by Lee Child
Then she looked back at him, jaw firm. “He beats me.”
His eyes and face remained stone still, as if he’d been replaced with a photograph of himself. “Where? You look perfectly fine to me.”
That was because Alan didn’t hit her hard every time. Usually, he just held tight to her hair while he flicked his fingers off her chin and nose or twisted the flesh over her hip. In the last couple years, though, after the markets collapsed and Alan and men like him were blamed for it in some quarters, he’d often pop the cork on his depthless self-loathing and unleash on her. He’d buried a fist in her abdomen on three different occasions, lifted her off the floor by her throat, rammed the heel of his hand into her temple hard enough for her to hear the ring of a distant alarm clock for the rest of the day, and laid her out with a surprise punch to the back of the head. When she came to from that one, she was sprawled on the kitchen floor. He’d left a box of Kleenex and an ice pack by her head to show he was sorry.
Alan was always sorry. Whenever he hit her, it seemed to shock him. His pupils would dilate, his mouth would form an O, he’d look at his hand like he was surprised to find it attached to his wrist.
After, he’d fill the bedroom with roses, hire a car to take her to a spa for a day. Then, after this last time, he’d sent her and Lana to Paris.
She told this to Kineavy. Then she told him some more. “He punched me in the lower back once because I didn’t move out of his path to the liquor cart fast enough. Right where the spine meets the ass? You ever try to sit when you’re bruised there? He took a broomstick to the backs of my legs another time. But mostly he likes to punch me in the head, where all my hair is.”
“You do have a lot of it,” Kineavy said.
It was her most striking attribute, even more than her tits, which were 100 percent Nicole and had yet to sag; or her ass, which, truth be told, had sprouted some cellulite lately but still looked great for a woman closing in on thirty-six; or even her smile, which could turn the heads of an entire cocktail party if she entered the room wearing it.
Her hair trumped all of it. It was the dark of red wine and fell to her shoulders. When she pulled it back, she looked regal. When she straightened it, she looked dangerous. When she let it fall naturally, with its tousled waves and anarchic curls, she looked like a wet dream sent to douse a five-alarm fire.
She told Kineavy, “He hits me mostly on the head because the hair covers the bruises.”
“And you can’t just leave him?”
She shook her head and admitted something that shamed her. “Prenup.”
“And you like living rich.”
“Who doesn’t?”
Nicole had grown up in the second-floor apartment of a three-decker on Sydney Street in Savin Hill, a neighborhood locals called Stab-’n’-Kill. Her parents were losers, always getting caught in the petty scams they tried to run on their soon-to-be-ex-employers and on the city and the welfare system and DSS and the Housing Department and just about anybody they suspected was dumber than they were. Problem was, you couldn’t find dead fucking houseplants dumber than Jerry and Gerri Golden. Jerry ended up getting stomach cancer while in minimum-security lockup for check-kiting, and Gerri used his death to justify climbing into a bottle of Popov and staying there. Last time Nicole checked, she was still alive, if toothless and demented. But the last time Nicole checked had been about ten years ago.
Being poor, she’d decided long ago, wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Plenty of people had nothing and didn’t let that eat their souls. But it wasn’t for her.
“What does your husband do?” Kineavy asked.
“He’s an investment banker.”
“For which bank?”
“Since the crash? Bank Suffolk.”
“Before the crash?”
“He was with Bear Stearns.”
Finally, some movement in Kineavy’s face, a flick in his eyes, a shift of his chin. He lit another cigarette and raised one eyebrow ever so slightly as the match found the tobacco. “And people call me a killer.”
SHE THOUGHT ABOUT it later, how he was right. How there was this weird disconnect at the center of the culture around various acts of amorality. If you sold your body or pimped someone who did, stuck up liquor stores, or, God forbid, sold drugs, you were deemed unfit for society. People would try to run you out of the neighborhood. They would bar their children from playing with yours.
But if you subverted federal regulations to sell toxic assets to unsuspecting investors and wiped out hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of jobs and life savings, you were invited to Symphony Hall and luxury boxes at Fenway. Alan had convinced the entire state of Arkansas to invest in bundled sub-primes he knew would fail. When he’d told Nicole this, back in ’07, she’d been outraged.
“So the derivatives you’ve been selling, they’re bad?”
“A lot of them, yeah.”
“And the CD, um, whatta you —”
“Collateralized debt obligations. CDOs, yeah. They pretty much suck too, at least a good sixty percent of them.”
“But they’re all insured.”
“Well . . .” He’d looked around the restaurant. He shook his head slowly. “A lot of them are, sure, but the insurance companies overpromised and underfunded. Bill ever comes due, everyone’s fucked.”
