Джеймс Паттерсон - Three Women Disappear

“Enough, Anna,” he said. “It’s time to come with us.”

I’d forgotten just how heinous his skin was close up—taut and glistening, as if someone had taken a cockroach shell and spread it over a human face.

“Can’t do it,” I said, leaning with one hand against the Bentley, waiting for my breath to come bounding back.

“Come on now, Anna,” he said, patting his leg as if he was summoning a dog.

Here’s a free survival tip: always do the opposite of whatever your would-be assassin commands.

Which is to say I ran like hell. I was guessing they couldn’t kill me until Vincent got his alone time. More importantly, I was guessing I could outrun a fat man and a gimp. One perk to being the wife of mob royalty: you spend a lot of time at the gym. With the crumpled Bentley blocking the alley, the only way they could follow was on foot. I figured as long as I didn’t trip and face-plant, I’d live to see another day.

“Go on, go on!” Defoe shouted. “Stop her before she makes the street.”

Then I heard tires screeching, and I knew Defoe was planning to hightail it around the block and cut me off on the other side. Unfortunately for me, this alley was the length of an airport runway, and I hadn’t cleared a third of it before I crashed.

A quick glance over my shoulder told me I had nothing to fear from Broch, who was too top-heavy to keep pace. Now all I needed was for downtown traffic to keep Defoe at a crawl. I dug deep for an extra gear, gasped my way through the homestretch.

And then I saw my escape route: a city bus. It was pulling past the alley and up to the curb as I hit the street. I ran after it, leapt aboard just before the driver shut the doors, then started for the back.

“Hey, miss,” the driver called after me. “Forget something?”

I hadn’t taken a city bus since college. I searched my pockets, threw change down the chute until the light turned green.

The smart play would have been to duck out of sight, but I had to know. I walked past rows of empty seats, crouched down, peered out the back window.

Defoe and the man-child were standing beside their double-parked sedan, craning their necks in every direction but mine.

I was safe. For now.

CHAPTER 16

BUT PROBABLY not for much longer. Not unless I found a way to get Vincent Costello off my back.

I exited three stops later, in front of a strip mall lined with the kind of stores my brain is programmed to ignore: a comic book shop I’d bet my life sold weed out of the back, one of those cook-your-own-food Mongolian barbecues (Anthony always thought they looked like fun; my argument was, what’s the point if you have to do all the work?), an antiques store with busted GI Joes and ancient lunch boxes in the window. Crap, crap, and more crap. And crappiest of all: a women’s discount apparel store with half a roll of duct tape holding the front window in place.

Like it or not, this was a new day for me, and new days require new outfits. I held my breath, stepped inside. It was suddenly clear to me what people meant by off-the-rack : half the merchandise was lying trampled on the floor. The place itself looked trampled. The drop ceiling was buckled from water damage, the blue synthetic carpet was worn through to the concrete foundation, and the long, dark cracks in the drywall reminded me of my grandmother’s spider veins. Even the security cameras hadn’t been updated since the seventies.

In other words, the place was perfect. I didn’t have to search hard to find the kind of outfit Anna Costello would never be caught dead in: acid jeans, a pink sweatshirt with GLAMOUR GIRL scrawled across the chest in purple glitter, a pair of those rubber clogs patterned with geometric cutouts, plastic sunglasses sporting neon-green frames, and a handful of sparkly rainbow hair clips that I planned to stick at random intervals all around my head. I could sit on Vincent Costello’s lap and he still wouldn’t recognize me.

I took my haul up to the counter and paid—this was one place I could use my credit cards without fear of a Costello hearing about it seconds later—then carried the drawstring plastic bag back to the only dressing room and swapped my new clothes for the old ones. I looked like a cross between a high school cheerleader and the last woman standing at the local casino’s boilermaker Thursdays. It would work just fine. Where I was going, I’d fit right in.

La Torre Bar (formerly La Torre Bar and Grille, but the latter part of the name was dropped when not even the most hardened wino would eat there) was five miles to the north, in a neighborhood I’d heard about but never visited. I decided to hoof it in my new clogs. I had time to kill: Victoria wouldn’t be there before happy hour, anyway.

Victoria Maria Elena Costello. Anthony’s first wife. In his more affectionate moments, Anthony called me “the upgrade.” Victoria kept the Costello name in part to piss off Anthony and in part because it came with major benefits. No one fires a Costello. No one assaults or insults a Costello. And men don’t hit on a Costello uninvited. Not even drunk men.

All that came in handy for Vicki given that she poured the drinks at La Torre. By the time I arrived, my new sweatshirt was a darker shade of pink, and my feet felt as though they’d been rubbed raw. The bar sat between a bodega and an abandoned storefront. A gaggle of aging men hung outside the bodega playing cards and smoking cigars. I cocked my head and winked at them: a new personality to go with my new wardrobe. Then I gave myself a silent pep talk and pushed through the bar’s saloon-style doors.

The interior was all felt pennants slung crooked against wood paneling. The sawdust on the floor was probably the same sawdust they’d laid out when the place opened three decades ago. At a little after five, only the hard-core regulars were in attendance—drunks of both genders with sunken mouths, busted capillaries, clothes that would fall apart if they were ever washed. Of course, the population would look much the same at 8:00 p.m., 10:00 p.m., midnight.

She was standing behind the bar, chopping up lemons, with a black rag slung over one shoulder. She hadn’t changed much since the last time I saw her. Fake hair, fake eyelashes, fake nails, fake tits, and none of it particularly well maintained.

“Hiya, Vicki,” I said.

She hated it when anyone shortened her name. Victoria sounded to her like royalty, and falling from Anthony’s castle to this hole-in-the-wall had done nothing to slow her ego.

“I know you?” she asked.

I took off the Cracker Jack–prize sunglasses.

“Know me?” I said. “You hate my guts.”

She glared across the bar, her jaw working double time. Vicki’s one of those people who can make the act of chewing gum look and sound like a war crime.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “You’re the lying, thieving, flat-chested whore. Anthony find a newer model yet?”

I grinned. I felt oddly pleased with myself. Her insults held no sway anymore. Nothing she said could faze me. I needed information from her, and that was it.

Namely, I needed to know who might want Anthony dead. Because while I believed either Sarah or Serena was involved, or maybe both of them, I didn’t believe they’d acted alone. I didn’t believe they’d done the stabbing. Combined they added up to about half Anthony’s weight. Maybe Serena turned off the alarm, let the killer in. Maybe Sarah sprinkled my husband’s eggs with powdered Valium. But the move against him had been sanctioned by a higher power. Maybe Vincent’s men weren’t coming after me to avenge Anthony. Maybe they were just finishing the job.

If anyone could cut through the maybes, it was Victoria. She’d been hands-on with his business interests—especially his extracurricular interests, the side deals he didn’t want Vincent to know about. She was the one who convinced him he wasn’t getting his due. It took a while, but her relationship with Anthony went south because she pushed too hard, wanted his fingers in more and more pies. That’s part of why I played deaf and dumb in my marriage. The other part was that I really didn’t want to know.