In Too Deep (3 page)

‘What did you mean?' he asked, after some time had passed. He had given up, and now lay huddled beneath the flimsy blanket. The wool smelled of her, the sweat of her skin, but of deeper and even more distinctive scents too, and he drew its edge up to his chin so that he might better savour such an unexpected detail.

She lay beside him, on the brink of sleep, though her hand raked back and forth beneath the blanket, her fingertips teasing and getting to know the down of hair that smattered his chest and stomach.

‘When you said you knew me, what did you mean?'

She opened her eyes. Her face lay just inches from his own, and he was again shocked to find a beauty that added up to far more than the mere sum of its flawed parts. ‘Just that,' she said, her voice all smoke again, a stunning aural texture. ‘I know you.'

‘How?
'
He rolled onto his back, and took to studying the ceiling. He realised that he was afraid of what the answer might be.

‘Why, you're me, of course,' she said, with a little hiccup of laughter, as if the answer were obvious. ‘I mean, we're the same, you and I. Looking at you is like looking in a mirror. We carry around the same sort of secret, but there are others like us, too many others. I can always tell them at a glance. Anyone can, if they know how to read the signs. Some are more clearly marked than others. With certain people the evidence might not be much, just a hardness around the mouth, a distance to their stare, the way they hold their shoulders when they walk or how they react to a question asked, but whatever it is, it's still there, and it's enough. Today, as soon as I saw you, I knew.'

‘From all the way across the street. Am I that obvious?'

‘Let's put it this way: you're not difficult to read.'

She pressed her mouth against the lobe of his ear and kissed the falling line of his jaw. When she smiled, sadly, he could feel it seeping into the bones of his skull. ‘What was it for you? An orphanage, a neighbour, a teacher at school? An uncle?'

He made a sound with his throat and scraped it clear, but he could still hear it in his mind. ‘One of those, all of those,' he said, and then she had reached his lips and he closed his eyes and let her in, surrendering to her, the first person in a long, long time that he really wanted to grant some access to his life, the first who seemed to understand what he was all about.

‘If you are serious about surviving, you can't allow the details to matter,' she said. With his eyes closed he could imagine colours in that voice, tangled brown and grey ribbons of smoke or muddy, burnt-out rainbows, and he shifted and reawakened, trying desperately not to fall in love, not yet ready for something as drastic and over-whelming as that.

Without noticing, the hour had grown late, verging close to midnight, and a lamp was burning across the room. ‘Do you always sleep with the light on?
'
he asked.

He felt her nod her head. ‘Don't you?'

Rather than answer, he let it go. He watched her fingers worry the fringe of the blanket, and felt his heart break more than a little at the sight of her badly chewed fingernails. A moment earlier, he had been planning the easiest possible manner of escape, working up the excuse that would allow him to just slip away. Now, it seemed easier and better to stay. The tiniest details made all the difference. She propped herself up on one elbow, peeled a rope of fringe back off her face and tucked it behind her right ear. It held its forced position for just a beat, then tumbled back down across her eyes again. He reached out and ran a hand from her armpit slowly down to the jagged peak of her hip, and then she was looming above him again, her mouth smiling, answering some perceived invitation, with every shift of her china doll's body asking the sort of questions that didn't need words. He met her smile and returned it, and though their second attempt was nowhere near a triumph, it was at least a little more successful than the first had been. What was more, it felt like they had sealed some important deal.

‘I don't look at it that way, Mrs Malone,
'
I said, helping myself to another sip of Scotch. The living room was expensively decorated, a classy joint from start to finish. The stuff on show was enough to hurt my eyes, but at least it provided a distraction. Too much looking at a girl like Susan Malone could play havoc with a man's best intentions.

‘Murder is such an ugly word. I prefer to think of it as business. I'm a problem-solver. People come to me with a problem and I try to help out, if I'm in a position to do so and if the monetary compensation strikes me as acceptable. But I'm not in this business to get caught. I don't gamble, I only play the safe odds.'

God, she was something. You know the type: early thirties, tall and slim, but not skin and bone, with eyes the subtle blue of smoke and long blonde hair bouncing in curls around her bare shoulders. She wore a tasty black satin number, discreetly cut to emphasise her shape. I didn't want to stare, but I guess she was resigned to men staring by then.

‘All right,' she said. ‘So, what about my problem? Can you help?'

I shrugged. ‘Yeah, I guess I can do something for you.' I hadn't noticed before, but she was nervous. Some people move around when they are nervous, others just freeze. I had her down as the cold type.

The details weren't too complicated, nothing I hadn't heard a dozen times before. Basically, she just wanted her husband out of the picture. She had gotten my number from a friend of a friend, and that's usually how it works. Most of my work is corporate-sponsored, and I try to steer clear of domestic jobs, but occasionally I'll make an exception, when the money is too good to refuse.

