill him.”
She swallows, but nods, then nods a second time as though to reinforce her acceptance. “Remember that he brought us into this, he struck us first, and whatever we have to do is because of him. We didn’t ask for this but we’re damn sure going to end it. Messages are written in blood in this business.”
“A tiger is a tiger.”
“That’s right. And he should have left me, should have left us, sleeping in the jungle.”
I go back to that final file, the fourth hit, that had Spilatro working a tandem with the woman named Carla, the same woman Archie then used later for his personal contract. When professional killers work a tandem sweep, when they’re working together to accomplish a single hit, it usually indicates a certain closeness. The killers either came up together, or partnered for convenience purposes, or split the fees because they each had a specialty or strength that was necessary for the most effective hit. Rarely are they complete strangers. A degree of trust has to exist in order to execute an effective tandem.
Since all I have on Spilatro is his face, I’m going to need whatever information off of Carla I can get. I struck out with Kirschenbaum, so she’s going to have to do.
She won’t be on the lookout for me unless they’re still tight, which I doubt based on those last three files, the hits Spilatro worked alone, plus the one she worked solo. They went their separate ways, and maybe the reason behind it will help me build a strategy for taking on the son-of-a-bitch who came after me.
Finding Carla is going to require calling in a favor. Looking at the clock, I’m going to have to wake up a fence in Belgium.
A shell game of pre-paid phones and intermediaries and appointment times and coded messages finally lands me a secure connection with Doriot, a Brussels-based fence I’ve crossed paths with a couple of times in Europe. Once when I went to his office so he could evaluate me, and a second time when I reached him in a prison in Lantin, where he thought he was safely hidden.
“Hello, Columbus. I heard you were dead, so this is a surprise.” His thick French accent sounds even rougher over the phone line.
“Still breathing.”
“Yes, I can hear that now.”
“And you’re out of jail.”
“I couldn’t afford to stay in.”
“And how’s Brueggemann?”
“Unemployed, I’m afraid.”
Brueggemann was a German heavy who helped me find Doriot in that Lantin jail, against his will. I think I exposed his weakness as an employee.
“So you would not be calling me for any reason I can understand unless you need something from me, yes? So how may I help you?”
Belgians tend to get right to the point, a national trait I admire.
“I need you to do something for me.”
“I see. What is that something?”
“I need you to locate a New York female hitter who goes by Carla. I need you to hire her for a dummy job. Tell her she has to meet the fence and give her a fake address on Warren Street in Tribeca. I’ll pick her up from there.”
“You going to put her down?”
“Nothing like that.”
“Who’s her contracting fence?”
“I’m guessing Kirschenbaum, but he’s dead so you’ll have to figure out how to contact her.”
“I see.”
This is the part where he realizes he has me over a barrel and will ask for something. Either money or a favor or to pull a job for him for free. But Doriot is full of surprises.
“Okay, Columbus, how can I contact you?”
I give him the number on a prepaid phone and tell him to text me there with a secure number and then I’ll call him back from a different line.
“Very well. I’ll try to dial you in the next day or two.”
I decide to flush the quail if he’s not going to attempt it. “And what do you want in exchange?”
“Not a thing. I have a new outlook on life. I am trying to be accommodating to my friends and rely on providence to reward me with good fortune.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You are a cynic then. I understand. But my actions will turn you into a believer.”
“Okay… well, I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Yes, soon.”
We hang up. If he’s going to work out his personal issues on my behalf, I’m happy to accommodate.
Carla is in her late thirties, and looks the opposite of most female plugs I’ve encountered over the years. Professionals are always trying to get close to their marks in order to make the kill in private and get the hell away after business is done; as such, most of the women I’ve seen in this line of work are gorgeous. They work their way inside on the mark through suggestions of sex and pounce when the target is at his most vulnerable. By the time the mark figures out he’s been conned, his bodyguards are outside the door, his pants are around his ankles, and his day is about to be ruined. Many a target has been popped at night, but not discovered until the next morning, naked, in bed, blood-dry.
Carla isn’t talking too many men into the bedroom. She’s dressed like she’s used to towing around a couple of kids: knock-off designer jeans and an unflattering print shirt bearing a vague pattern of stripes. She’s dowdy, about thirty pounds overweight, and has a face that wouldn’t launch any ships out of Troy.
