Twisted: The Collected Stories (4 page)

“Oh, God, no,” Dale said, frowning. “I’d never do that. I just made it
look
like I did. Believe me, it was pretty gross finding a used condom from behind that massage parlor on Knightsbridge Street.”

So hit men have standards, she reflected. At least some of them do.

She looked him over. “Aren’t you worried I’m a policewoman or anything? Trying to set you up? I mean, I just got your name out of that magazine,
Worldwide Soldier.
”

“You do this long enough, you get a feel for who’re real customers and who aren’t. Anyway, I spent the last week checking you out. You’re legitimate.”

If a woman paying someone twenty-five thousand
dollars to kill her husband can be called legitimate.

Speaking of which . . .

She took a thick envelope out of her pocket. Handed it to Dale. It disappeared into the pocket with the white rope.

“Dale . . . wait, your name’s not really Dale, is it?”

“No, but it’s the one I’m using for this job.”

“Okay, well, Dale, he won’t feel anything?” she asked. “No pain?”

“Not a thing. Even if he were conscious that water’s so cold he’ll probably pass out and die of shock before he drowns.”

They’d reached the end of the park. Dale asked, “You’re sure about doing this?”

And Marissa asked herself, Am I sure about wanting Jonathan dead?

Jonathan—the man who tells me he goes fishing with the boys every weekend but in truth takes his nurses out on the boat for his little trysts. Who spends our savings on them. Who announced a few years after getting married that he’d had a vasectomy and didn’t want the children he’d promised we’d have. Who speaks to me like a ten-year-old about his job or current events, never even hearing me say, “I understand, honey. I’m a smart woman.” Who nagged me into quitting a job I loved. Who flies into a rage every time I want to go back to work. Who complains whenever I wear sexy clothes in public but who stopped sleeping with me years ago. Who gets violent whenever I bring up divorce because a doctor at a teaching hospital needs a wife to get ahead . . . and because he’s a sick control freak.

Marissa Cooper suddenly pictured the shattered corpse of a rattlesnake lying bloody on a hot patch of yellow Texas sand so many years ago.

That’s too bad. I want him to go to hell. . . .

“I’m sure,” she said.

Dale shook her hand and said, “I’ll take care of things from here. Go home. You should practice playing the grieving widow.”

“I can handle that,” Marissa said. “I’ve been a grieving wife for years.”

Pulling her coat collar up high, she returned to the parking lot, not looking back at either her husband or at the man who was about to kill him. She climbed into her Toyota and fired up the engine, found some rock and roll on the radio, turned the volume up high and left Green Harbor.

Marissa cranked the windows down, filling the car with sharp autumn air, rich with the scent of wood smoke and old leaves, and drove fast through the night, thinking about her future, about her life without Jonathan.

T
he night went bad fast.

I looked in the rearview mirror and didn’t see any lights but I knew they were after us and it was only a matter of time till I’d see the flashers.

Toth started to talk but I told him to shut up and got the Buick up to eighty. The road was empty, nothing but pine trees for miles around.

“Oh, brother,” Toth muttered. I felt his eyes on me but I didn’t even want to look at him, I was so mad.

They were never easy, drugstores.

Because, just watch sometime, when cops make their rounds they cruise drugstores more often than anyplace else. Because of the perco and Valium and the other drugs. You know.

You’d think they’d stake out convenience stores. But those’re a joke and with the closed-circuit TV you’re going to get your picture took, you just are. So nobody who knows the business, I mean really
knows
it, hits them. And banks, forget banks. Even ATMs. I mean, how much can you clear? Three, four hundred tops? And around here the “Fast Cash” button gives you twenty only. Which tells you something. So why even bother?

No. We wanted cash and that meant a drugstore, even though they can be tricky. Ardmore Drugs. Which is a big store in a little town. Liggett Falls. Sixty miles from Albany and a hundred or so from where Toth and me lived, farther west into the mountains. Liggett Falls’s a poor place. You’d think it wouldn’t make sense to hit a store there. But that’s exactly why—because like everywhere else, people there need medicine and hair spray and makeup, only they don’t have credit cards. Except maybe a Sears or Penney’s. So they pay cash.

“Oh, brother,” Toth whispered again. “Look.”

And he made me even madder, him saying that. I wanted to shout look at what, you son of a bitch? But then I could see what he was talking about and I didn’t say anything. Up ahead. It was like just before dawn, light on the horizon. Only this was red and the light wasn’t steady. It was like it was pulsing and I knew that they’d got the roadblock up already. This was the only road to the interstate from Liggett Falls. So I should’ve guessed.

“I got an idea,” Toth said. Which I didn’t want to hear but I also wasn’t going to go through another shootout. Surely not at a roadblock, where they was ready for us.

“What?” I snapped.

“There’s a town over there. See those lights? I know a road’ll take us there.”

Toth’s a big guy and he looks calm. Only he isn’t really. He gets shook easy and he now kept turning around, skittish, looking in the backseat. I wanted to slap him and tell him to chill.

“Where’s it?” I asked. “This town?”

“About four, five miles. The turnoff, it ain’t marked. But I know it.”

This was that lousy upstate area where everything’s green. But dirty green, you know. And all the buildings’re gray. These gross little shacks, pickups on blocks. Little towns without even a 7-Eleven. And full of hills they call mountains but aren’t.