Jake Malone had money to burn. Officially, he had made his fortune in transport, but most people knew that there was mud beneath the surface, whispers of drugs and Mob affiliations. These days he was clean right down to his toes and, as a respected pillar of the community, involved in all kinds of charity work and a voice of note in the Republican party. He had also expanded his empire to magnate pro-portions. The picture I held in my hand showed a man in his late sixties, bloated by the excesses of living. Not exactly the Prince Charming that every schoolgirl dreams of marrying.

But high finance could be a powerful aphrodisiac. Susan Malone wore her wealth well, yet there was something there that told me she hadn't always been accustomed to such surroundings. Not that I held any of it against her. Quite the contrary, in fact. She used what she had, made the best of it.

We talked money. I named a figure and she shrugged absently, as if it were nothing. I insisted on cash, half up front, and told her not to expect a receipt. Keep the paperwork for the pen pushers.

‘Half,' she said, and held out a large brown envelope. ‘Count it if you like.
'
The distance in her voice fit perfectly with the rest of the picture.

‘That's all right,' I said, smiling, ‘I can trust you, I'm sure.' My reputation was beyond reproach; few would have been foolish enough to try anything as cheap as short-changing me. I never needed to count the cash, and I had never once, in all the years that I have been doing this work, encountered a single problem in collecting the balance.

‘When will you … go to work?' she asked, choosing her words carefully. A lot of people are like that. She stood close enough for me to breathe the delicate lily-of-the-valley scent of her perfumed skin, but I had a rule: no mixing business with pleasure. There'd be time for such things later; maybe we could even come to some arrangement in lieu of the balance.

‘It's best that you don't know,' I said. ‘There's a lot more involved than just pulling the plug. It could be weeks, maybe even a couple of months. You won't hear from me for a while, even after it's all over. But I'll call when the time is right.'

She nodded, and that was that.

The people who tend to find themselves on my list are invariably the sort best put out to dry.
The Mob pays most of my bills; gangsters keep themselves generally well protected, but I can build a plan to fit any situation. Sometimes, I can do my work from a mile away, peering through a sniper's scope and just cutting loose, but even if I'm being paid to send an added message and I have to get my hands dirty, I rarely have to break a sweat. The police will take a look, but they won't go digging, because Mob hits are part of the daily merry-go-round.

Domestic jobs are more difficult, because of the level of trust that I have to extend, a concept quite foreign to my nature. In an ‘accident', the grieving spouse is naturally first in the firing line. Most people think they can handle the heat, but they'll start spilling at the first upward click of the thermostat. And this is where attention to detail comes in. It is imperative that the police don't query the death as anything other than accidental. Hence my hefty price-tag.

Jake Malone was six foot of bloated girth, with the thunderous ego that men who measure their wealth in the hundreds of millions wear like a sidearm. Sixties isn't ancient, but on a man like him it was plenty. Susan was his trophy wife, and I found myself hoping for her sake that it never strayed much further than the ornamental state. When I am casing a job, I do my utmost to remain detached from such useless emotions as like or dislike, but there was no denying that this guy was a hunting accident waiting to happen.

‘I'll leave that up to you,' Susan had said, when I mentioned some possible methods. ‘I have it on good authority that you are considered the very best in your field, so I guess I'd be a fool not to let you take care of the details. Besides, it's not as if I hate him or anything like that.
'
I weighed her words for the least hint of flirtation, and nodded.

So there it was; just business. A lady who knew what she wanted out of life and was not afraid to go after it. I wondered if she could ever fall for someone like me. I'm in good shape and not bad-looking for mid-forties, and I've managed to put aside a nice little nest-egg to ensure a very comfortable retirement. Some women even found ambrosial qualities in my aura of menace. I decided that, when all of this was done, I'd come knocking.

I took my time with the job, gave the situation a chance to settle. A cooling period is important, in case of new developments or stirrings of conscience. And when, finally, I did set to work, Jake Malone was still brash and overweight, still rolling to his routine days, making the office by ten, lunching with a constantly rotating clientele, and always checking out by five. I kept up surveillance for a fortnight, until I could read him like a penny dreadful.

Like a lot of his kind, he liked the façade of independence, and found great appeal in the idea of showing the world that he had never lost touch with the common man. No personal valets for him, no chauffeurs either. When he left work at five, he climbed behind the wheel of a jet-black Lincoln Navigator SUV, a great boat-like slab that practically haemorrhaged cash, but which held a lot of sway as a style statement among the tasteless glitterati. Such indulgence made him an easy mark though, allowing me to trail him at a variety of distances and to watch how he bullied his way through rush-hour traffic, cutting lanes, running red lights and blasting his horn at anyone who dared hold their place instead of ceding right of way to him. The man was a maniac behind the wheel and that presented me with an open-door invitation. All I had to do was find a quiet spot on the road and go to work. The police would open and shut the books on this highway wreck, no question about it.

Malone always took the hill route home. The hill, seven or eight miles out of town, was the status real estate, and his spread was the prime spot: well elevated, west-facing for bloody sunsets and the sparks of the town lighting up as stars in the darkness. The road up was narrow and winding, and edged in several places on sheer drops. It wouldn't take much to ease him out into the waiting abyss.

