Джеймс Паттерсон - The 13-Minute Murder

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…cleanup. 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.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“I have something that will change your mind.”

“Tell me who ordered the hit.”

She smiled.

“What?” I growled at her, searching her disposition until I started to see, with growing dread, that maybe the battle’s winner wasn’t me. “Wait. Where did your driver go?”

“To get me leverage.”

“Where exactly did he go?”

“To get your dog.”

Chapter 25

“My dog?!” My blood was boiling. Allison was playing a very dangerous game. She didn’t know how irrational I could be.

The self-preserving move on my part would be to comply. She was assuming I’d be self-preserving. “I know what’s wrong with you,” she said.

“Back away from me!”

“Listen to me, Michael Ryan. I know exactly what’s wrong with you.”

“Turn around! And face the wall! Hands!”

She couldn’t possibly have my dog. He’d be too fast. He wouldn’t trust the front door.

“I know why you can’t function anymore,” she said.

“Hands against the wall!”

I didn’t care if they found the basement and the frozen bodies. I just wanted Updike to run.

“I swear to God,” I said, “if you hurt one single…!”

I slammed her backward against the mirror.

She was freshly invigorated. She spoke with new strength. “My phone is going to ring when the animal is in the possession of my driver. Before that happens, we will reverse roles and you will give me back my gun. You’re strong, Michael. See that? I know you. I know you had trouble in your marriage. She didn’t appreciate you.”

“You’re sick.”

I spun her away from the mirror, then shoved her back toward it, so her chest slammed against it, so my chest slammed against her.

Yet she remained in control. “You can come out ahead here, Mike.”

She’d probably had hundreds of enemies beaten up in hundreds of lobbies and parking lots, but I, for some reason, must’ve stood out as one of the rare victims who required personal attention.

“I won’t kill your dog unless you make me,” she said.

“Who ordered the hit?”

“I won’t unless you ch—”

Blam! I fired the gun and blasted a bullet into her hamstring.

She winced deeply, yet seemed to disrespect the pain. Her eyes searched into me.

With two bullets in her body, she seemed to understand me just ever so slightly more.

I’d just won the war.

“I admire you,” I said to her. “You brought me here alone, alone, because you needed to defy a broken system. Stay still. You were never actually going to get your so-called leverage—leverage you only happened to mention after you lost control. I admire you, Allison, but you’re done. Tell me who ordered the hit.”

She took one last strategic breath. She didn’t have my dog—I saw it in the way she flinched. It was a shift in dominance. She eyed me, searching for a promise that I wouldn’t kill her.

My question lingered in the air. She decided to answer it. “His brother.”

Chapter 26

His brother?

There it was. The fruit of my entire day’s work.

“His brother paid me to arrange the kill,” she said. “The son of Ivan Mesic called me to request a public hit.”

Ivan fathered a son who would request the murder of his other son. It would’ve been ghastly to hear if it didn’t make sense. In this business, the idea of an intrafamilial feud felt sadly obvious.

“Okay?” she said. “Now, why don’t you…let me leave this room…so that I can then live in healthy fear of you…so that you can then go home to your wife?”

“My wife?”

“She needs you.”

“My wife is…uh…well…She’s dead.”

“What?”

“She was sliced in half.”

“Who’d be stupid enough to kill the wife of a relentless maniac?”

“The maniac himself.”

It felt good to say.

“Please let me go, Michael. You’re smarter than this.”

“I killed my wife, face-to-face, just like we are now.”

“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you’re that far gone.”