Kelley Armstrong - Exit Strategy

“Will there be a problem getting in to see him?” I asked. “They’ll have him under security still, won’t they?”

Frances shook her head. “When the family puts someone out to pasture, he’s persona non grata. They’ll visit him, keep up appearances but, as far as they’re concerned, he’s out of the business. They won’t tell him anything, so there’s nothing he can tell anyone else. On current events, that is. The past? Well, no one cares much about the past these days.”

Frances searched the Internet for private rest homes in the Detroit suburbs until she found the one that tweaked her memory. Then we took our leave and prepared for a trip to Michigan.

“He’s an old man,” Evelyn said as she pulled into a mall parking lot. “Flash him some T and A, and he’ll tell us everything we want to know.”

“Great,” I said. “We’ll find you a push-up bra and miniskirt.”

She pinned me with a look. “After a certain age, all the push-up bras in the world don’t help, as you’ll discover. With a man like Little Joe, the horseflesh has to be young and it has to be firm.”

“Did I mention I don’t do Mata Hari?”

“ Dee…”

“I’m not pulling some feminist bullshit. I can’t play the seduction card-I don’t have the look for it. When I was on the force, Vice nabbed me once for undercover, stuck me in a microskirt and halter top, put me on the street corner. I looked like the world’s only crack ho with a personal trainer.”

“We can skip the microskirt.”

“And the halter top?”

A sigh. “And the halter top. Let’s see what we can find.”

I folded my sandwich wrapper into quarters, tucked it into the take-out bag and folded that into a neat square. Then I leaned forward to shake the crumbs from my cleavage. Amazing what they can do with bras these days. Slap together some elastic and some underwire, toss in a couple of gel-filled “contouring pads” and I felt like I should be ticketed for false advertising.

Evelyn had picked out my sweater-a low-cut job that was 50 percent Lycra, 20 percent angora and 100 percent skanky. She’d completed the ensemble with skintight jeans, ankle boots, red press-on nails and jewelry that clanked when I walked.

Back at her place I’d finished up with hair and makeup. I’d considered Jack’s platinum wig choice, but it tweaked the outfit over the line to street whore. So I’d kept on Evelyn’s long brown one, borrowed a curling iron and hair-spray, and teased the wig until it looked like what I’d worn for my eighth-grade yearbook photo-a shellacked ode to the era of big hair and heavy metal. Mafia bait. All I needed was a wad of bubble gum and a Jersey accent.

We’d taken turns driving, picked up lunch and arrived at Glory Acres just past three-thirty. The place had once been a home-a real one-occupied, undoubtedly, by a real family. It appeared to have begun life as a two-story Victorian but, like most of us, had spread with age. There was an addition here, a wing there, none of it the same style as the original building. Two skeletons of porch swings were propped against the house, seats and cushions gone. Burlap covered the shrubs and rosebushes. Birdbaths had been emptied and turned upside-down. A house in hibernation.

“I’ll talk to him alone first,” Evelyn said as we walked up the front steps. “I need to refresh his memory on some…past deeds of mine. So he knows I’m not conning him.”

“Maybe you can get him to talk to you, skip my role altogether.”

She said nothing, and I had the feeling it wouldn’t matter if she could get Little Joe to talk-she’d still bring me in. Testing me. Or showing me who was boss. Probably both. Typical “new partner” bullshit. One reason I liked working with Jack-he never pulled this crap.

“It might take ten, fifteen minutes, so use the washroom, freshen up.” She gave me a once-over. “Put on more lipstick. And pull the sweater down.”

“If I pull it down anymore, I’ll fall out.”

“All the better.”

“So what’s my story?” I said as I pulled open the front door. “Your niece? Nurse? Tax accountant?”

“For occupation, we’ll stick with the truth.”

I stopped, the door half open. “Seriously? Dressed like this?”

“He’ll love it.”

I waited in the atrium. The nurse had said there was a sitting room, but I preferred to stick close to the door, where escape was within sight. The smell is what did it to me, that unforgettable mix of disinfectant, overcooked vegetables and mortality that hits you in the gut and screams “run, while you still can!”

The last time I’d set foot in one of death’s holding pens-sorry, “retirement homes”-I’d been thirteen, visiting my great-aunt Anna. The same Aunt Anna who’d sworn she’d die if her kids ever put her in a home. She didn’t belong in a retirement home. First, she’d never retired, having run a cake-decorating business right up to the minute her kids stuck the For Sale sign on her front lawn. Second, though she was ninety-one, her brain was as sharp as ever, which was part of the problem. With her body wasting, she needed live-in help and she could be difficult. When the third nurse quit, Aunt Anna’s children gave up and put her in a home. Two weeks later, the old woman’s prediction came true. She died. There’s a moral in there somewhere. I think it’s “don’t have kids.”

Evelyn came to collect me about ten minutes later.

“Now, he knows what you are,” she whispered as she steered me down the main hall. “But I didn’t give a name. Don’t use Dee. That’ll be your official name and we don’t want him knowing that.” She stopped outside a room and grasped the handle. “We could go with-”

“I’ve got one,” I said and pushed open the door.

The door opened into the living room area of a hotel size suite. A couch, a chair, a coffee table and art prints on the wall, all very Holiday Inn, reasonably new, but definitely bargain-basement quality. A decent enough place to spend the night…but the rest of your life? I fought back a shiver.

A man sat in the chair, his back to the door, affording only a view of a liver-spotted bald head. He stood as we came in. I blinked, and hoped my surprise didn’t show. He was three inches shorter than me, and I was only wearing one-inch heels. With a name like Little Joe, maybe this doesn’t seem surprising, but blatant irony is the favored form of criminal nickname humor. Any guy with the words “tiny” or “little” in his moniker was certain to be six feet plus. Obviously the Nikolaevs didn’t share the usual sense of mob humor.

Like many undersized criminals, Little Joe had over-compensated in the weight room. He’d pumped iron for so many years that even now, stuck in a rest home, his biceps would be the envy of a man a quarter his age. He had, however, neglected the lower half of his body, which left him looking like a balloon character squeezed from the bottom, a massive chest topping spindly legs. His eyes were sunken brown dots that glittered when he saw me. He smiled, revealing a perfect set of fake pearly whites.

“Is this her?” he asked, his gaze dropping to my chest and staying there.

“Jess,” I said, stepping forward and extending my hand. “But my friends call me Jezebel.”

He wheezed a laugh. “I bet they do.” He vice-gripped my hand. I squeezed back and he fairly licked his lips, eyes never rising above my neckline. “I bet you are very good at your job, no?”

“The best. No one ever complains.”

I extricated my hand from his and sashayed to the sofa. Evelyn tried to take the seat beside me, but Little Joe slid into it with the speed of a twenty-year-old.

“Now this, Evelyn, this is how a hitwoman should be,” Joe said, waggling a finger at her. “Not dressing up like a man, running around, shooting people. She must be subtle. Use her assets.” A sidelong look at my “assets.” “Yes, this is how it should be.”