Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

“There,” she said, walking out. “I did my part. Now you clean up the rest.”

I took a deep breath and proceeded to do exactly that.

IT DIDN’T SURPRISE ME one bit that I found nothing on the man after going through his pockets. No wallet, no ID, no photos, no badge (thank God), not even a stick of gum. He was a thorough professional, probably a freelancer. And I was quite sure he had been sent either by Pelton or Schillinger or both. It only made sense for them to place a tail on me seeing that I posed such a threat. What did surprise me was how the hell he located us all the way up here. He must have tailed us the whole way.

Under the cover of night, I dragged his body out to the woods behind the cabin and buried him in a shallow grave marked with a stone cairn and piles of oak leaves and pine needles for camouflage. It wasn’t much but at least his body would be hidden until I devised some kind of plan for disposing of it before the stink of decomposition took over. I’m not sure exactly why I did it, but before I covered him in dirt I put the knife back in his hand.

It took about an hour to clean up the mess in the bathroom and to burn the blood-soaked towels in the fire. By the time I got settled, it was going on two o’clock in the morning.

Cassandra was a tough one.

She never lifted a finger to help with the mess. She sat by the fire taking deep, calming breaths, her shoulders shaking, trying to bring herself to grips with the fact that she had just buried a hatchet in somebody’s skull. Like Eddy Vasquez’s sudden death, this was something she had to swallow. But in another sense, it was something I had to swallow too. Cassandra had saved my life and I knew I should be grateful. And I was. Not for my life necessarily, but for providing me with at least one very good reason to place my trust in her.

I sat down beside her. She seemed somewhat calm now, although I had no way of knowing for certain just how she really felt.

“Thanks,” I said, staring not at her, but into the fire.

“For what?” she said.

“For preventing that paid assassin from planting that knife in my solar plexus.”

“Oh,” she said. “That.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That.”

I looked at her, saw her make a slight, corner-of-the-mouth smile, then break down in tears once more.

“You did what you had to do,” I said.

“No,” she said in a soft, whisper voice. “That’s not it at all.”

“What then?” I was trying my best to stay calm and patient, despite the fact that I needed answers and needed them quickly.

“I’m not sure that I loved Eddy at all after he shot that cop,” she said. “It’s just that I felt this need to be there for him once he’d been put in prison. Like my being there somehow gave him a good side or somehow destroyed the bad. And now that he’s dead, I can’t help but feel like I somehow let him down.”

She hesitated for a few seconds. Her entire body was trembling, and for good reason.

“But there’s something else, too,” she said. “I can’t help but feel relieved.”

I felt the heat from the fire on my face, but in my brain I pictured the overcoat man coming up on me from behind, knife in hand.

“How can I help?” I said. But what I really wanted to say was this: Just what the hell do you know and how do I know you’re going to tell me the whole truth and nothing but the whole truth, regardless of the way you just saved my life?…

Of course, I’d have to be gentler than that.

“You don’t know what I’m going through,” she said, louder this time, more forceful.

I looked at her eyes, wide and brown, filled with fire both real and reflected.

“I almost feel good, like this weight has been lifted from my shoulders because I know I won’t have to be there for him anymore, won’t have to play his or anyone else’s games. Like I can live a life of my own now that Eddy has lost his.”

I put my hand on her knee. She made no attempt to move it.

“Don’t confuse relief with guilt,” I said. “From the moment he killed that cop, his going down was only a matter of time.”

I wasn’t sure if I should have said it like that, but I said it anyway, because it was the truth and I wanted to get beyond this whole thing as soon as possible. But the facts were plain enough: Eduard Vasquez shot a cop. A cop with a pregnant wife. He had to pay, one way or the other.

Cassandra put her head down again, chin against chest. She wiped the tears from her eyes with the backs of her hands. But then, suddenly, she snapped her head up so that her heavy eyes and long black eyelashes once again reflected the radiance of the fire.

“That’s it,” she said. “I’m not going to mourn for a man I did not love.”

“Good,” I said, lifting my hand from her knee to her shoulder. “Then let’s get to work.”

I checked the time. Two-fifteen in the A.M.

Before I knew it, daylight would be breaking over the valley and Val would be waiting for me at our rendezvous off Exit 28 of the Northway. That is, if the bastards didn’t get to us first. What I mean is, if the overcoat man had been sent by Pelton or Schillinger and he didn’t return or contact them at some designated hour, somebody was going to become a little suspicious.

I got up, tossed two more chunks of wood into the fire. Sparks shot up and a couple of air pockets burst like intermittent blasts from a light-caliber revolver. It was hard to believe in a way. A fire during the month of May, during an unusually warm spring. But that was the difference between the north country and the suburbs that surrounded Albany only a hundred fifty miles or so to the south. As I sat back down again, I knew that even during the summer months it was not unusual to get a frost up here.

“Now look, Cassandra,” I said, in as steady a voice as I could summon given our situation. “I want to ask you some questions and I want you to tell me the truth.” I tried looking her in the eye, but she looked away as if the effort were just too painful. “We have to be honest with each other, help one another out as much as possible, hold nothing back. Or else we both risk going away for a very long time. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

She stared at the fire like it was her lifeline, like we had all the time in the world. I took her by the shoulders, shook them just enough to get her full and undivided attention. “Do we understand one another?” I repeated.

She said nothing. Instead she nodded her head yes.

“Good,” I said, standing and pulling the.45 out from under my belt, checking the safety and the round I had chambered earlier. “First question. How’d you get mixed up with a crook like Vasquez?”

“So you want to know about Cassandra’s fucked-up past, is that it?”

“It might help if we start from the beginning,” I said, pacing now from one end of the great room to the other. “It’ll definitely be a start if I get to know you a little better.”

Cassandra laughed, but I wasn’t sure why.

As for me, I pulled back the shade on the picture window just enough to get a look outside, slightly anxious that the overcoat man might not have been alone when he tailed us here.

Cassandra cleared her throat as if about to make a speech. Then she breathed and started in.

“In ‘87,” she said. “I was working as a waitress in one of those cheap Mexican buffet joints down by NYU. I was barely getting by, so I decided to answer a classified to become an exotic dancer. You know, a stripper. No prior experience required, the ad said.”

“On the pole training.”

“At the same time,” Cassandra said, “I was taking some home-study courses from a cable television correspondence school.”