“And the bill’s going to come due?”
“With Arkansas, it sure looks like it. They bundled up with some pretty sorry shit.”
“So why not just tell the state retirement board?”
He took a long pull from his glass of cab. “First, because they’d take my license. Second, and more important, that state retirement board, babe? They might just dump those stocks en masse, which would ensure that the stocks would collapse and make my gut feeling come true anyway. If I do nothing, though, things might — might — turn out all right. So we may as well roll the dice, which is what we’ve been doing the last twenty years anyway, and it’s turned out okay. So, I mean, there you go.”
He looked across the table at her while she processed all this, speechless, and he gave her the sad, helpless smile of a child who wasn’t caught playing with matches until after the house caught fire.
“Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” Alan said, and ordered another bottle of wine.
The retirees lost everything when the markets collapsed in 2008. Everything, Alan told her through sobs and whimpers of horror. “One day — fuck, yesterday — old guy worked his whole life as a fucking janitor or pushing paper at city hall, he looked at a statement said he’d accrued a quarter million to live off of for the final twenty years of his life. It’s right before his eyes in bold print. But the next day — today — he looked and the number was zero. And there’s not a thing he can do to get it back. Not one fucking thing.”
He wept into his pillow that night, and Nicole left him.
She came back, though. What was she going to do? She’d dropped out of community college when she met Alan. The prospects she had now, at her age and level of work experience, were limited to selling French fries or selling blow jobs. Not much in between. And what would she be leaving behind? Trips, like the one to Paris, for starters. The main house in Dover; the city house twenty miles away in Back Bay; the New York apartment; the winter house in Boca; the full-time gardener, maid, and personal chef; the 750si; the DB9; the two-million-dollar renovation of the city house; the one-point-five-mil reno of the winter house; the country club dues — one country club so exclusive that its name was simply the Country Club — Jesus, the shopping trips; the new clothes every season.
So she returned to Alan a day after she left him, telling herself that her duty was not to honor a bunch of people she didn’t know in Arkansas (or a bunch of people she didn’t know in Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Maine, and, well, forty-five other states); her duty was to honor her husband and her marriage.
Honor became a harder and harder concept to apply to her husband — and her marriage — as 2
008 turned into 2009, and then as 2009 turned into 2010.
Outside of losing his job because his firm went bankrupt, Alan was fine. He’d dumped most of his own stock in the first quarter of ’08, and the profit he made paid for the renovation of the Boca place. It also allowed them to buy a house she’d always liked in Maui. They bought a couple of cars on the island so they wouldn’t have to ship them back and forth, and they hired two gardeners and a guy to look after the place, which on one level might seem extravagant but on another was actually quite benevolent: three people were now employed in a bad economy because of Alan and Nicole Walford.
Alan cried a lot in early 2009. Knowing how many people had lost their homes, jobs, retirement savings, or all three ate at him. He lost weight, and his eyes grew very dull for a while, and even when he signed on with Bank Suffolk and hammered out a contract feathered with bonuses, he seemed sad. He told her nothing had changed; nobody had learned anything. No longer was investment philosophy based on the long-term quality of the investment. It was based on how many investments, toxic or otherwise, you could sell and what fees you could charge to do so. In 2010, banking fees at Alan’s firm rose 23 percent. Advisory fees spiked 41 percent.
We’re the bad guys, Nicole realized. We’re going to hell. If there is a hell.
But what were they supposed to do? Or, more to the point, what was she supposed to do? Give it back? She wasn’t the one shorting stock and selling toxic CDOs and CDSs. And even if she were, the government said it was okay. What Alan and his cohorts had done was, while extremely destructive, perfectly legal, at least until the prosecutors came banging on their door. And they wouldn’t. As Alan liked to remind her, the last person to fuck with Wall Street had been the governor of New York, and look what happened to him.
Besides, she wasn’t Alan. She was his wife.
Maybe she was doing a service to society by hiring Kineavy. Maybe, while she’d been telling herself she didn’t want to leave the marriage because she didn’t want to be poor, the truth was far kinder — maybe she’d hired Kineavy so he’d right a wrong that society couldn’t or wouldn’t right itself.
Seen in that light, maybe she was a hero.
IN ANOTHER MEETING, at another part of the waterfront, she gave Kineavy ten thousand dollars. Over the years, she’d been able to siphon off a little cash here, a little cash there, from funds Alan gave her for the annual Manhattan shopping sprees and the annual girls’ weekends in Vegas and Monte Carlo. And now she passed some of it to Kineavy.