The whole thing looked straightforward, but as always, my mind was soaked in doubt. What if I had underestimated his abilities as a driver? What if he saw me coming in my freshly stolen sedan and merely sneered as he held his place, and his cool? Or maybe I'd have the bad luck of meeting oncoming traffic just as I made the final push. And all would be lost. But some risks were unavoidable, and I have always been good at working out mathematical equations, measuring the angles, settling on the correct formula. Besides, doubt is, I think, an essential part of my work.

In the end, the job proved as easy as picking flowers.

He had the needle pinned in the high seventies and it was all the sedan could do, given the steepness of the incline, to close the gap. Still, the speed was the key; the faster he was going the easier it would be for me to make him to lose control. When I made my move, edging up beside him, I registered anger in his eyes. Then I swerved, hard but still keeping control, but his reflexes were slow and to avoid being hit he pulled hard at the wheel, all that anger engulfed by terror. A heartbeat later, I was past and the SUV had torn through the whitewashed guard-rail.

I slowed, because breaking too suddenly could have left marks on the asphalt, and the next bend revealed to me the twisted metal of the wreckage, far below. Then, seconds later, the gas tank ignited and an explosion ripped apart the day. Knowing that my work was done, I didn't stop.

I usually wait a year before getting back in touch with a client, but this time I had other things in mind than money. The woman I had widowed was bearing up very well.

‘Don't go crying into people's faces,' I had told her. ‘It won't look genuine, especially with the age-gap. A better act would be to retreat into yourself, grow thoughtful, distant. And don't rush things. Try to resist the need for … company.'

Clever girl, I thought, the few times I helped myself to a discreet look-in.

Six months to the day, I put in a call. ‘You know who this is?
'
I asked and, after a breathy pause, she said she did. I told her to expect me the following evening at eight, then hung up. Eight was a civilised hour, suggestive without being too brazen.

The inquest had put the cause of death as accidental, with not even a suggestion of anything untoward. By now the estate had been settled and the massive life insurance policy honoured. The cash owed to me was small change in comparison, but I've dealt before with people new to money and I wasn't averse to a spot of bargaining. After all, six months was a long time and women get lonely, just the same as men.

She answered the doorbell wearing jeans and a skimpy white camisole, a beige cashmere cardigan her only effort at modesty. Her hair was pulled back into a casual ponytail and looking darker for the effort, but the style suited her, emphasising the fine bone structure of her face.

‘Good evening,' I said and held out the small bunch of flowers, nothing fancy. She took them, letting her movement be thanks enough. Over coffee we swapped a little small-talk; she leaned forward so that she was perched on the edge of an armchair and I helped myself to details. Her left heel had lifted from her slip-on shoe, and even the curve of her arch was enough to set my heart racing.

‘I guess you're here for your money,' she said, finally. I sensed a problem in her tone and, I'll admit, it excited me. She steeled herself. Her chin had an eggshell delicacy in the subtle lamplight. ‘Actually, I don't think that I'll pay.'

I merely levelled her with a cool stare.

‘I've made some enquiries,' she said, ‘and the price you originally quoted seems quite exorbitant. Especially since I have only your word that what happened was actually due to your interference.'

I smiled. ‘Well, that's the trick. If I had made it any less convincing, we could very well find ourselves waiting in line for the lethal injection.'

‘Still,' she said, ‘I believe the figure you're asking is more than double your usual fee. I don't like being played for a fool.'

‘The figure was high, I'll grant you,
'
I said, patiently. ‘But it was an exceptional situation. At no point did I ever try to play you for a fool. On the contrary, I think I've been very straight with you. You agreed to my demands. Of course, we didn't put anything in writing. I suppose it's only natural to look for a loophole, though most people understand that it's in their best interests to pay up.'

She looked small and tense, but still managed a thin smile.

‘Is that a threat?'

I shook my head, no. ‘I don't waste my time with threats,' I said. ‘What would be the point in mentioning that I know a lot of unsavoury people who are good at making accidents happen, or that I have friends in the police who could, with a little prompting, open up old wounds and make things decidedly difficult for you?'

‘You won't do that,' she said. ‘That would be putting your own head in the noose.'

‘Well, since you bring that up, I have an alibi, a congressman in fact, who will swear up and down a Bible that I was with him that evening. Besides, there's nothing to link me with anything improper.'

She looked close to tears.

‘Look,' I sighed, ‘like I said, I'm not threatening you. I did what you hired me to do. Maybe I could force you to pay me, but I'm not going to do that.' I stood, pulled on my coat and showed myself to the door. ‘Good-bye, Mrs Malone,' I said, ‘and good luck.'

That was two years ago. In my entire career, she was the only client who ever stiffed me on a bill. I guess people know about it, people who count, and they probably think that I got my money some other way, or that I'm just a sucker for a pretty face and a nice pair of legs. Maybe they're right.