Friday
Time to go. I twist the key and the car rumbles awake. The last bend before Carlisle is just ahead. Foot to the pedal. Please let me not come back this way bewildered.
• • •
Carlisle Inc. is a sloppy compound made up of dusty assembly yards under mammoth scaffolds dripping with hoists and pulleys, the whole complex worked around clusters of the cheap aluminum dome sheds that the company makes for its customers. As Friday’s business hours wind down, a mild commotion of people, cars, and work trucks buzz over the worn tracks that lay out a winding maze through the site. A pleasantly warm sun is westering over the end of this workweek, and the promise of a weekend that’s made out of all the same loveliness looks as if it’s motivating everyone to keep one eye on the clock and the other on what needs doing in order to punch that clock on time.
The few glances that could mark my approach have slid right off my car as if it isn’t there. I feel invisible in a very pointed lack of curiosity. Either slippery ignorance is a job requirement here at Carlisle, or no one wants to acknowledge my presence for fear that it might pull them off the fast track to Friday’s happy hour.
Cars are haphazardly parked in the grassless spaces between the buildings, but the blue sedan I was hoping to see is fortunately easy to find. It’s all alone and deep in the shaded alley alongside what looks to be the main office.
I slide the gearshift to Park. Then eyes closed, deep breath. I don’t get even a full minute before the door of the office opens up and two men step out onto the concrete apron. They’re talking, nodding over a clipboard in the bright, lowering sun, and they wrap up their business with a handshake.
The bald one on the left looks very much as if he could be my guy, but I’ve only ever seen him at a distance and, even then, only sitting in the car. But once they separate, Baldy veers off toward the left side of the shed in the direction of the blue car. With that, I have as close to an answer as I’m going to get.
My available options make their arguments. I could follow him, although getting out of the compound discreetly behind his car now would be something of a trick. He would almost certainly know I was there. Getting it wrong and setting him on high alert would surely undo any progress I’ve made.
I could play a ruse—hunker down and let him go on about his business, then bluff my way into a conversation with his buddies and hope that Friday’s secondhand information will be enough to tilt Saturday out of the crosshairs. Weak.
He’s slid in behind the steering wheel of the blue car and I’m here at the decision. Move or don’t. You have two seconds to make up your mind. Heaven help me, Mother help me, I get out from behind the wheel of my own car before he can leave.
I don’t have a plan, which is probably a good thing. She always said that plans were for professionals and that people who didn’t know what they were doing only fouled them up. So I scrub my mind a determined blank and leave the engine running, and the driver’s door wide-open. I pace off the distance to the other car in long, steady, Annette-Vess-style strides.
I wait to draw the gun from my bag until the shade of the building unsquints my eyes.
Baldy is just reaching for his seat belt when I draw even with his rolled-down window. He turns his unconcerned face up to me, no doubt expecting his colleague for a follow-up last word. What he gets instead is the barrel of my gun pressed into his forehead.
“Don’t move.”
He moves, but to his credit, only to raise his hands, palms out, above his shoulders.
“Do you know me?”
The answer dawns across his face before I even finish the question. He swallows hard and gives a redundant nod.
“What’s your name?”
“Jim.”
I push the gun a fraction closer to Jim’s skull, whitening the skin in a halo around the muzzle. “Well, Jim, I have never yet killed a man who told me what I needed to know.”
He searches my eyes and finds no lie there. “Are you wearing a wire?” His color is coming back.
“I’m holding a gun to your head. How likely is that? Now, how do you know me?”
I get the sense that his line of work has given Jim a certain fatalistic resignation in the face of disaster. He sighs. “Obviously, you already know.”
I press the gun harder into his head and Jim winces.
“Okay, okay. Your husband has hired us—more specifically me—to have you killed.”
My lungs shut down, the bellows simply refusing to fan full or fold up. There’s enough air in me for another question, maybe two. Beyond that, I’m not sure how I’m going to reboot the next breath.
“Tomorrow morning?”
“That was the plan.” It’s derailing how much sympathy and matter-of-fact detachment Jim can telegraph at the same time from deep down in his sad brown eyes.
My own eyes tear up. But it’s from lack of blinking, not sadness. I’m not devastated yet. I’m barely anything at all, only stiff, brittle, and so cold. A great reservoir of reaction is frozen beyond my reach. I can feel it like sap in a tree waiting for its time.
“Why did I see you at my house a few weeks ago?” My voice falls quiet, but I haven’t turned the volume down consciously. The idea itself isn’t loud. It whispers. I just remember being in my driveway, unconcerned on a beautiful morning, shielding my eyes against the same sun that warmed my body through the comfy cotton robe that I know is hanging right now on its hook in my closet. No, the idea that I almost didn’t have this day isn’t loud. It’s low and cold. “Were you there to—to do it?”
“No.”
“Then why were you?”
“We’d given him a phone when we’d started the deal. He was waffling. I’d come to see why he wasn’t communicating reliably and collect it, if necessary. He decided to keep it. Obviously.”
“And my car? The belt? Did you do that?”
“It was just one of several possible alternatives. Plan Bs and all.”
It’s what I had expected to hear, but the blow knocks my heart out of rhythm and horror finally flits like icy-winged moths, bumping and thumping their heavy way through my middle. My hands and feet buzz with a charge that fizzes up my legs and down through both arms. My knees are thinking about letting go. My throat burns. My head, however, is still on the job. Sort of.
“Okay.” I’m still stunned, but warming up. Life has returned with the first order to flee. I let the pistol drop against my thigh and turn for my own car.
People never do what you expect them to do. This was true for me and true, apparently, for Jim. My simply walking away was not in his playbook. “What?” His bewilderment borders on indignant. “That’s it?”
I stop, zapped sane, and turn around again to face him. “You know what?” I stride back. “You’re probably right.” I raise the gun and shoot him, point-blank, behind the ear.