Ed McBain - Three Blind Mice

Well, hello, Kit, she thinks.

Aren’t you lovely, Kit.

Are you ready for your lesson? he asks.

Oh yes, she thinks, I am ready for my lesson. Kit.

He has been giving her lessons for almost a year now, on and off the court. She cannot imagine what her life was like before he entered it. He is the same age as her husband, but by comparison Stephen seems far older. Stephen and his boat. Always the damn boat. Felicity . She hates the name of the boat. He comes in off the boat tasting of salt. Kisses her tasting of salt. She hates his kisses, they make her want to wash out her mouth. Stephen is a big man going to fat. Kit is the same age, they both fought in the same war, but Kit is lean and hard and savage, and she cannot get enough of him.

They talk a lot about her leaving Stephen. Divorcing him. But Florida’s courts aren’t quite as liberal with alimony as they are elsewhere in the United States. Most judges down here will grant alimony for a so-called period of adjustment and then you’re on your own, sink or swim. She is trying to figure out some way to get him to put the farm in her name. She has told him that if something happened to him, God forbid, the estate taxes would murder her, they’d be giving the government enough money to invade Grenada all over again. Over and over again, she hits on the Grenada theme. He’d hated Reagan when he was president, hated the invasion of Grenada, the bombing of Libya, a man who’d killed people himself, it was strange. Try to get the farm in her name. The farm was the fortune. Get him to put it in her name and then kiss him off, spend the rest of her life lying in the sun with Kit, making love to Kit. They talk about that tonight, too. They always talk about that. In each other’s arms, they talk about her leaving Stephen once the farm is in her name.

Their watches are on the dresser, lying side by side, hers tiny and gold with a slender black strap, his massive and steely, with digital readouts and stubby little studs.

Their watches toss seconds into the room.

Minutes.

More minutes.

On the bed across the room, they are making love again, lost in their need for each other, savoring these last passionate moments before their long separation, she cannot get enough of him. And at last they lie back on the pillows, her head close to his, his arm lying across her breasts, spent, content, silent. A fire engine races past on U.S. 41, its siren howling.

Fire someplace, she says.

Mmmm, he says.

They listen to the sound of the siren fading, and then it is gone, and the room is silent again save for the ticking of her watch on the dresser. She wonders aloud what time it is, and gets out of bed naked, and walks flatfooted across the room and picks up the watch and—

Jesus!

It’s a quarter past eleven!

This is when the nightmare begins.

Not later.

Now.

This instant.

It will take at least fifteen minutes to get back to the mall. This will put her in the Maserati at eleven-thirty, an hour and a half later than she’d planned. It’ll take another half hour to get back to the farm, she won’t be home till midnight! Never mind him putting the farm in her name, he’ll kick her out of the house if she walks in there at midnight! He’ll throw her out on the street! He’ll file for divorce tomorrow morning! How could they have been so stupid, wasn’t somebody watching the time? She is saying all this to Kit as she dresses, hastily putting on the garter belt and then the seamed nylon stockings, and fastening the stockings to the garters, He’ll kill me, she says, and stepping into the black lace-edged bikini panties, I can’t believe we let this happen, and then putting on the short black skirt and the sleeveless white silk blouse, and buttoning the little pearl buttons up the front. What can I tell him, she says, what can I possibly say to him?

The mall has been closed for an hour and a half by the time they reach the parking lot. There is an hour and a half she must account for. The movie has already let out, even the restaurant is closed, its neon sign dark, its front plate-glass windows black. The parking lot is empty, everything is dark, everything is still, save for a single light hanging over the rear door of the restaurant and a light shining through a narrow window beside the door. Kit drives her directly to where she’s parked the car. She does not even kiss him as she gets out. She is thinking ahead. She is still wondering what she can possibly tell her husband. She is thinking there is no possible way to explain a time lapse of an hour and a half, it’s all over, finished and done, he’ll kill her. Swiftly, she unlocks the door to the Maserati.

She has parked it behind the restaurant, which is shaped like a pagoda, and which in fact is named The Pagoda. The car is an expensive one, and this is four days before Christmas. With all the traffic in the mall’s lot a dented fender is a distinct possibility, but this was not her prime concern when she chose this deserted spot; she is a married woman having an affair, and moving from car to car is the most dangerous time. So she has parked it far from where — if she’d been back here on time — there would have been other cars, parked it instead here behind The Pagoda, alongside a low fence beyond which is undeveloped scrub land. She climbs in behind the wheel, locks the door, and starts the engine.

The dashboard clock reads twenty minutes to twelve.

The sound of the engine tells Kit that everything’s okay, but she flashes her headlights anyway, signaling, and he flashes his own headlights in farewell and begins backing his car away from the fence. She puts the gearshift lever in reverse. Kit makes a wide turn and then begins driving toward the exit. It is best not to follow him too closely, the night has eyes. She waits until in her rearview mirror she sees him turning out of the lot. Then she steps on the accelerator, and begins backing her own car away from the fence, and realizes almost at once that she has a flat tire.

The nightmare is about to escalate.

She knows how to change a flat tire, she has changed many of them in her lifetime, she is not one of these helpless little women who eat bonbons on a chaise longue while reading romance novels. She takes the jack out of the trunk, lifts out the spare, lays it flat on the ground behind the rear bumper, and then kneels beside the right rear tire to loosen the lug nuts on the wheel. She has removed one of them and placed it in the inverted hubcab, when…

The first thing she hears is the rear door of the restaurant opening.

And then voices.

Foreign voices.

Well, a Chinese restaurant, she figures they’re Chinese voices.

And then three men come out of the restaurant, through the back door, talking and laughing, and she recognizes them as the men who’d been out back here smoking earlier tonight when she’d parked the car, eight o’clock tonight when she’d parked the car, three hours and forty minutes ago when she’d parked the car. Three young men out back smoking. “Good evening, boys,” she’d said cheerfully — well, perhaps a bit flirtatiously, too; she was a woman on her way to meet her lover, and a woman with a lover thinks the whole world is dying to fuck her. “Good evening, boys.” Three hours and forty minutes ago. A nightmare ago.

One of them reaches in to snap off the inside lights. There is only the light over the door now. Another one pulls the door shut. The sound of the spring bolt clicking into place is like a rifle shot on the night. The three are still talking among themselves, their backs are to her, they haven’t yet seen her. One of them laughs softly. And then they turn from the door, and… and… they… they…