I smile when I spot her. She wouldn’t stand out in any room, on any block, in any crowd, on any stage. She doesn’t just blend into the background, she is the background. I almost didn’t pick her out, even though she’s the only woman walking down Warren Street at this time of morning. Her expression is neutral, as bland as her wardrobe and as unassuming as her gait. I like her already.
I approach Carla from behind so she’ll have to turn. I want to see how she moves, see if I can spot where she keeps her weapons.
“Carla?”
She turns slowly, deliberately. Her eyes fix on my chest, unchallenging. Her voice is wheezy, like a trumpet with a faulty valve. Nothing about her is inviting.
“You Walker?”
“That’s right. Let’s move where we can talk.”
“You got an office around here?”
“I like to walk and talk.”
“You got muscle?”
“Just me.”
“You must be new to this.”
“I… how long I’ve been doing this is none of your business.”
She doesn’t respond, just follows beside me as I head up the street toward the river. I think she’s bought my newbie act, though I’m not certain.
I talk just above a whisper, “You work tandem with a hitter named Spilatro?”
“Why’s it matter?”
“I might need a two-fer and my client wants a team who’ve worked well together in the past.”
“Fsssh.” The trumpet hits another false note as she blows out a disappointed breath. “I don’t team anymore.”
“You guys have a falling-out?”
“Why’s it matter?” she asks a second time.
“Just making conversation.”
“Now I know you haven’t been doing this long.”
She stops in the street and this time lifts her eyes all the way to my face. “You got a job? Give me a file and let me know when you want the account closed. Otherwise I’m going to walk in that direction, you’re going to walk in that direction, and if we see each other again, we won’t be shaking hands.”
During this, her face doesn’t pinch or blacken. She just says it plainly, like we’re discussing the Tribeca weather.
“All right, don’t tighten up. I was just trying to get a feel for your style…”
“What you see is what you get,” she says.
“Fair enough. Let’s stop right here.”
She obeys and folds her arms, impatient. I change tactics, hardening.
“We’re going to have a conversation about Spilatro and you’re going to tell me everything you know about him, or you’ll be dead at my feet before you can take a step away. Your choice.”
This ambush catches her flush, off-guard. She blinks and swallows, not sure how control could have flipped so quickly.
Then her right eye flutters as a red laser shines into it, and we watch together as a small pinprick of red light slowly moves down her face until it stops square in the middle of her chest. Risina is high up on a rooftop working our own loose version of a tandem. Carla doesn’t need to know that the red laser comes from an office pointer rather than a gunsight.
I hold my hand up. “If I raise a finger, you drop. Nod if you understand.”
It takes her a moment to focus on me, and when she does, it is through defeated eyes. She nods. Her gaze flits back to the red dot on her chest.
“Who are you?”
“What’s it matter?” I say, using her words. “What do you know about Spilatro?”
“He…”
“Speak up.”
“He brought me into this business.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I… uh…” She shakes her head slowly, like she can’t believe what she’s about to say. “I was married to him.”
That’s unexpected.
“Start from the beginning.”
It doesn’t take long for the words to gush out of her like water from an overturned hydrant. I have the feeling Carla has been waiting a long time to tell her story, to get things off her chest. Most likely, she hasn’t had anyone to talk to about what she does for a living. She just needs someone to whom she can confess her sins, both personal and professional, and I’m the first man to ask for it. That’s unexpected, too.
For the first six years of their marriage, Carla Fogelman Spilatro had no idea her husband, Douglas, was a professional hit man. She thought he worked sales for a software company that specialized in creating computer programs for brokerages. He talked about programs for tracking stocks, programs for tracking sales, programs for tracking investments, and it all seemed, well, boring. She tuned him out. She didn’t care. She worked too, as a speech pathologist for a hospital, assisting stroke patients who could no longer get their mouths around their words. It was stressful and grueling and demanding, and she came home each day exhausted, too tired to listen to her husband talk about quotas and sales leads.
Their marriage was comfortable if not comforting, and she was happy to have the television to herself when her husband went away on frequent business trips. They had no kids, confessing early in their courtship neither cared for children, and she never heard her biological clock tick the way so many other women did. Between her husband’s commissions and her speech salary, they established themselves in the upper middle class and had a nice two-story home, the customary accoutrement of couples earning their income.
