Jack reached for his coffee, took the last cold slug, then tossed the empty cup in the back and squirmed in his seat, trying to find a more comfortable position. Three hours parked and staring at everyday people hurrying off to their little jobs was enough to put a crick in anybody’s back.
“Still no sign of Will.” Marshall tapped an unlit cigarette against his thigh. Man didn’t smoke, but always carried a pack. Claimed they were useful, an easy way to get close to somebody or to start a conversation with a chick. “You don’t think the little prick lied to us?”
“No.”
“I guess you’re right. Number you did on him, he’d have ratted on Jesus Christ.” Marshall scrunched his face up like he was in pain, cast his voice high. “ ‘Ohgodohgod, please, not my other hand, I’ll tell you where he is, just not my other hand, please!’ ” He blew a breath. “That was heavy shit, you doing it anyway, after he told us.”
“Had to be sure.” Something queasy happened in Jack’s stomach, and he had an image of the boy the way they’d left him, cruciform, facedown, a pool of blood spreading fast, pouring out of his neck to darken the hardwood like a hose left on the concrete. He pushed it away, a mental twitch that was becoming easier. The boy hadn’t been his first.
“Poor Ray. Just bad luck, him being Will’s nephew.”
“Yeah.” Jack closed his eyes, rubbed them with his fingertips. “Poor Ray.”
“Funny, the way luck works. Going about your business, thinking about what car to buy, whether you want to stay with your girl or look for a new one, and wham! Head-on collision with fate.”
“Fate?” Jack shrugged. “It wasn’t fate. It was us. We did it.”
“Sure. Fate’s messengers.” Marshall spun the cigarette between his fingers. “Let me ask, how many times you pull the trigger on somebody?”
“A few.”
“You remember the second?”
“Huh?”
“I got this theory. The first you’re always going to remember. Like losing your cherry. I remember the first time perfectly. Julia Buckley. I was fifteen, she was fourteen, in her parents’ basement. They had this orange shag rug, and we did it right on top.” He paused. “Thing is, I can’t remember the second time we fucked. Already started to lose the novelty.”
Jack ran his tongue between his teeth and his lips, shifted in the seat. “I remember the second time.”
“Second time you killed or the second time you fucked?”
“Both.”
“Huh.” Marshall stared out the window, spoke slow. “You notice how none of them believes it’s happening? Take your toughest tough guy, he won’t believe it. But it’s like getting hit by a bus. Anybody can get hit by a bus, anytime. Bus don’t care what you’re thinking, that you aren’t ready. It’s just getting from A to B.” He jerked his chin toward the windshield. “There’s the other neighbor.”
Jack followed his stare to the brick two-flat forty yards down. A woman was stepping out of the door that led to the second-floor apartment. When they’d first arrived, he’d gone into the vestibule that fronted the place and checked the mailboxes. The first floor read Bill Samuelson, close enough to “Will” that it’d be automatic to respond when people said it. The second floor listed a Tom and Anna Reed. A guy Jack could only assume was Tom had left earlier, wearing rock star shades.
They watched her lock the door and head down the block, her low-rise jeans tight enough to show off the sweetheart of her ass. She climbed into a late-model Pontiac and pulled away.
Jack reached in back and pulled the shotgun, handed it to Marshall.
ANNA COULDN’T GET used to how easily she’d gotten used to it. The money. Only a couple of days since they’d found it, and everything felt different already.
Like her job. Normally, given all the time she’d missed for doctor’s appointments, today she would have gone in early. Tried to make some headway against the mountain of e-mails. Butter up her boss. Spend some time schmoozing the client, letting them feel they were involved without letting them muck anything up.
There’d been a time when she’d loved it. Loved the hours and the excitement of a downtown ad firm, loved wearing heeled boots and working on the forty-first floor, loved the free lunches and Friday-afternoon beer. But lately it had come to seem so… pointless. Working sixty-hour weeks to create advertising – the one product people actively tried to avoid.
And this morning she just couldn’t face it. So after Tom had left, she’d called in to say that she was wiped out from the treatments. Then she’d put on her favorite jeans, gone to the basement, and taken eight bundles of their money.
Their money. That was another funny thing. She no longer thought of it as Bill’s. From the moment she lied to the detective, it had started to become theirs. Little images popped up against her eyelids when she closed them: the house paid off, a baby girl in her arms and another on the way, an annual vacation to South Carolina to play in the surf. Nothing elaborate, no jet-set life or movie-star parties. Just a family and the security to enjoy it. That was all she had ever really wanted.
She flipped her signal, turned onto Lincoln. A lovely spring morning, the trees suddenly green along the neighborhood blocks, sunlight playful off storefront windows. A perfect day to play hooky. She decided to treat herself to lunch. Maybe even call her sister, see if Sara wanted to join.
But first, errands. She dropped off the dry cleaning, filled the tank with gas. Swung through a hardware store for some cleanser and rags. Then spun east toward Uptown.
The neighborhood was an in-betweener, an economically depressed zone – trash bags in piles, men lounging against the wall, shops that sold incense and hair extensions – nestled between affluent neighbors. It was an area she didn’t often hit. It wasn’t dangerous exactly, but it didn’t offer much reason to visit, either. But today she found exactly what she was looking for on a Clark Street corner.
She parked at a meter, glancing around to make sure no one was watching. An empty taxi was two spaces up. A pedestrian waiting on the light to change glanced in her direction, then up at a billboard for a cell phone company. Anna narrowed her eyes, but the man didn’t look over again. Down the block the El rattled overhead, throwing flickering shadows across gray stone.
She hadn’t been inside a Currency Exchange in a decade. The last time was before Sara lived in town, when she and a boyfriend had come to visit. Neither of them had remembered to deposit their paychecks before running to the airport. Considering that was half their drinking fund for the weekend, it had seemed problematic until Tom had suggested visiting an Exchange.
This was a different location, but they all seemed pretty much the same. Garish neon, the inside faded linoleum and too-bright fluorescents, a counter fronted with inch-thick Plexiglas. A shuffling line of people looking as though they’d like to be elsewhere. A closed-circuit camera was mounted on the back wall, and it made her nervous. She took sunglasses from her purse and put them on.
It took about five minutes to make it to the counter, where a bored woman popped her gum, then asked what Anna wanted.
“I’d like a cashier’s check, please.” She pulled the envelope from her purse. “Made out to Citibank.”
“How much.” The clerk’s voice so level it hardly seemed a question.
Anna glanced over her shoulder, then said, “Fifteen thousand, four hundred and twelve dollars, and fifty-seven cents.”
“Sure thing, lady.” The clerk rolled her eyes, then gestured to the customer behind Anna. “Next.”