That pissed her off. How dare I still be alive? The shock on her face was almost funny. But then, I was dying, so my sense of humor may have been skewed. If only I had the strength to rise… She was momentarily unarmed and went back to Scott to retrieve the knife. Holding it sheathed in the towel, she raised it above her head, coming at me again. “Your skinny neck,” she said. “Your ugly skinny neck—”
A hard rap rattled my apartment door and made her jump. She turned quickly toward Scott's body.
“You can't kill him anymore,” I said. “Give it up, Brooke.”
“Shannon?” It was Beth's small voice. I smiled weakly, turning suddenly cold and feeling the blood drain from my head. I had fainted before. I knew what was happening.
“Didn't think Beth could knock so hard,” I whispered to myself. Keep talking. I wanted to stay alive, conscious. I fought like hell to keep breathing slowly. In… Out… In… Out.
“Shannon!” Beth screamed loud this time.
And then a man's voice. “Move! Get out of my way.”
Brooke was standing over me now, bringing the knife back to my throat. I pulled my chin into my chest, protecting myself with the only strength I had. She stabbed the knife into the side of my neck, nicking it, while I dragged my leg across her feet and tripped her. But that was all I had. I was done.
I heard Brooke screaming. Or was it Beth? I lay my head back on the floor. Just a quick nap, I thought. I need to rest a second and I'll get back up. I can do this thing.
My cheek against the floor, I watched the door bang open. Feet on the floor pounding toward me. Toward Brooke, who was slashing the knife in the air like a cowboy at a rodeo lassoing a wild horse. A heavyset man reached for a holstered gun. Had I gotten through to the cops? I couldn't remember and didn't give a rat's ass anymore. I just watched the show as if I were no longer in it. A spectator watching a movie. A character in a slasher flick who'd been killed off by the end.
“No, Vince, let me go, please,” Brooke pleaded. “I didn't do this. I found them both like this.”
“You little bitch,” Vince said.
Beth had come to my side. She was punching numbers on a cell phone—her hands shaking and bloody— my blood. Crying. Screaming my name.
“Beth,” I whispered hoarsely. “Scott didn't kill his wife. Brooke did.”
Beth looked up at Vince. Brooke had backed up to Scott's body.
“Drop the knife, sweetheart,” Vince said. “You think I won't shoot you because of a few drunken pokes? You swing it at me one more time and I swear I'll shoot!”
I watched Beth's mouth open in a scream. “Vince!” The sound of her voice seemed far away.
The gunshot took Beth's attention from her shaking fingers and she dropped her phone. I read the outcome in her wide-open eyes. They blinked closed in relief and she breathed deeply, retrieved her phone, and punched the keys. “Ambulance, police,” she said. “In that order! Ambulance now!” She gave them my address.
WHEN SHRIMPS LEARN TO WHISTLE
“AH, THIS IS NICE, HUH?” CHUCKY SAID. “SMELL that fresh air?”
“Algae and pond scum,” I said. “And are you really going to impale that worm's brain on a pronged hook?”
“Worms don't have brains or feelings. And don't ask me how I know that.”
“How the fuck do you know that, Chucky? I dug for worms when I was kid, and whenever I'd pick one up they'd squirm into a ball and jump out of my hand. Now, how the hell did the worm know I was picking it up if it couldn't feel anything?”
“Instinct.”
“Something triggered the instinct. If some big gawky kid a thousand times your size picks you up, you feel it, and then you protect yourself.”
“Jesus almighty God, Shannon,” Chucky threw the hook and worm down to the floor of the sixteen-foot skiff, “you can sure chase the sun away.”
I looked up at the sky. The sun was still strong, an Indian summer day. The air was a balmy 78 in odd contrast to the leaves already yellowing to gold from the nightly dips in temperature common to early October.
It was two months after Brooke, Scott, and I were carried out of my blood-soaked apartment on stretchers. Brooke and Scott were dropped at the morgue, and I was taken to Rhode Island Hospital, in tough shape but alive. I stayed for three weeks, by the end of which I was getting wine and spicy corn pizzas from Al Forno smuggled in by the girls. The morning I woke up with a hangover and my blood work showing elevated liver enzymes from alcohol consumption was the day they threw me out. The hospital preferred to call it an early discharge, but hey, let's call a spade a spade.
Vince didn't really care exactly how Leo Safer died, whether it was intentional or in a struggle with Scott. It could have been either. I chose to believe it was an accident. I wanted to believe Scott couldn't be a cold-blooded killer. I like to think my assessments of people were still on target. Like the Cohen case; I didn't think Micah Cohen shot his wife, and I preferred to believe Scott was incapable of murder.