Her husband had one quirk. Miniatures. He had a basement full of miniatures-airplanes, trains, cars. In fact, he built elaborate cityscapes, with model skyscrapers and model traffic congestion and model construction equipment and sometimes little model pedestrians walking the model streets. She didn’t mind him down in the basement, building his tiny worlds; she figured having him home when he was in town was better than having him out at bars or running around the way some husbands did. Besides, she could watch her shows while he was building and painting down there. She never had to fight him for the remote control.
A text changed her life. A simple text from her friend Michelle. I DIDN’T KNOW D OUGLAS WAS IN C LEVELAND. H E’S NOT. O H. S WORE I SAW HIM. H OW R U?
She didn’t respond, and when the TV suddenly sprang to life, she realized she’d been sitting there for the full thirty minutes it took TiVo to override the pause. She looked at her hand and realized she had chewed her thumbnail to the quick.
Doug wasn’t in Cleveland. He was on a business trip, yes, but he said he was going to New York to see his client. What was the name he had said? Damn, why didn’t she listen to him? Smith Barney? Something like that.
She was being silly. Why was her imagination running wild? Why did she watch stupid trash like Desperate Housewives and Young and the Restless, where every husband was philandering around like it was Roman times? People in real life didn’t act like that, right?
She should just call him on his cell and see where he was. He’d probably said Cleveland anyway. Maybe she had mixed it up. Cleveland and New York?
“Hello?”
“Hey, hon, I can’t talk right now.”
“Are you in a meeting?”
“Walking into one right now. I’ll call you when it’s over…”
“Are you in…” But he hung up before she could finish the question.
She got online and found a number for a Smith-Barney branch in Cleveland. There were three so she picked the first one and dialed the main line.
“Morgan Stanley Smith Barney Financial…”
“Yes, hello… my name is Carla Spilatro… I have to… is my husband Doug there right now?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Doug Spilatro with Valsoft?”
“Hold one moment.”
She waited, chewing that thumbnail down until she tasted blood.
A new voice came on the line. “Hello, this is Matt Chapman, may I help you?”
“Hi, sorry to bother you. My husband works for Valsoft and I think he has a meeting with someone in your, uh, firm. His name is…”
“Don’t know any Valsoft. You sure you have the right branch?”
Her heart beat harder. “No, I guess I’m not sure.”
“Well, we have two other branches in Cleveland. I’ll have Melanie come back on and give you the numbers…”
“Thank you… oh, wait. Mr. Chapman…?”
“Yes?”
“You said you don’t know Valsoft? It’s my understanding they produce and manage the software you use on your computers?”
“Hmm. I don’t think so. We use good ol’ Microsoft.”
“Do all the branches use Microsoft?”
“I’m ninety-nine percent sure.”
She had moved her teeth off the thumb and on to the cuticles on her ring finger. “Okay, sorry to bother you.”
“No problem.”
She looked up the Valsoft corporate webpage. It wasn’t more than a few pages, but there was her husband’s name and contact info under the “outside sales” banner. Sure, the number listed was his cell phone, but he worked out of his car most days. The corporate office’s main address was listed as Deerfield, Michigan, and she realized she had never been to Michigan, much less Deerfield. There was a main office phone number, so she picked up the phone to call again.
Then she stopped. What was she doing? One little text from her friend saying she’d seen Doug somewhere other than where he said he was-she was certain he had said New York-and she’s running around checking on him like he’s some sort of dual-life soap opera character. She put the phone down. She’d wait and talk to him when he returned and just ask him where he went and how the meetings went.
She plopped on to the couch but couldn’t concentrate, so she ate an entire quart of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia but still couldn’t keep her thoughts straight. She flipped channels and all the networks were breaking in on the soaps to talk about a “major accident” in Cleveland. The Cleveland of it caught her eye. Doug might be in Cleveland and there was an accident there too?
