Dangerous Women

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  “I don’t pick who I work for,” Frank said. “They pick me.”

  “They pick you because they know the job will get done,” Joey said. “It’ll be clean and quiet. And almost impossible to trace, either back to you, or the money or to the voice at the other end of the telephone.”

  “Not so impossible,” Frank said. “Or you wouldn’t be sitting here.”

  “I made it my business to find you,” she said. “I made it my life.”

  “I always knew you would,” Frank said. “All these years I knew you were out there and I knew you would never stop.”

  “There were times I wished you would have stopped me,” Joey said, sadness etching her words. “Brought it all to an end. For you and for me.”

  “I never gave it any thought,” Frank said.

  Joey took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a brief moment. This was always the hardest part of the Q&A for her, asking the short, direct queries that were designed to bring a victim’s face to the jury. Keeping the victims alive, making them a presence in a courtroom often dominated by a charming, well-mannered and well-behaved defendant, was always the most painful part of a prosecution. “The victim is the one person they never see that they need to see,” an old judge had once told her. “It is so easy for the jury to forget. It is the prosecutor’s job to keep that victim alive. Full closure can only come with a guilty verdict and a conviction. Nothing else will do.”

  The bartender turned off the silent television and pulled the switch on the blue-glow lights behind the rows of whiskey bottles. He stared over at Frank and Joey, his middle-aged face weary and void of any expression. He was short, with a squat frame that was balanced by two broad arms, a long line of aging purple tattoos running down their fleshy side. His bald head glistened with tiny sweat beads and slivers of scalp oil. Ralph Santo was the kind of man who went into life expecting little in return and he walked away never disappointed.

  “Why did she let you into her apartment?” Joey asked.

  “What story did you tell her that made her trust you enough to do that?”

  “Why don’t you call her by her name?” Frank asked, returning the question with one of his own. “She’s not just another victim. She’s your sister.”

  “You don’t deserve to hear her name,” Joey said, her low voice a venomous hiss.

  “She had a good heart,” Frank said. “Like a lot of kids her age. I told her I had lost my wallet and needed to make a phone call. Try to reach my girlfriend and have her come pick me up.”

  “She trusted you,” Joey said.

  “Most people do,” Frank said. “You would have, too.”

  “What if she didn’t have a good heart?” Joey asked. “What if she had just said no and kept walking or offered to give you money for a cab? What would have happened then?”

  “It never got to that,” Frank said. “It seldom does.”

  “What if it had?” Joey asked. “Would you have killed her on the street?”

  “Only if I was really eager to get caught,” Frank said. “Which I wasn’t.”

  “When did she know?” Joey asked. “That a phone call wasn’t what you were after.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Frank asked. “You know everything you need to know. Skip the details. It’ll make it easier to live with yourself. No matter how tonight ends up being played out.

  “When did she know?” Joey asked, her question now more pointed and direct, her anger residing just below the surface.

  “We were in the apartment and she led me to the small dining room, turned to me and pointed out the phone,” Frank said. “That was the first time she saw the gun.”

  “Did she cry?” Joey asked. “Or scream for help?”

  “No,” Frank said.

  “Did she say anything to you at all?”

  “She asked me not to rape her,” Frank said.

  “And that’s why you didn’t?”

  “You know better than to ask that,” Frank said. “I didn’t rape her because I don’t rape anybody. I was there to do a job. I did it and then I left. If it means anything, I wasn’t looking to cause her any great pain. I did it the best I could and as fast as I could.”

  “She say anything before she died?” Joey asked.

  “No,” Frank said. “She just closed her eyes and waited for it to happen.”

  “Did you ever think of not doing it?” Joey said. “Didn’t seeing that sweet, innocent girl, shivering on a bed, waiting for you to pump bullets into her body, not make you just want to walk away from it all?”

  “What difference would my answer to that make to you?” Frank said. “It doesn’t matter what I thought or how I felt. All that matters is what I did.”

  “You made a name for yourself off that murder,” Joey said. “It put you in demand. The calls came in steady after that, the work more than you could handle.”

  “Let’s just say it got easier after that,” Frank said.

  “And you only got better,” Joey said. “Here it is more than twenty years later and no one has even come close to putting handcuffs on you.”

  “Is that what you’re waiting to see?” Frank asked.

  “Maybe that would have been enough twenty years ago,” Joey said. “But not now. I need more than that.”

  “If you were going to kill me you would have done it when you had the chance,” Frank said. “And that chance was when you first walked in and right before you ordered that first drink.”

  “I wish I could kill you,” Joey said. “I wish I could pull out a gun and shoot you until you were dead. I wish I could do to you what you did to my sister. But we both know that I can’t and talking about it is just a waste of time.”

  “You came a long way and waited through a lot of years just to hear me say I did it,” Frank said. “Is that going to be enough for you?”

  “You can’t get a conviction without a guilty plea,” Joey said. “ I didn’t have that until tonight.”

