“And he can divorce me, but not without writing out a check for half a million dollars. I told you the terms of the pre-nup, right?”
“You did.”
“That sounds like a fortune, half a million dollars. It’s not, not really, not anymore, but it’s a whole lot more than I had in my jeans when I said goodbye to the Twin Cities.” She took a deep breath, let it out. “And it’s not as though I’ve got any say in the matter. If he wants to divorce me that’s what he’ll do. Suppose we invest the money. What kind of income would I get?”
“I’m not the best person to answer that,” he said, “but I can tell you this much. You’d be better off by a factor of ten if he died before he had a chance to divorce you.”
“If he died,” she said. “You mean if we killed him.”
“I mean when we kill him.”
“God,” she said. She looked down at her folded hands, then up at him. “I know you’re serious about it,” she said, “but it’s hard for me to know how serious. I mean, look at me. I was so stupid, making half-assed arrangements with Gonson. What saved me was when you showed up.”
“With my fancy car.”
“It did look like something a murderer would drive. But suppose Gonson hadn’t ratted me out, suppose he actually did know somebody and the man I was meeting was ready and willing to do the job. And suppose he went through with it, and got away clean. Who would they look at?”
“The wife.”
“And how well would I hold up? I could probably make it through an hour or so of interrogation, and then I could let it dawn on me that I probably ought to have a lawyer, and after that there wouldn’t be any more questions. But if they kept digging—”
“They’d find something. And of course there’d be the chance they’d find their way to the man you hired, because even if he’s a pro it’s a profession that doesn’t have terribly high standards. And he could drink and run his mouth, or he could give his girlfriend reason to drop a dime on him.”
“It’s funny how that expression is still around. If you could even find a pay phone, what good would a dime do you?”
“The point is, he’d give you up in a hot second.”
“I know that. So I was lucky twice, that a real hit man didn’t show up at the Winn-Dixie, and that the fake hit man decided he’d rather fuck me than score points with the sheriff.”
“It was a little more complicated than that.”
“I know that,” she said. “It wasn’t just my pussy. It was my eyes of blue. But you know what I mean, don’t you? I want to do this, Jesus I want to do this, but I don’t know how serious we really are.”
“I drove to Georgia Sunday.”
“Why, to get away from this whole business? You got as far as Atlanta before you changed your mind?”
“I didn’t get anywhere near Atlanta. I went to a town called Quitman.”
“I never heard of it.”
“I went to the high school, and isn’t that the perfect venue for a gun show? I spent about an hour there, and I came away with two unregistered guns and a box of shells for each of them.”
“Two unregistered guns.”
“A pistol and a revolver. The pistol’s a Ruger, the revolver’s a Taurus.”
“With Gemini rising, I’ll bet. Well, Jesus Christ, Doak. That’s a big step, buying the guns.”
“But?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to be a downer, but—”
“Go ahead.”
“Well, could you actually go through with it? I mean there’s a difference between buying a gun and pulling the trigger, isn’t there?”
“Absolutely.”
“You never actually did it, did you? Kill somebody, I mean.”
“Yes.”
A pause. “Yes as in yes you did, or yes you know what I mean?”
“I killed a man once,” he said.
“How did—”
“With a gun. I shot him and he died.”
She thought about this. “You were a policeman.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It was self-defense,” she said. “It was in the line of duty.”
“That’s how it went in the books,” he said, “but that’s not how it was. I murdered him.”
Twenty-three
He’d never told anyone.
He was working a case, knocking on doors on a mixed block on the Lower East Side, the same tenements housing Wall Street guys and corporate lawyers in four-figure monthly rentals alongside rent-controlled tenants who paid less for rent each month than their yuppie neighbors spent on sushi.
He could remember when you didn’t walk on that block if you didn’t have to, and now the storefronts were all designer clothes and vegan restaurants.
He was in a building, going door to door, trying to find someone who might have had eyes on the street three nights earlier when somebody gave a young man named Raisin Little a double-tap with a .22. Raisin had a yellow sheet that ran to drug busts, and it was a fair bet that whoever shot him was in the same line of work. As far as Doak was concerned it was a PSH, a public-service homicide, but you did what you could to clear those, too.
And gentrification made that a little more possible than it might have been in the old days, because the new people didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to talk to the cops.
The woman in 3-G was a junior copywriter at a Madison Avenue agency but was thinking of bailing on that because a couple of friends were starting a web-based company and wanted her to go in with them, and it sounded like fun, and there was always the chance it would work and somebody would buy them out for like a billion dollars. I mean it could happen, right?
And no, she’d heard about the shooting, because how could you not? It had happened right across the street, and she was home and heard the gunfire, or at least she thought now that she must have heard it, but you heard loud noises all the time, and if she even thought about it she thought it was a car backfiring or kids throwing firecrackers, and could someone please tell her what was it anyway with Chinese kids and firecrackers? So if what she heard was in fact the end of Little Raisin (she got the name turned around, but so did one of the tabloids), well, she never looked out the window to see what was going on, and if she had she probably wouldn’t have been able to see anything anyway and—
A woman screamed.
Not on TV, not out on the street. It was right there in that apartment, or maybe next door, and—
“Oh, God,” the copywriter said. “They’re at it again. The fun couple in 3-F, and I know he’s going to kill her one of these days.”
Another scream, and the sound of something banging into something. Furniture overturned.
“I keep thinking maybe I should call the police, but I don’t know, I have to live next to them, and — was that a gunshot?”
It was, and it was followed by another gunshot, and Doak was out in the hall now, his .38 drawn. He tried the knob, and when the door didn’t open he reared back to kick it in.
It must have been just a snap-lock holding it, because the door burst open, and just as it did there was a gunshot and a bullet sailed past him on the left, about shoulder high.
He saw a huge man, barefoot, wild-eyed, wearing stained baggy sweat pants and no shirt, with a gun in his hand.
“Police! Don’t move!”
That was what you were trained to shout, and he shouted it loud and clear, and the guy heard him and didn’t have to think it over. He swung toward Doak and pointed the gun at him and squeezed the trigger, all before Doak’s brain could tell his hand to point and shoot.
He thought, I’m dead.
And heard the hammer click on an empty chamber.
The guy grinned, he fucking grinned, and tossed the gun aside. “No bullets,” he said, and threw his hands in the air, palms facing forward. “No bullets. Bitch got ’em all.”