She grew up near there, in Shaker Heights, and knew the skyline well. It seemed a section of light rail track above a highway had collapsed and an RTA train hadn’t been able to brake in time. It dove over the edge and killed fourteen people. Such a random, odd event. An act of God. One day you’re riding a passenger train, maybe worried about making a meeting on time or concerned about the job interview you’re headed to or wondering whether or not you’re going to have time to pick up a snack on the way home from work and what stops you cold? A piece of track giving way and it’s bye-bye to all those plans you made. Incredible.
A news camera in a helicopter was showing the accident under a “LIVE” banner, a bird’s-eye view of dozens of emergency vehicles surrounding the aftermath of the crash like moths circling a flame. As the chopper hovered, it settled on a particular angle, that view of God looking down from above on the carnage, and suddenly she felt as though she’d been jolted with electricity. She shot straight up on the couch and overturned her carton of ice cream as she sent the spoon clattering across the wooden floor.
That angle. The precise angle of the news footage. She’d seen that angle before. She’d seen this accident before.
She had gotten off her ass yesterday to do a bit of cleaning, and decided to vacuum the carpet in the basement when she wouldn’t be under her husband’s feet. The door was locked, which was odd, but she didn’t think too much about it. She knew where her husband stored his keys, even if he had never outright told her. She imagined there wasn’t a square inch of this house she didn’t know intimately, and so had retrieved the key from its hiding place and gone down below so she could surprise Doug with a clean work area when he returned from New York. Or Cleveland.
She realized her tongue had turned to chalk, thinking about yesterday. She rose from the couch and headed to the basement door. Slowly, she descended the stairs as though she were in a dream, each step bringing her a better view of the table where Doug built his miniatures.
From the back, it looked like any of the dozens of skylines he’d built over the years, though this one had a familiarity to it she hadn’t noticed yesterday.
She reached the basement floor without realizing it, her eyes fixed on the model city, crafted with such precise detail. Doug had grown into an accomplished designer; how had she not noticed it before? The level of detail. The precision of the streets and buildings. The photographs pulled from the internet and attached to the corkboard on the wall to serve as blueprints for the model.
She kept gliding around the model, following the path she’d taken with the vacuum cleaner, and her jaw dropped as her eyes led her around the cityscape.
The track was there… the light rail track. The exact place where the rail had collapsed according to the news footage was also collapsed here, and a miniature train was shown draped over the broken section, mimicking exactly what had happened.
Doug left on Wednesday. The last time he was in this basement was Tuesday night. The accident happened today? It was live, right? Or was she confused? It was all so…
She felt her stomach roll over and she bent at the middle, but nothing came out. Her body reacted before her mind could catch up. What the hell was going on? Why did the floor threaten to pull her down? She fought off the urge to collapse, to faint, and raced back up the stairs toward her computer. Maybe the news was old and it was a replay and she was confused. It only took a second to confirm on CNN. com that the accident was “breaking news,” that it had happened today.
What the fuck was her husband up to? What the fuck was he involved in?
He came home the next afternoon. The basement door was wide open. If he was surprised about that, if he felt any moment of shame or regret about her discovery, she didn’t know. She was waiting for him when he walked down the stairs, standing with the model between them.
“What did you do?” she barked.
“Carla…”
“Just tell me what this means!” She pointed at the model, at the collapsed miniature train. He circled around the table toward her, his arms outstretched, and she wanted to be hugged, needed to be hugged, but she wasn’t ready to let him touch her yet. She realized tears were streaming down her face and she tried to blink them away. She had barely slept, had pictured this confrontation a million times since yesterday, but the reality never lines up with the way we imagine it. “What did you do to those peop-”
The last word stuck in her throat as his hands closed around her neck. It took her a full five seconds to realize what had happened, was happening. So sure was she that he was coming around to placate her, to comfort her, to soothe her, that she never imagined he’d try to kill her. She flopped backward into the model, his precise model, and she felt a sting of pain as her back smashed through the light rail track and crushed the rest of the miniature train.
He was strong, much stronger than she would’ve thought. When did he get so strong? She kicked at him but her legs were on the wrong side and she couldn’t gain any traction. Her fingers clawed at his hands but the grip was solid and his face, his horribly twisted face started to blur as tears soaked her eyes. She might have a chance for a couple of words, just a couple if she could get his fingers off her throat.