  “Well then, you got what you came for,” Frank said. “I’m guilty as charged, Counselor. Which leaves you where? Calling the cops won’t do you much good. It’s going to take a terrorist attack to get them out in this weather, not a twenty-year-old murder case none of them even remember. And airport security couldn’t catch their ass with both hands, let alone someone who’s been running for as long as me.”

  “There’s just one more thing left for me to do,” Joey said. “And I don’t need the cops, or security to get that done.”

  “Do I need to guess?” Frank asked. “Or you going to spoil the suspense and tell me?”

  “It’s what I’ve been waiting more than twenty years to do,” Joey said. “I get to sentence you.”

  “That’s a judge’s job,” Frank said. “You get promoted and not tell me about it?”

  “In this case, I’m one-stop shopping,” Joey said. “Prosecutor, jury and judge.”

  “I hope it’s not community service,” Frank said. “I would really hate that.”

  “And it’s not life in prison, either,” Joey said. “I don’t have the power to do that. Or for that matter, the desire.”

  “Which leaves what?”

  Joey pushed her chair back and stood, her eyes glaring down at Frank. “The death penalty,” she said. “I sentence you to die for the murder of my sister. There will be no appeals filed and the twenty years that have passed since the crime was committed take care of any stays of execution you might have earned.”

  “I’ve only had a couple of beers,” Frank said, smiling and brushing off the harshness of her words. “That’s not much of a last meal.”

  “You picked the place,” Joey said, picking up her black leather coat. “Not me. But I’ll get the tab. A condemned man shouldn’t have to pay for anything other than for his crime.”

  “You’re really not following proper procedure,” Frank said. “I always had you pinned as a stickler for details. But here I am sentenced to die and no last shower and no fresh batch of clothes. T
hat’s not like you to be sloppy, Counselor.”

  “I have to use what’s available to me,” Joey said, tossing the coat on and reaching for her bag. “Besides, you don’t look like you need either a shower or new clothes. But I did make arrangements for your remains.”

  “Buried or burned?” he asked.

  “That’s at the discretion of the executioner,” Joey said. She picked up her bag, took one final look at Frank and turned to leave the bar.

  “If he’s a pro, he’ll probably do both,” Frank said, his eyes not moving from the table.

  “You would know that better than I would,” Joey said, her head down, walking toward the open entrance to the bar.

  “Hope to run into you again, Counselor,” Frank said, raising his voice one notch, looking at her back.

  Joey stopped and dropped her bag; its low-impact thud echoed inside the silent and empty bar. She lowered her head and closed her eyes, her two hands balled into tight fists. “I’m afraid not, Frank,” she said, calling him by his name for the only time that night. “This was our first and last meeting. It’s all over between us. This case is now closed.”

  Frank nodded. He didn’t need to turn around to know that he’d been locked into the perfect setup from the time he walked into the bar. He didn’t need to hear the muted footsteps coming his way or the click of the nine-millimeter that was sure to be aimed at the back of his head. He knew his run was over.

  He glanced up at Joey, her back to him, her body still, her head hanging low. He knew she’d been on his tail all these years and wondered why they had both waited until this night to bring the chase to an abrupt end. He was relaxed and relieved in those few silent moments before the first bullet hit. He had chosen the life and now had chosen his own way out of it. He was glad that Joey had been the one, knew she would eventually find the courage to take it to the next step. In that sense, there were two people in that bar on that snowy night that felt a burden lifted.

  Joey heard the three muted shots and then heard Frank utter a low, guttural moan and then heard a thud as his upper body fell face forward on the small table, an empty beer bottle smashing to the floor. She stayed frozen in place, waiting with her head bowed as the footsteps now came walking in her direction.

  “It’s done,” she heard the bartender say as he stood next to her. “He’s dead.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “I’ll clean the place up and get rid of the body,” he told her. “By the time the storm clears, he’ll be gone for good.”

  “And so will you,” she said.

  “No profit in sticking around,” the bartender said. “I hate bars and I hate airports. This is definitely not the place for me.”

  Joey reached down and picked up her bag. “How good was he?” she asked. “Do you know?”

  “Frank Corso was the best,” the bartender said. “None better. There are enough stories about him to fill a dozen books.”

  “But you got to him,” she said. “Does that make you better than him now?”

  “I got to him because he wanted me to,” the bartender said. “Believe me, if he didn’t want to go down, it would have been my body being left under a mound of snow.”

  “Why would he do that?” she asked. “Give up the way he did?”

  “Maybe he just got tired of the game,” the bartender said. “It’s been known to happen sometimes. Or maybe, he felt he owed you. That happens, too. Or maybe it was something else. Something a guy like him could never allow to happen.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe Frank fell in love with you,” the bartender said. “You chasing him all these years, he ended up knowing as much about you as you did about him. You get close to a person that way, closer even than to somebody you see every day of your life. You end up feeling for that person. Usually it’s hate. But, on a one-in-a-million shot, it does roll out as love.”

  “We’ll never know then,” Joey said.

  “You can catch a cab if you need one on the lower level,” the bartender said. “There are buses, too, but you might have to wait the rest of the night for one to take you back to the city.”

