30
THAT EVENING STONE drove slowly to Annika’s house, tak ing in Key West as he went. He felt oddly let down, having concluded his business with Evan Keating. He had no real purpose in Key West now, and he thought he might as well head home the next day. His business with Annika Swenson, however, did not seem to be concluded, and he was beginning to wonder if her idea of moving to New York mightn’t be a good one. As long as he paced himself.
The front door was open, and the sounds of good jazz wafted from somewhere in the house. “Hello!” he called out.
“Hello! I’m in the kitchen!” she shouted back.
He found her there, stirring something in a pot, wearing a wraparound apron. “Smells good,” he said. “What are you cooking?”
“A venison ragout,” she replied.
“And where would you find venison in Key West? I hope you didn’t go out and shoot one of those lovely little Key deer; they’re protected, you know.”
“Of course not; I got it on the Internet, like anything else. You want Japanese blowfish? You want Iranian caviar? It’s all on the Internet, for delivery the next day.”
“I never thought of the Internet for food.”
“Oh, you can order all your groceries on the Internet,” she said. “The freshest foods, all delivered to your door.”
“I wonder if you could order a hit man on the Internet?” he mused.
“What?”
“A hit man, an assassin.”
“Oh, I’m sure. I’ll bet there’s a website called hit man dot com or something.”
“If there is, you can be sure it’s operated by the FBI or a police department.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you see all these news stories on TV where somebody, a husband or wife usually, tries to hire a hit man to off the spouse, and he turns out to be a cop?”
“Yes, I have seen that story, now that you mention it. How can people be so stupid?”
“What’s stupid is trying to murder someone,” Stone said. “Even if you got lucky and found a competent pro, it would always come back to bite you on the ass.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean that people in jail solve an inordinate number of homicides.”
“How do they do that?”
“Let’s say you want to have me knocked off . . .”
“Knocked off what?”
“Knocked off my perch, capped, murdered.”
“Okay, let’s say.”
“Let’s say you wander into the right bar and somebody offers to buy you a drink, and the evening passes and you learn that this guy is willing to do unusual work for a price. You hire him to kill me . . .”
“How much would that be?”
“Almost anything: five hundred, ten thousand, whatever the traffic will bear.”
“Traffic?”
“The free market.”
“Okay, I hire him to kill you, then what?”
“Then he kills me. He hangs around outside my house until I get home, then he shoots me and runs, gets away with it. You pay him off, and he’s happy, you’re happy.”
“But you’re not happy.”
“No, I’m not happy, I’m dead. Then some time passes—a year or two or five—and your hit man gets arrested on a completely unrelated charge.”
“Unrelated to what?”
“Unrelated to making me dead. Let’s say he gets caught trying to rob a liquor store, or maybe he makes a deal to kill somebody else, but the dealmaker is a cop.”
“Okay, let’s say.”
“So they’ve got him down at the police station, and they convince him that they’ve got him dead to rights, that they have all the evidence necessary to send him to prison for many years. But suddenly he says, ‘What if I could solve a bigger crime for you? A murder, maybe? Remember a guy named Barrington who was shot outside his house a few years back? I could give you the murderer, if you’ll give me immunity from prosecution.’”
“Prosecution for what?”
“For any crime he has committed.”
“The police will do that?”
“They do it all the time. They’ll say, okay, you’ve got immunity; who killed Barrington? ‘I did,’ he’ll say, ‘but Swenson hired me to do it; I was only a tool.’ And they can’t prosecute him. They can prosecute you, though.”
“They would do that?”
“Of course. All over the world, in every society, the greatest taboo of all is murder. We place a very high value on human life—that’s why we devote so much of our police resources to solving murders. That’s why there’s no statute of limitations. Once you’ve murdered someone—or paid to have someone murdered—you’re never safe again. They can always come and get you when the evidence turns up.”
“Well, that is very sobering,” Annika said. “Perhaps I won’t have you killed after all. What if I fuck you to death? Can they get me for that?”
Stone laughed. “Only if they could prove you intended to kill me, that maybe I had a heart condition and you knew I couldn’t stand the strain.”
“But not if I were just fucking you for several hours and you finally, ah, turned up your toes, I believe the expression is?”
“Annika, I think you’ve found a way to commit the perfect murder.”
“Well,” she said, taking off her wraparound apron and revealing herself to be naked from the waist down, “let’s get started now, and I can finish killing you after dinner, for dessert.”
AND SHE NEARLY DID. Much later Stone was lying in the fetal position, trying not to whimper, when his cell phone vibrated on the bedside table. “Humpf,” he managed to say.
“It’s Dino.”
“Who else?” Stone responded weakly.
“Take a couple of breaths and see if you can generate some adrenaline,” Dino said.
Stone did not take this advice. “I’m listening,” he said.
“Tommy called. Evan Keating is in the hospital; he’s been shot.”
Stone sat up on the side of the bed. “How bad?”
“I don’t know. Pick me up at the hotel in ten minutes; we’ll go together.”
“Right.” Stone closed the phone and looked at the sleeping Annika. It was just as well he got out before she woke up.