What had the self-defense expert said in that meeting at the hospital back when they had that rapist scare? Forget the neck. Thoughts whizzed around her head at a million miles an hour. Forget your neck and go for the eyes. His eyes.
She didn’t think about it anymore, just went hard for his eyes as she grabbed the side of his head and dug in with her thumbnails. The effect was immediate; he flopped backward, never expecting her to fight back, and she sucked in air like a swimmer coming to the surface.
Recovering, he took a step forward and she managed to screech out: “I took pictures!” The words sounded like they had been scratched with sandpaper, but they hit her husband flush and took hold. He stopped in mid-step, his feet rooted to the ground. His eyes darted back and forth as he tried to figure out his next move. Finally, he spoke. The calmness in his voice chilled her.
“Where?”
“Emailed to my hotmail account.”
He started to take another step, when her words stopped him again. “Where do you think the police are going to look when I go missing? You don’t know the password to that account, but all my friends have sent and received emails from me there. The cops’ll figure out how to open it.”
His face was flush with anger. “God. Dammit!” he spat, breaking it into two words so he could hammer the second.
“You stay away from me.”
“Just calm the fuck down.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you mean it, Carla. I know.” Then he moved over to a chair, sat down heavily, and rubbed his head in his hands. “Just calm down and let me think.”
They went to breakfast. It seemed extraordinary at the time, and now even more so as she retold it to me. He told her everything. Everything. She had him by the balls, so he just came out with it. Maybe it had been weighing on his chest and he wanted to talk about it, just like she was doing now. Maybe he didn’t know how to broach the subject with her before this tipping point… she didn’t know. But over bacon and eggs at IHoP, he told her how he’d first gotten into the killing business after his discharge from the army; an infantryman in his unit had been taking contracts for a decade, and remembered Doug as having particular acumen for planning missions. Doug was adept at reading a map and conducting an ambush and presenting an almost geometrical strategy for accomplishing the squad’s goals. You need to raid a building? Go find Doug. You need to take out an ammo dump? Go find Doug.
Ten years later, he was married to Carla and making eighty grand a year in middle-management sales when his old friend Decker knocked on the door and walked him through the business. Gave him the basics on fences and hits and kill fees and tandem sweeps and time commitments and hidden money and weapons caches, all one needed to know to become a professional contract killer. It wasn’t much different than planning missions in Kabul, truth be told. Said if Doug were interested, then he’d introduce him to a fence and see how they did together. Said if he wasn’t, he’d never see Decker again. It was a crossroads moment and the timing was right: Doug was bored out of his mind and looking for some spice.
The first hit was messy and personal and upsetting. Face to face with a guy in an elevator who never saw it coming, but the blood and the matter and the splatter were enough to make Doug gag every time he thought about it. He had seen violence in Iraq, but it was mostly at a distance, and he was never the one actually pulling the trigger.
But he liked the work. By God, he really did. It was like everything he had ever done in his life was designed to make him an effective killer: his love of statistics and science and numbers and percentages-the very things that pushed him into a computer science degree after his service-also helped him execute the perfect hit. He just didn’t like the mess. Even when he was choking her hours before, he knew he wouldn’t be able to go through with it. He was in the death business, but he didn’t like the actual killing.
It was a paradox, but one to which he spent a month devoting his thinking time. Could he be an effective killer, but from a distance like in Iraq, where he wouldn’t necessarily need to see the kill? And in doing so, could he create a new niche in the market?
It hit him in a flash, the way the best ideas most often do. Accidents.
The difficult part in executing a hit is getting away after the mark is murdered. So what if there isn’t a murder? What if the death is ruled accidental? Would the client be willing to pay-possibly even pay a premium-if the hit appeared as though the mark were the victim of bad luck?
He floated the question to the fence Decker had secured for him. The man looked at Doug like his head had sprouted antenna. So he shut his mouth, took his next assignment, and started planning.
The mark was an Air Force colonel stationed in San Angelo, Texas. Doug didn’t know why someone wanted him dead and he honestly didn’t care. He just didn’t have much sympathy for people-didn’t value their lives; if he were being honest, he never did. Most people were assholes or stuck-up or inferior anyway. And no one lived forever, didn’t matter who you were. Why should Doug give a shit if some stranger had his ticket punched?
