Джеймс Паттерсон - The 13-Minute Murder

“Down the ditch,” I said to Milt. “Let’s go.”

We ran down the ditch and without incident reached the parking structure, where we had to race up five flights of stairs. Our golden goose was parked on the fifth floor.

“Hurry!” I yelled backward.

“Hurrying. Jeez!” yelled Milt, fat jiggling, lungs wheezing, asthma attack imminent. He looked even worse once he saw the chosen car. “This?!”

“Hurry!” I was already getting in. I pried open the door and tricked the ignition within nine seconds total.

“A Volkswagen Bug?” His disappointment was at a crescendo. “Bright yellow? Please tell me there’s a daisy on the dashbo—”

He got in and saw the daisy.

“We are completely visible,” he whined.

“That’s where we’re hiding. In broad daylight.”

I got in the driver’s seat and busted the casing off the console. By my mental clock, twenty-three seconds had elapsed. I’d counted them out while envisioning the last few turns the cop cars would make to narrow our location down to this particular garage.

Stock anti-theft alarms are easy. They go off but they don’t linger once the kill switch is bypassed. I had us on the road in eighty-one seconds total, from my hand first touching the door to my tires first touching the road. It wouldn’t fully compensate for the overall tardiness, but every microsecond helped. The turnpike was more crowded now, but we were safer. After a massive shoot-out, would you flag the brightest, friendliest, yellowest thing on the road?

We passed oncoming police cars, one after another, with Milt sweating each one.

Mine was a different concern. A deeper concern. I may have found us a successful vehicle to get back to Boston, but I didn’t have an answer to a very fundamental question. I turned to Milt to ask what had to be asked. “Who ordered the hit?”

Chapter 11

Five kids shot in the upper body. Three nicked in the limbs. One head wound. Two dead guards. One gutted female. And a young Mafia kid with his face missing. Today had been carnage on a level I had never signed up for.

“Who ordered the hit, Milt?”

“What?” he replied. Nonchalant.

He hadn’t picked up on how intensely I needed my answer. I kept my tone casual, because there was nothing casual about the question.

“Who?” I repeated.

“This car smells like pumpkin spice condoms,” said Milt. “Can’t believe we’re in this thing.”

Deflection. This wasn’t going to be easy.

“I can feel my manhood decrease by the mile,” he said.

“Oh, miles? I measure mine in millimeters.”

He laughed.

For those wondering, I am a fantastic actor. A trained actor, in fact, a theater major who had commanded the finest of stages in each of the three theaters on the Boston University campus, and who had voiced truth into the most stilted of classical monologues. The trick was to believe in what you were saying. I had that sort of brain. It floated between the wonderful realities of life and the vivid realities of fiction, and I rarely wanted to know which was which. I was performing for Milt.

“Who called the hit?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer.

I’d quit stage acting when my wife got pregnant. The baby was stillborn. The doctors were helpless. Maria spent the next few years resisting the urge to blame me. That effort had worn off recently, but I couldn’t deny that my unhealthy lifestyle was at fault.

“Goran Mesic, son of Ivan Mesic,” I said, without sounding too Lord of the Rings -y about it. “Tell me why he was chosen to fall.”

“You knew his father?” questioned Milt. More deflection. “I mean, I heard your big bullshit speech back in that alley. I assume it was big and bullshit. Was it?”

“How about I answer your question when you answer mine?”

“What difference does it make? A job’s a job. We’re about to be paid.”

Concord Avenue directly west. Toward New York. Then left on Arlington, then left on the turnpike, past Fenway Park, back into Boston. A bird’s-eye view of our journey would make it look like we were New Yorkers. The crisscrossing was to throw any bloodhounds off the scent.

Which made me think back to the morning. Why were Tweedledum and Tweedledee suddenly walking next to the boy? How did they know to do that?

“You’re right,” I said. “The paycheck’s coming. Thanks to you.”

He laughed. “And ain’t you retiring on it?”

“I’m retired as of twenty minutes ago. Unless what just happened with the kid was based on a feud .”

“Game at Fenway tonight.”

“Was it a feud? Did someone order a feud? Just tell me.”

“Three wins outa first,” he said before finally murmuring some semblance of an answer. “I dunno, man.”

He was a bad liar. I knew the sign. He got louder.

“I really don’t know, Mike.”

“Who would know?”

I knew Milt had read some real estate sales book that said that people tuck their voice in the back of their throat when they lie. So he compensated by being so confident and loud— GOSH, I HAVE NO IDEA, MIKE —it was like he was suddenly in a discotheque. “I got the info from the normal channel. Y’know how it is. Anonymous.”

He was covering it up. Anything to hide the truth that I’d become aware of during this car ride. Milt was going to kill me.

Chapter 12

Why did I keep finding myself not at home? At the Alluvial Tavern I had my book open, beer poured, jukebox cranked.

“Another,” I said to the general area of the bar. No eye contact.

Another arrived.

The bartender made no conversation.

How did I get there? I could barely recap it. I’d dropped Milt off at the ditch site. We’d parked our car, wiped the prints, then abandoned it in a bad neighborhood, where it would be stripped clean like one of those time-lapse nature videos where bugs reduce a carcass to nothing. Next thing I knew I was in a cave in the South of France. A little village called Grasse.

Well, not me, but Grenouille, the protagonist of Le Parfum, now learning that he himself has no odor. An entire novel about odors—and he finds out he himself has none.

“I can relate, pal,” I murmured to no one.

I devoured pages and triple IPAs, one after another, never engaging with the gray-eyed bartender.

When my thoughts drifted to my day, all I could think was, I hate shooting kids . That’s why I was at the bar.

“Check,” I said out loud.

Once you name your self-deception, it loses its power.

I took a taxi home and got out a half block before my house. I’d enter quietly, hoping with all my heart that she would just— just for once, Maria —wake up when I came home. Touch me a little.

“Maria?” I whispered toward the closed door.

My house key clicked into the knob with an unusually loud gnash of teeth. The lock was grungier than normal and it scraped upon a stillness I hadn’t felt in years.

“Maria?”

Having an absent wife is one thing. Having a house absent of the absent wife is another.

Was she gone?

I started to enter, quietly, striving to avoid excess noise.

“Maria?” I said, loud enough to be heard if she were up, soft enough to be missed if she weren’t.

No answer.

“Maria?”

I crept toward the kitchen and turned on the lights.

Blood.

In large quantities.

There was blood all over our white linoleum. I reached for the gun inside my coat with a trembling hand. I could only pray that my wife wasn’t the source of the…

I couldn’t finish the thought. I knelt by the scarlet pool. It was dark, a spilled Merlot. I guessed by temperature that it’d been on the floor for at least an hour.