Toth cranked down the window and let this cold air in and looked up at the sky. “They can find us with those, you know, satellite things.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“You know, they can see you from miles up. I saw it in a movie.”

“You think the state cops do that? Are you nuts?”

This guy, I don’t know why I work with him. And after what happened at the drugstore, I won’t again.

He pointed out where to turn and I did. He said the town was at the base of the Lookout. Well, I remembered passing that on the way to Liggett Falls this afternoon. It was this huge rock a couple hundred feet high. Which if you looked at it right looked like a man’s head, like a profile, squinting. It’d been some kind of big deal to the Indians around here. Blah, blah, blah. He told me but I didn’t pay no attention. It was spooky, that weird face, and I looked once and kept on driving. I didn’t like it. I’m not really superstitious but sometimes I am.

“Winchester,” he said now, meaning what the name of the town was. Five, six thousand people. We could find an empty house, stash the car in a garage and just wait out the search. Wait till tomorrow afternoon—Sunday—when all the weekenders were driving back to Boston and New York and we’d be lost in the crowd.

I could see the Lookout up ahead, not really a shape, mostly this blackness where the stars weren’t. And then the guy on the floor in the back started to moan all of a sudden and just about give me a heart attack.

“You. Shut up back there.” I slapped the seat and the guy in the back went quiet.

What a night. . . .

We’d got to the drugstore fifteen minutes before it closed. Like you ought to do. ’Cause mosta the customers’re gone and a lot’ve the clerks’ve left and people’re tired and when you push a Glock or Smitty into their faces they’ll do just about anything you ask.

Except tonight.

We had our masks down and walked in slow, Toth getting the manager out of his little office, a fat guy who started crying and that made me mad, a grown man doing that. Toth kept a gun on the customers and the clerks and I was telling the cashier, this kid, to open the tills and, Jesus, he had an attitude. Like he’d seen all of those Steven Segal movies or something. A little kiss on the cheek with the Smitty and he changed his mind and started moving. Cussing me out but he was moving. I was counting the bucks as we were going along from
one till to the next and sure enough we were up to about three thousand when I heard this noise and turned around and, what it was, Toth was knocking over a rack of chips. I mean, Jesus. He’s getting Doritos!

I look away from the kid for just a second and what’s he do? He pitches this bottle. Only not at me. Out the window. Bang, it breaks. There’s no alarm I can hear but half of them are silent anyway and I’m really pissed. I could’ve killed him. Right there.

Only I didn’t. Toth did.

He shoots the kid, bang, bang . . . Shit. And everybody else is scattering and he turns around and shoots another one of the clerks and a customer, just blam, not thinking or nothing. Just for no reason. Hit this girl clerk in the leg but this guy, this customer, well, he was dead. You could see. And I’m going, “What’re you doing, what’re you doing?” And he’s going, “Shut up, shut up, shut up. . . .” And we’re like we’re swearing at each other when we figured out we hadta get outa there.

So we left. Only what happens is, there’s a cop outside. That’s why the kid threw the bottle, to get his attention. And he’s outa his car. So we grab another customer, this guy by the door, and we use him like a shield and get outside. And there’s the cop, he’s holding his gun up, looking at the customer we’ve got, and the cop, he’s saying, It’s okay, it’s okay, just take it easy.

And I couldn’t believe it, Toth shot him too. I don’t know whether he killed him but there was blood so he wasn’t wearing a vest, it didn’t look like, and I
could’ve killed Toth there on the spot. Because why’d he do that? He didn’t have to.

We threw the guy, the customer, into the backseat and tied him up with tape. I kicked out the taillights and burned rubber outa there. We made it out of Liggett Falls.

That was all just a half hour ago but it seemed like weeks.

And now we were driving down this highway through a million pine trees. Heading right for the Lookout.

Winchester was dark.

I don’t get why weekenders come to places like this. I mean, my old man took me hunting a long time ago. A couple times and I liked it. But coming to places like this just to look at leaves and buy furniture they call antiques but’s really just busted-up crap . . . I don’t know.

We found a house a block off Main Street with a bunch of newspapers in front and I pulled into the drive and put the Buick behind the place just in time. Two state police cars went shooting by. They’d been behind us not more than a half mile, without the lightbars going. Only they hadn’t seen us ’causa the broke taillights and they went by in a flash and were gone, going to downtown.

Toth got into the house and he wasn’t very clean about it, breaking a window in the back. It was a vacation place, pretty empty, and the refrigerator was shut off and the phone too, which was a good sign—there wasn’t anybody coming back soon.
Also, it smelled pretty musty and had stacks of old books and magazines from the summer.

We brought the guy inside and Toth started to take the hood off this guy’s head and I said, “What the hell’re you doing?”

“He hasn’t said anything. Maybe he can’t breathe.”

This was a man talking who’d just laid a cap on three people back there and he was worried about this guy
breathing
? Man. I just laughed. Disgusted laughing, I mean. “Like maybe we don’t want him to
see
us?” I said. “You think of that?” See, we weren’t wearing our ski masks anymore.

It’s scary when you have to remind people of stuff like that. I was thinking Toth knew better. But you never know.

I went to the window and saw another squad car go past. They were going slower now. They do that. After like the first shock, after the rush, they get smart and start cruising slow, really looking for what’s funny—what’s
different,
you know? That’s why I didn’t take the papers up from the front yard. Which would’ve been different than how the yard looked that morning. Cops really do that Colombo stuff. I could write a book about cops.