He knew the colonel lived in a ratty one-story home near the base and so he rigged the building to collapse on him while he slept.
The plan worked, the roof fell in directly on top of the mark, and Doug even added a weight set in the attic so the death would be instantaneous. Except it wasn’t. The colonel died, yes, but only after two weeks in the hospital in the ICU as doctors fought for his life. Spilatro sweated those two weeks like his own life hung in the balance. Maybe it did.
When he showed up to his fence after the mark finally died, Doug expected to be reprimanded. But Kirschenbaum clapped him on the back and asked him when he’d be ready to go again. It turned out the client was ecstatic with the way it went down, with the way the police and the press declared it to be a sad accident.
Kirschenbaum apologized for not recognizing what Spilatro brought to the table. He understood now the value in Doug’s killing style. He’d like to increase his fee. He was seriously impressed with the innovation. He’d like to step up their relationship. Move Doug to the top of his stable.
Doug was pleased with himself. His father had never once complimented him like this. Nobody had.
So that’s how he got into it and that’s what he did. He hadn’t worked in software sales in years. He was a contract killer, one of the most sought-after Silver Bears in the game. He told Carla how much money they really had, how much he had hidden away in cash, where no bank, no taxman, no creditor could get to it.
“But what about collateral damage?” she asked him. What about the other people who die in these accidents? What about the innocents on the train in Cleveland?
He shrugged. “People die in accidents every day,” he told her. “I don’t care about them and I don’t think about them.”
Then he put his hands out across the table, palms up, imploring her to hold hands, as if those same hands hadn’t been around her throat two hours before.
“I overreacted,” he told her. “But it was such a surprise to see you standing there… it was like a violation, I guess. I really apologize for that.”
“For trying to kill me?” she whispered as she tried her best not to raise her voice.
“That wasn’t me. I promise. I was stressed out and off my game. I was seriously in shock. Nobody’s ever thought to catch me before and I guess I hadn’t prepared for it mentally. I saw you standing down there and an animal part of me took over. But I’m okay now. I see it now.”
Inexplicably, she softened and he pounced on it like a cat with a ball of string. “I love you, honey. That’s never changed. You mean more to me than anything. You tell me to stop, to get out, to drop this business and leave it in the sewer, then I will. We’ll just move away and be done with it.”
And she believed him.
We sat on a stoop on Warren Street for hours while Carla laid it out for me. If she forewent details, I grilled her to fill them in. If I thought she was holding back, I turned up the heat. That laser sight on her chest would disappear for a time, then reappear at various intervals, so it stayed omnipresent in her mind. But I couldn’t have pried half this information from her if she hadn’t wanted to talk, hadn’t needed to talk. I don’t believe most of it, especially the parts where she presents herself in the best possible light. But the kernels of truth are there, and it is those kernels I can make pop.
“And instead of asking him to quit, you joined him?”
“Not at first. God, no. But you’re right, I didn’t ask him to quit either. The money was insane, and the job kept him busy. I just put my hands over my ears, hear no evil, see no evil, you know?”
“So when did you start working tandem?”
She gazes at her feet and that laser pinpoints her chest. Dark circles have formed around her eyes now, and her face has gone pallid, as if unburdening herself of this story has discarded her soul with it. “I don’t know. Years ago. He asked me if I wanted to help him out once and I guess I said yes. He figured he could charge more for two of us. So I ran interference and helped move a mark into place, but I
… I never had the stomach for it.”
“Uh huh.”
She doesn’t bother looking up to see the doubt in my expression, content to leave half-truths hanging in the ether like wisps of gossamer.
“You’ve worked at least one job that I know of on your own since you guys split.”
“I have bills to pay.”
She blows out a long breath.
“Look, you going to let me go now?”
“I need you to tell me where to find your husband.”
“Oh… that’s right. You want to hire him for a tandem.”
I don’t say anything. She picks at a piece of gravel on the pavement, crushes it into chalk between her thumb and forefinger.
“All you gotta do is give me one piece of information I can use to find him…” I point to that laser sight on her chest, “and you’ll never see that dot again.”
“The truth is…” and for this she looks up, clapping her hands together to wash the dust off. “The truth is… you’re going to have a very hard time finding him.”
“Yeah, why’s that?”
“Because Doug’s dead.”