Джеймс Паттерсон - The 13-Minute Murder

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 unbuttoned 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.