Джеймс Паттерсон - The 13-Minute Murder

“Wh-h…?” He found that surprised look again.

Milt was really a lot better looking than I’d allowed myself to think. I could see why Maria had slept with him. Some guys in my position would be angry—that his wife had enjoyed the very handsome qualities of another male, the sleek jawline, the broad shoulders. But not me.

“That means I hate your existence, Milt.”

He hid his fat well. Some people can be fat but pull it off. Not me. That’s why I jog countless miles per day and eat fashionable amounts of kale.

“You have shifty eyes,” I said to Milt. “Your face points one way but your eyes watch stuff at a different angle. How cliché is that? At least be inventively repulsive.”

He groped for air, with his hands, then said, “Call…”

“Would you like to hear my one French sentence?”

“Call the ambulance. I’ll pay you.”

Ah, the bribe offer. Right on schedule. “Really? How much is a dopey, no-good, cheating partner’s life worth?”

“A hundred and fifty th—”

I shot him again.

He lay there inert. I’d aimed higher this time. The stomach wounds hurt. The chest wounds kill.

I drank his bourbon. I wanted to look tough, but his choice of alcohol tasted like buttered Windex. I spat it out and stood up.

“You may think this is over,” I said, “but you’re misunderstanding the rules. This isn’t over. This is page one.”

Chapter 16

I was driving the speed limit. Updike was next to me in the seat. And my trunk was full.

Of Milt.

After thirty minutes of very focused driving, I arrived at what I now hesitate to call “home.” The hardest part was getting him from his house to my car. Solution? Cut him in half. Just like they did Maria. Seemed only fair. I brought the first piece out in a suitcase, the second piece in a golf club travel bag. Each segment still weighed over a hundred pounds, so I’m not saying it was easy.

By now Updike was in sync with my erratic behavior. He himself became more erratic and, oddly, more cooperative.

“C’mon, pal,” I said toward his area of the backseat. “Don’t look at me like that.”

He did. He looked at me like that. The eyes of canine judgment. I could see them in my rearview mirror, gazing at me.

We were going thirty-four miles per hour in a thirty-five miles-per-hour zone. Cops do actually pull people over for going “too much” the speed limit. It’s what drunkards do. It’s what serial killers do. I’d already made up my mind at this point how I would handle the situation if I were stopped.

And I was stopped.

A cop lit up in my rearview mirror, visible just past the flattened ears of my nervous heap of a pooch. The new police cars have subtle, low-profile lights to fool you, to lull you into cop-oblivious behavior. I was pretty sure I was getting cited for running a light. What I wasn’t sure of was whether my trunk had drops of blood on the outside.

I slowed down. He followed me to the side of the road. I parked. He parked. Then came that ugly fifteen seconds when they just sit there behind you. When his door finally did open, he took a long time to approach.

“I will kill him, Updike,” I murmured out the side of my mouth. “You understand that, right? I’ll kill him, if circumstances demand it.”

Updike whined that signature dog whine and looked around for the nearest airport. I was sweating right up until the moment Officer Something-or-Other arrived at my door. Six two. One ninety. Mustache. He had a Beretta 9mm holstered. I calculated that I could have my own gun pointed toward his torso twice as fast as he could ready his.

If necessary.

“Good afternoon, sir,” I said.

“License and registration,” he said.

I complied and we traded the usual three minutes of dialogue. He left with my license but stopped to look at my plates, which to me felt like he was looking at the trunk.

“There’s no blood on there, Updike,” I said quietly to Updike. “I checked. No blood. Okay?”

Updike looked backward. He knew the cop was trouble.

My finger had already laid itself upon the trigger of my .38 Special. I could open my door. I could loudly say, “Officer, my left hand is bleeding.” He’d yell at me to get back in my car but for a split second he’d look at my left hand. He’d look for the blood, not the weapon. And I’d raise that weapon and power two slugs past the Kevlar, into the small clump of tissue just above the eye sockets.

“Sign this,” he said, suddenly back at my window, ticket clipboard in hand.

I must’ve blanked out for a moment. While I was sitting there, fretting over what he was seeing on my bumper, he had already journeyed all the way to his own car and back.

I signed the ticket.

“Please drive safely,” he said. “Life is precious.”

Then he walked away.

Done. Thank you for that fortune cookie’s worth of wisdom, sir.

When I arrived home—some two hours later, I think—I pulled out Milt: The Prequel and placed it near the rear bumper while I dragged out Milt: The Sequel in a second bag. I brought the complementary works of art down to the basement while Updike followed cautiously behind.

There wasn’t enough room next to my silent wife unless I took out a few of the boxes, so I did. I slid them to the middle of the basement, where I knew they’d start to smell within days.

“In ya go, Milt.”

I wasn’t operating on a “within days” timeline. I barely knew what the next three hours would hold for me. And by the time I’d stashed Milt’s carcass, I’d burned through at least one of those precious three hours.

Maria’s body hadn’t become rigid yet. She was cold, but still supple. Tears welled in my eyes. As much as our romance had dwindled lately, I’d still cried about her every night, softy in bed, or loudly in the shower, or even louder in the car.

I started to caress her cheek with the back of my hand. Then I stopped.

I missed my wife. I couldn’t believe somebody had done this to her. Had done this to her, when we were so far from where we should have been. My retirement would’ve solved everything. I wiped my tears with the inner elbow of my sleeve, sat on the stack of sirloin, and pulled out my cell phone.

“Thank you for calling Whole Foods,” answered a chirpy voice. “This is Amber.”

“Hi, Amber,” I replied. “This is Maria’s husband, Michael.” She said hi back. “Just a quick heads-up: she’s got the flu…and yeah…didn’t wanna introduce it to you guys…so…she’s gonna stay home for a couple days.”

We traded a few useless remarks about how, gosh, something sure is goin’ round lately and Stay warm and Belichick always tells his team to drink fluids and I hung up. At first I’d had Milt’s upper body on the ground with his lower body hung by the hook. But Maria’s cadaver had gotten bumped in the shuffling and slowly rotated toward his.

As much as I resented the current population of this meat locker, I couldn’t let them sit there like savages. So I fixed Milt, nice and neat, and let his wobbly head sort of stare at my wife.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I said to his unblinking eyes. I turned to Updike. “C’mon, li’l man.”

Chapter 17

If I was going to enter the docks in daylight hours, I’d need to be ready for a bloodbath.

Milt had said 451. I was pretty sure he meant shipping berth number 451, which was a drop site run by a man named Big Byron. I played the waiting game, sitting in my parked car across the street from the wharf entrance, after hours, staring at a torn photograph of Maria, until a bright-red Escalade pulled in.

Byron. He was that guy. The polyester-track-jacket, medallion-against-a-hairy-chest guy.