  “I’m not in any hurry,” Joey said, walking slowly out of the darkness of the bar and into the soft glare of the terminal, lined on both sides by shuttered stores. “I have nowhere else to go.”

  Dangerous Women - Penzler, Otto Ed v1.rtf

  WITNESS

  J. A. Jance

  W

  hat are you going to do about it?” I asked. Refusing to meet my gaze, Mindy Harshaw poked at her salad with her fork but ate nothing. Her lower lip trembled. “What can I do?” she asked hopelessly.

  A year ago I’d been matron of honor at Mindy’s wedding. She had been radiant then. A few months later, when she and our other pal, Stephanie, and I met for coffee at Starbucks, she had definitely lost her glow. She had been uncharacteristically quiet then and had hidden out behind a pair of enormous sunglasses, claiming she had an infection related to pinkeye. Now, having heard what she had to say, I suspected the pinkeye story was just that-a story. And the woman sitting across from me bore no resemblance to my lifelong friend who had been a beaming bride only a few months earlier.

  I had been shocked when she slipped into the booth across from me. She looked wan and pale, and I thought she had lost more weight than she could afford to lose. I didn’t say, “My God, Min! You look like hell!” although I probably should have. But now, after she had told me at least some of what had been going on, I wasn’t the least bit shy about offering my opinion.

  “What you do is blow the whistle on the jerk,” I said. “You’re not the first Cinderella who woke up after the honeymoon to discover she had married a frog instead of Prince Charming.”

  Mindy sighed. “It didn’t turn out that way for you and Jimmy.”

  That was true. I had been a thirty-eight-year-old “old maid” when I was introduced to James Drury in the lobby before a performance of Angry Housewives, an original Seattle-based musical about a group of frustrated mothers who start a rock band and end up with an unlikely hit entitled, “Eat Your Fucking Cornflakes.” Not being a housewife at the time, I hadn’t much wanted to go, but a friend from school had dragged me along. James Drury had been bullied into going to the play by a friend from the bank where he worked. The moment Jimmy and I met, we clicked. Just like that. Neither one of us had been married before, and our whirlwind courtship had left our friends, Mindy included, shaking their heads. Jimmy and I had enjoyed eleven glorious years together before a drunk driver, going the wrong way on the I-90 bridge, had snuffed out Jimmy’s life and dismantled mine.

  It was now three years later. The ache of losing him was still there, but his death was long enough in the past that when Mindy asked me to be her matron of honor, I had been glad to do so. I had known Mindy Crawford since grade school. In high school and college she had always gone for the wrong guys-for the wild ones, the ones living on the edge, for the muscle-bound jocks who played sports, looked great in jeans mid T-shirts but had nothing whatsoever going on upstairs. But in the days and weeks leading up to Mindy’s wedding to Lawrence Miles Harshaw III, I thought for sure she had come up with a winner.

  Larry had money, looks and brains, and not necessarily in that order. Obviously, having money isn’t everything, but I was grateful that, after years of hardscrabble existence, Mindy would finally be in a situation where she wouldn’t be living hand-to-mouth. As far as I could see, Larry was crazy about her. Which is one of the reasons I was so provoked with him right now. Larry Harshaw had pulled the wool over Mindy’s eyes and mine as well. She had an excuse-she was in love with the guy. I’ve spent the last twenty-five years working as a high school guidance counselor, and I resented the hell out of being duped. Two and a half decades of working with troubled kids has taught me way more than I ever wanted to know about the realities and pervasiveness of domestic violence. It worried me that Mindy seemed totally oblivious about what was in store for her.

&nbs
p; “What do you think I should do?” she asked.

  “Let’s go over what you just told me,” I said. “He reads your mail, checks your e-mail. He monitors your telephone calls and checks the mileage on the odometer whenever you use the car. What does this sound like to you?”

  “He wants me all to himself?” Mindy asked meekly.

  “It’s a lot more serious than that,” I told her. “It’s called isolation. He’s cutting you off from your support network. I’m surprised he let you meet me for lunch.”

  “It was spur of the moment,” Mindy admitted. “I didn’t exactly tell him.”

  Or ask permission, I thought.

  Suddenly I felt much older and wiser than my fifty-two years, and Mindy seemed like an innocent-a babe in the woods. Trying to guide recalcitrant teenagers has taught me that I’m not going to get far by telling anybody what they need to do. If I really want to help, I have to get the students who come to my office to see their problems and difficulties for themselves. Mindy wasn’t one of my students, but the same thing was true for her. If she was going to save herself, she would have to come to terms with what was happening in her life and marriage on her own. Comprehending the existence of a problem is the first essential step in solving it.

  “I’ve seen how Larry Harshaw acts,” I said. “In public, he’s the perfect gentleman. What’s he like in private?” My question was followed by a long, awkward silence. “Well?” I prodded finally. “Are you going to tell me?”

  “He’s not very nice,” Mindy said in a small voice.

  “How so?” I asked. “Does he tell you you’re stupid, for example?”

  Mindy nodded. “Yes, and that I’m not good with money.”

  “Because… ?”

  “Because I don’t balance my checkbook.”