The girls and I continued to torment Vince about his dip into Brooke's honey pot, but he, in his typical macho way, just winked as if he'd been the one who'd gotten away with murder. The thought that he'd been sleeping with a sicko murderer didn't seem to faze him. I guess Vince liked a little James Bond in his sex life. Hey, that worked for me.
“Truth is,” I said, focusing back on Chucky, who was slugging down a Miller Lite he'd just popped the tab on, “I really don't like fishing. Never did like the idea of killing things I'm going to eat. Philosophically I'm a vegan, but nutritionally I like my steak still bleeding. It isn't easy being me.”
I knew I was making Chucky miserable. He'd told me once that he and Marjory had met at some lakeside camp in Maine when they were teenagers. They married right after high school and spent their honeymoon at a Saskatchewan fishing lodge. (Saskatchewan might be in Canada but don't quote me.) While Chuck was probably comparing me to Marjory, and waxing nostalgic about his lost vacation with her, I was wishing I was on Cattails, Scott Boardman's luxurious yacht, on which I'd spent only a half a day before all the shooting started…
“You know what, kiddo?” he said. “I think you like the idea of me more than the real thing. Since Marjory and I split up… I think you're scared of being with me full-time. And the truth? I'm not sure I'm enough to make you happy.”
I felt a cold chill at Chucky's words. Had I broken up a perfectly good marriage only to find myself reincarnated as Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate on the backseat of the bus? Is this all there is?
“And I don't want you to blame yourself for breaking up my marriage,” he said. “If things hadn't been bad at home, I never would have gone for you in the first place. So no worries. We can take it real slow if you want.”
Well, thank the Lord, I thought. He didn't expect me to walk down any aisles any time soon. “How is Marjory?” I asked. “Is she doing okay with you being gone and all?”
He shrugged, tucked his beer can into a cup holder built into his tackle box, and picked up his fishing rod. He thoughtfully chose a fly from the box and tied it onto the end of the fishing line. The worm got to live another day.
“I guess Marjory's okay,” he said. “She has the kids visiting her all the time, especially the girls. She got custody of the family and I got you. But they'll come around in time.”
But is this what I really wanted? A permanent relationship with a guy who would stay with me until shrimps learn to whistle?
Or would I miss that constant flow of pickups in strange bars? The flirtations. The zipless sex, as Erica Jong would say. Yeah, I liked the never knowing. And I guess, like Vince, I liked the danger too. That danger that Jeff had talked about during the Cohen trial: my payback for saying “Fuck you” to the wrong guy in the wrong alley too late at night after too many vodka martinis. Yeah, maybe I like the danger of waking up in my bed in the morning and asking the guy lying next to me, Do you want milk with your coffee, and, oh, by the way, what's your name?
“Maybe y
ou should go back to her, Chuck. If I told you things would stay the same between us—I mean if I was okay with you being married to Marjory—would you go back with her?”
He threw his line over the side of the boat. “That's what you want, isn't it? For me to let you off the hook? You and the worm? So you'll both stop squirming. Just throw you back in the bait pail so you can keep sliming around with your girlfriends to singles bars and whatnot?”
“That's real low, Chuckster. Real low. But I guess I deserve it, don't I? Once a mistress, always a slut.”
“I didn't mean that—”
“Sure you did. And I'm okay with it. I've never pretended to be anything I'm not.”
I picked up the rod Chucky had brought along for me. I lifted the worm from the pail and quickly slid the hook through its soft skin. “Is that how you do it? Fast like that so it doesn't hurt?”
“Yup,” he said without looking at me, watching the end of his line bob in and out of the water. “You kill him real fast so it doesn't hurt.”
I nodded, threw the rod down on the floor of the boat, and then slid out of my white Keds.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
I stood up in the boat and faced the shore.
“Sit down, will ya? You're going to tip us over,” he said.
I didn't bother looking at him as I dove over the side of the boat. I was a pretty good swimmer, but I wasn't a gym babe, and sitting on my ass for days on end had taken its toll. Plus I hadn't done a lick of swimming all summer. Christ, even my sex life was out of shape. But as long as I had the stamina to keep a stroke going, I figured I could make it to shore in about ten minutes. And if I didn't? If I got tired and started to falter? Well, I knew Chucky had learned his lesson when he left me overnight at the police station. He wouldn't let it happen again. He'd always be there to save me, no matter how much of an asshole I am.
CELESTE MARSELLA received her B.A. and M.A. from NYU and her J.D. from New York Law School. She is a member of four state bars—New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Florida—and has practiced in all except Florida. In Rhode Island, where she lives with her family, she worked in a gritty criminal law firm. Celeste now writes full time and is currently at work on her next novel.
PERFECTLY CRIMINAL
A Dell Book/April 2009
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is
entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2009 by Celeste Marsella
Cover photographs © Dougal Waters and Rubberball/Getty Images
Dell is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a
trademark of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-440-33837-6
www.bantamdell.com
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