Steven Womack - Way Past Dead

Alvy shook her head from side to side, disgusted. “Faye, you scared the pee out of us.”

“I told you not to come,” Mac said. “I’ll take care of this.”

Faye had on a pair of pleated khaki pants and a military-style shirt with epaulets. A large knitted bag hung from her right shoulder. Her permed red hair was full, bright. She was gorgeous, and what a hell of a thing for me to notice given the circumstances. I stared down at the floor, deflated.

“Mac, I had to,” she said. “What are you going to do?”

His jaw tightened. “I’ve got to take care of these two!”

My head snapped up. These two?

Alvy noticed it, too, and I saw a look on her face that was like a curtain dropping. Suddenly, what I had figured all along dawned on her.

“Maybe I’m naive,” I said to Alvy, “but you aren’t stupid enough to think he’d actually give you a million dollars, are you?”

The curtain-dropping look turned into terror.

“Okay,” I said offhandedly, “so you are that stupid.”

She turned to Ford. “Mac?” she said, pleading. “We had a deal, an arrangement. Right?”

Mac Ford rolled his eyes. “Get over there and stand against that wall, you little twit.”

She drew herself up straight. “What about my copy of the letter?”

“I’m tired of fooling with you, Alvy. Screw your copy of the letter. It won’t do you a bit of good after-”

Mac didn’t need to finish the sentence.

“Oh, no,” she squealed.

“What’s going on here?” Faye demanded. Alvy slowly backed up, her eyes open their widest, her hands crossed in front of her open mouth. Textbook terror, shock, disbelief, all interwoven on her face.

“Well,” I said brightly, “let’s review the day’s events. First, I blackmailed Alvy into helping me get evidence that Mac Ford is a murderer. Alvy then sold me out in order to successfully complete her plan to blackmail Mac into giving her half of the two-million-dollar insurance settlement. Then Mac betrays her and is going to kill us both.

“Now tell me, Faye,” I said, turning to her. “Just who did you fuck in this little drama?”

Mac Ford took a step toward me and pointed the pistol, as best I could tell, right at my forehead.

“For a guy that’s about to take a record-breaking dirt nap, you sure are awful goddamn funny.”

“I’m sorry, Mac. It’s that bad-attitude thing again. I’m so tired and stressed-out that my mouth is writing checks my ass can’t cash. But I think you’re making a big mistake here, buddy.”

“Fuck you.”

“Look, let’s start with the fact that I’m sure you didn’t mean to kill Rebecca Gibson. At least, that’s what I’d say if I was your defense lawyer. You know, ‘That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.…’ The bitch betrayed you, was going to cost you a fortune after you’d risked everything to put her name up in lights. So you went over to talk to her, to try to reason with her, to beg her to come back into the fold. She went to work on you just like she did everybody else. She got abusive, maybe even took a swing at you. You got in a fight, and in the heat and passion of the moment, she winds up dead. Worst-case scenario, you cop to involuntary manslaughter. You get five-to-ten, but let’s face reality here. With prison overcrowding and the fact that despite your scruffy appearance, you’re basically a middle-class professional with a lot of good contacts, you’ll do maybe eighteen months in a minimum-security facility before you’re paroled.”

“And lose everything,” he said. “The agency, the career, the two million dollars.”

“Big deal,” I said. “What are you, thirty-eight, forty? Another ten years, nobody’ll remember this and you’ll be back on top. On the other hand …”

All three of them stared at me. “Yeah?” Mac said.

“On the other hand, you drive us out to Rutherford County and bury us in some farmer’s field, it’s premeditated murder. That’s capital, pal. They’ve got Ol’ Sparky working out at Riverbend again. How’d you like to spend the next decade on death row, then get plugged in for your last ride?”

“That’s if I get caught,” he said.

I waved my hand. “C’mon, you’ll get caught. Plus, you’ve got somebody here who knows you did it.” I pointed at Faye. “You guys are tight as a duck’s ass now, but who can say what’s going to happen a few years down the road? She’ll always know you committed three murders, and you’ll always know she knows.”

Faye and Mac looked at each other. Behind me, Alvy slumped down against the wall and slid all the way to the floor. I wondered if she’d passed out and hurt herself, then realized I didn’t give a damn.

“Don’t listen to him, babe,” Mac said. “He’s full of shit.”

“Mac,” Faye said slowly, “I think he’s right.”

“No!” Mac screamed, the rage coming to the surface now. “I won’t give it up!”

“And to complicate matters even further, Mac, I left written instructions with friends telling them everything I intended to do today and telling them what to do if anything happened to me.…”

That wasn’t quite the truth, but it would do for now. I just hoped he bought it. I stood up slowly from behind the desk, my hands palm outward in front of me.

“You ask me, dude,” I said, “it’s all over.”

He moved the gun a little closer to me. “Nobody asked you.”

“Mac, honey,” Faye said, “he’s right. It’s not worth it.”

“It is worth it!”

“If they take you away forever, it’s not! I’ll wait for you. It’s a chance for you to relax for a while, get out of this rat race. You’re killing yourself. Look at you.”

“Shut up, Faye!” he screamed. His face was red now, his jaw shaking as he spoke.

I kept trying to come up with something clever to say to him, but the well had finally run dry. I’d said all I could, and unless I got the chance to jump him like in the movies, then it really was over. And although I’d never tried it, I had a feeling that movie shit wasn’t going to work.

Behind me, Alvy groaned. I looked down at her. She was huddled in a ball, her head buried between her knees.

“Let’s go,” Mac ordered, waving the pistol. “Everybody out!”

“To the car, right?” I asked.

“That’s right, smart guy. To the car.”

I crossed my arms and shook my head. “No,” I said, with a voice inside my head wondering where the hell that came from.

He looked at me like I’d just spoken Farsi. “What do you mean, ‘No’?”

“Tell me, Mac. What part of no don’t you understand? I’m not going with you. I will not cooperate in my own death. If you want to kill me, do it right here in this room. But I promise you, I’m going to flop around like a largemouth bass and make an enormous mess for the forensics lab to go over.”

“You’re crazy,” Mac Ford said.

“Nevertheless …” I leaned my hip against the top of Alvy’s desk and tried to relax. I was too tired to deal with this anymore.

“Okay, we’ll do it here. My office is soundproofed.”

“Has it been bloodstain-proofed?” There went that mouth of mine again.

“Move!” he screamed again, waving the pistol.

“Mac, please,” Faye Morgan said. “Let’s stop this.”

Alvy groaned again, loudly. “Alvy, get up,” Ford said.

“Stop it,” Faye said, a little more sternly this time. I closed my eyes, exhausted, lethargic, not giving a big rat’s ass anymore. “Get up!” he yelled.

“Mac,” Faye said, “I can’t let you do this.”

“You can’t stop-” Then Mac Ford’s voice cut off like the plug had been pulled. I opened my eyes.