David Ellis - The Wrong Man

“That’s the day I killed him,” she told me.

I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly. Other than alluding to the fact that her father was deceased, she’d never told me a thing about her family. And now she was telling me…

Did she just tell me she killed her husband?

“He was abusive,” she said mechanically. “He knocked me around for years. One day, I decided I wasn’t going to let it continue. I didn’t try to leave. I didn’t try to get him in counseling. I just bought a gun and I shot him. He’d hit me a couple of times the night before. He got drunk at Thanksgiving dinner with his family, and when we got home, he used me for a punching bag. I woke up the next morning bruised and sore, and I felt like the oxygen was sucking out of my lungs. I felt completely trapped. He’d eventually apologize to me and make me believe that he could change, and then he wouldn’t, and the cycle would repeat itself. I just couldn’t do it anymore. Something just snapped. I got my gun out of the closet and I walked downstairs into the kitchen. He yelled at me because I hadn’t made coffee. I shot him in the chest. He bled out right in front of me on the kitchen floor.”

I wasn’t sure where to start, or whether I should say anything at all. I remembered the first time I met her, when those goons were hassling her, the one grabbing her arm outside. And I remembered how she reacted when I first mentioned I was defending a man accused of killing a woman.

“If I’d called for an ambulance right away, they might have been able to save him. But I didn’t. I didn’t want him to live. I wanted him to die.”

“Tori-”

“When the police came, they took one look at little ol’ me and this bruiser of a husband, and I think they wanted to help me. They had some woman detective talk to me. She kept asking me what happened right before he shot me. I told her the truth. He was bitching about not having any coffee. And she said, ‘Is that when he hit you?’ And I started to tell her, no, he’d hit me the night before. But then I realized that nobody would understand. The only way I could get away with this would be if they thought he was beating me up right then and there. So I lied. I said he punched me that morning. I said I was in fear for my life. I lied because I was afraid they’d put me in prison otherwise.”

Slowly, she turned her head and locked eyes with me.

“So you wanted to know more about me, Jason. Now you do. Nice to meet you. Most sane men would turn and run.”

“Is that what you want me to do? Turn and run?”

She stared at me, her jaw tight and defiant, but tears formed in her eyes, the first crack in her shell. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”

“Then you’re going to have to push me away,” I said. “I’m not running.”

I took her hand and held it for a long time. I didn’t move toward her. She didn’t move toward me. She’d opened up to me, but it was going to come in tiny steps. That was okay. I could wait. It was, in many ways, a terrible time to confide this secret to me, given the task I had before me and my time constraints. But it was an anniversary of sorts for her and it was on her mind. And she’d been watching me moan and groan like a little boy, suffering, and that somehow made her feel sufficiently at ease to share this thing.

There was plenty of time, I thought. Once this trial was over, Tori and I had plenty of time.

Then I thought to myself, Screw that, and I said, “I’m coming upstairs with you,” and she said, “Okay.”

I would imagine that Tori had a nice apartment, if I saw much of it. We barely made it through the door before we were undressing each other. I’d spent many hours dreaming of unbuttoning that long white coat and running my hands inside it. Many hours imagining her naked except for those black knee-high boots, but she kicked them off as we stumbled backward together.

I went first. I like foreplay. I liked watching her become more aroused as we progressed. I liked lying next to her on the bed, not letting her touch me, as my hands ran over her body. I liked caressing the inside of her legs as she moaned with expectation, almost tickling her, before my fingers slid inside her. I liked watching her free herself, unleash something primitive from within, break down that facade she always kept up. I liked watching her blush and bite her lower lip and squeeze her eyes shut. I liked that she gripped my hair tightly as I removed my fingers and replaced them with my tongue.

She was so light. She had such a petite but firm body. I lifted her up and onto me and our eyes met, wide open, gazing into each other, for just a moment before she closed them again. She ran her hands down my back as we bobbed up and down. Her breath came in halted gasps, high-pitched, resembling sobs in some way. I’m usually pretty quiet, but I found myself grunting, and I knew this wasn’t going to last long.

It didn’t. But it was worth it.

She climbed off me and fell onto the bed. I did the same. She opened her eyes now and watched me, like she was observing me in some clinical fashion, trying to discern what or whom I was. Or maybe, I thought, she was wondering about herself.

And then her eyes welled up with tears. She silently fought them back and broke eye contact with me. After a moment she brushed the back of her hand over her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“That’s okay. A lot of women cry after they sleep with me.”

She allowed herself to laugh, and then a tear escaped and rode down her nose.

“This doesn’t have to be a big deal,” I assured her. “I’m not proposing marriage.”

She offered a smile that evaporated almost immediately. She didn’t know how to handle this, or me, or something.

“Okay,” she said quietly.

On the Friday morning after Thanksgiving, Patrick Cahill stretched his calves and his quads, rolled his ankles, and ran in place to keep warm. To his right the sky over the lake was an intense pink, anticipating the rising sun. His breath lingered before him. It was probably just a hair above freezing, if that.

He was at an intersection, with his eyes trained six houses down the block. He wished he weren’t so conspicuous, but he had no choice. His intel was vague at best.

He runs, he was told. Jason Kolarich runs along the lake every morning, rain or shine.

Not being particularly familiar with the city, Cahill had mapped it out last night. He had Kolarich’s address. So that was point A. But the lakefront-point B-was another matter. The lake spanned the entirety of the city’s east border. And there were a dozen different ways that Kolarich could access the lakefront from his townhouse. He’d have to go about three blocks east from his house. That was the easy part. But he could go north or south, and he could cut through a park or take a main artery. If Cahill were able to predict the spot at which Kolarich would reach the lakefront, it would be a simple matter of waiting for him. But since he couldn’t, he had no choice but to follow him from his home.

There. Kolarich walked out of his townhouse at about a quarter to seven. He was wearing a sweatshirt and running shorts. He was a big guy, bigger than the photograph could convey. He jogged down the five stairs, opened the gate, and immediately took off to his left, eastbound, toward the lake, like he was shot from a cannon.

Cahill had to give him space, naturally. He receded into the shadow of the first house across the street. Kolarich paid him no heed, didn’t even look in that direction. He crossed the street and ran north.

Good. He was probably headed to Ash. That was the most logical route. It was a major east-west artery that ran all the way to the lakefront.