What would you do?
That’s two questions really.
Would you—the person sitting in your favorite chair, lying in bed, on the train, bus, or relaxing in the bath—kill a bad person if doing so would make the world a better place for someone you love? Maybe you’re sitting by the pool outside your mansion or lying in a super-king bed in your ten-thousand-dollar-a-night hotel suite as you read this, and two hundred grand is chump change. Maybe you’ve never felt hunger pangs because you had to decide between feeding yourself or your children. Or had to climb through the kitchen window to avoid the heavies your landlord sent round to collect the rent. Maybe you’re not familiar with the deadweight of a handful of overdue notices warning you of repossession, prosecution, or imprisonment. How you want to cry when you see the penalty interest and charges added that mean you’ll likely never escape the suffocating burden of debt. They say food tastes sweeter when you’re hungry. If you’ve never wanted for money, you’ll have no idea what I’m talking about. You’ll never know how good a few folding bucks can feel. Your morals will remain intact, and you can look down on the rest of us scrabbling for survival on your leave-behinds, fighting over the scraps from your billboard life.
I didn’t have the luxury of moral certainty, so after I’d showered, cleaned up my wounds as best I could, and got changed into fresh clothes, I went to Toni’s for some advice.
I needed peace of mind. Thinking about death in the abstract is easy. Words on a page. Ideas in a head. But I knew from Freya Persico and Walter Glaze that taking a life had taken part of mine too. My stomach rolled acid every time I thought about pulling the trigger on someone else. And this target was a woman. Maybe I should say victim, but that would reinforce the idea I was doing something wrong, whereas target, a word used for terrorists and criminals, put the wrongdoing firmly on the other party. It might have been latent sexism, a product of a late-twentieth-century childhood, but for some reason the death of a woman seemed to carry more weight than that of a man. Walter Glaze had deserved to die, but did Farah Younis? I hadn’t checked her out yet, because I realized I needed to be more careful about searches that could be traced back to me. If I went ahead with this, I couldn’t pretend to be an accidental killer. I’d be a very deliberate and careful one. And two would be a series.
A serial.
Jim Steadman had already absolved me of sin, but he was an immoral man. I needed absolution from someone I respected and wanted my ex-wife and high school sweetheart to bless my transition from deadbeat to assassin. Or to prevent it, if that’s what she was minded to do.
If I’m honest, now that I had prospects that could put a roof over our heads and money in our pockets, part of me was also hoping for a reconciliation. I thought I still loved her. She’d moved on, but I was still stuck basking in memories of the past. If she’d asked me to hit the straight and narrow, I’d have put thoughts of killing in my rearview and squared up solid. She told me she wanted the twelve grand only if it was legal, but would she feel the same way about two hundred? Everyone had their price. Was this Toni’s?
I parked near Toni’s building. Body aching, I winced and bit my lip as I shuffled toward the broken gate. I could give you a long list of organs and limbs that ached or flashed with pain, but it’s probably easier for me to say the only parts of me that didn’t hurt were my teeth. Movement and touch were my enemies, and even the soft cotton of my faded blue Quiksilver T-shirt set my ribs aflame.
A normal person would have gotten medical attention, but a US hospital would have relieved me of my two grand faster than any pistol-toting crack addict. I had to hold on to that cash. I couldn’t leave it in the house with the front door broken, so it was in the Range Rover’s locked glove compartment.
I knocked on Toni’s door and groaned as I settled. I’d taken a couple of Advil, but nothing stronger because I wanted to be sober for this. So, the sharpest edge of agony was blunted, but the bulky hammer remained.
There was no answer when I knocked on Toni’s back door, so I knocked again. I pulled out my phone and tried Toni’s number.
“What is it, Peyton?” she said without ceremony.
“I need to talk.”
“We’re out with Jack,” she replied. “He’s taken Skye and me to the Reel Inn.”
Was she deliberately trying to wound me? The Reel Inn was a fish place out near Topanga Canyon on the Pacific Coast Highway. It was one of my favorite restaurants and had been a regular haunt of ours during the happy years.
“Oh,” I said.
“We’ll catch you another time,” she responded.
“Toni, I really need to…,” I began, but I realized she’d already hung up.
The only decent person I could turn to wasn’t there for me. I was alone.
Feeling sorry for myself, I leaned against her kitchen door.
You ain’t got no one except the spirits of the folks you killed, Walter’s ghost told me. Loser is as loser does.
What does that even mean? I thought, but there was no answer.