“The other ten when I get there.”
“Of course.” She looked out at the water. A gray day today, very still and humid, some of the skyline gone smudged in the haze. “When will that be?”
“Saturday.” He looked over at her as he stuffed the cash in the inside pocket of his jacket. “None of your servants work then, right?”
She chuckled. “I don’t have servants.”
“No — what are they?”
“Employees.”
“Okay. Any of your employees work Saturday?”
“No. Well, I mean, the chef, but he doesn’t come in until, I think, two.”
“And you usually go out Saturday, go shopping, hang with your girlfriends, stuff like that?”
“Not every Saturday, but it’s not uncommon.”
“Good. That’s what you do this Saturday between ten and two.”
“Between ten and two? What’re you, the cable company?”
“That’s exactly what you’re going to tell Alan. On Thursday afternoon, your cable’s gonna go out.”
“Out?”
He popped his fingers at the air in front of his face. “Poof.”
“Alan’ll go crazy. The Sox play the Yankees this weekend; there’s Wimbledon; some golf thing too, I think.”
“Right. And the cable guy will be coming to fix it Saturday, between ten and two.”
Kineavy stood and she had to look up at him from the bench.
“You make sure your husband’s there to answer the door.”
AT NINE SATURDAY morning, Alan came into the kitchen from the gym. They’d had the gym built last year in the reconverted barn on the other side of the four-car garage. Alan had installed a sixty-inch Sony Bravia in there, and he’d watch movies that pumped him full of American pride as he ran on the treadmill — Red Dawn, Rocky IV, Rambo III, The Blind Side. Man, he loved The Blind Slide, walked around quoting it like it was the Bhaga-vad Gita. He was covered in sweat, dripping it all over the floor, as he pulled a bottle of OJ from the fridge, popped the cap with his thumb, and drank directly from the container.
“Cable guy come yet?”
Nicole took an elaborate look at the clock on the wall: 9:05. “Between ten and two, they said.”
“Sometimes they come early.” He swigged half the bottle.
“When do they come early?”
“Sometimes.”
“Name one time.”
He shrugged, leaned against the counter, drank some more orange juice.
Watching him suck down the orange juice, she was surprised to remember that she’d loved him this past week. Hated him too, of course, but there was still love there. He wasn’t a terrible guy, Alan. He could be funny, and he once flew in her brother, Ben, to surprise her for her thirty-third birthday — Lord knows, he could always be depended on for the grand gesture. When he spent two weeks in Shanghai on business right after her third miscarriage, he sent her white roses every day he was gone. She spent the week in bed, and sometimes she’d place one of those white petals on the tip of her nose and close her eyes and pretend she’d have a child someday.
This past week, Alan had been surprisingly attentive, asking her if everything was okay, if there was anything she wanted, was she feeling under the weather, she seemed tense, anything he could do for her?
They’d fucked twice, once in the bed at the end of the day, but once on the kitchen counter — the same counter he was leaning against now — good and lusty and erotic, Alan talking dirty into her right ear. For a full ten minutes after he’d come, she’d sat on the counter and considered calling the whole thing off.
Now, only an hour (or four) away from ending her husband’s life, her heart pounded up through the veins in her neck, the blood roared in her ear canals, and she thought there might still be time to call it off. She could just run upstairs and grab the number of Kineavy’s burner cell and end this madness.
Alan burped. He held up a hand in apology. “Where you going again?”
She’d told him about a hundred times.
“There’s an art fair in Sherborn.”
Drops of sweat fell from his shorts and plopped onto the floor.
“Art fair? Bunch of lesbos selling shit they painted in their attics from the backs of Subarus?”
“Anyway,” she said, “we won’t be all day or anything.”
He nodded. “Cable guy’s coming when?”
She let out a slow breath, looked at the floor.
“I’m just asking. Christ.”
She nodded at the floor, her arms folded. She unfolded them and looked up, gave him a tight smile. “Between ten and two.”
He smiled. Alan had a movie-star-wattage smile. Sometimes, if he put his big almond eyes behind it, tilted his chin just so, she could feel her panties evaporate in a hushed puff of flame.
Maybe. Maybe . . .
“Don’t be all day with the lesbians, that’s all, okay? Money’s like rust — shit doesn’t sleep.” He winked at her. “Know what I’m saying, sister?”
She nodded.
Alan took another slug of orange juice and some of it spilled into his chest hairs. He dropped the bottle on the counter, cap still off. He pinched her cheek on his way out of the room.
Nah. Fucking time for you to go, Alan.
KINEAVY HAD BEEN very clear about the timeline.
She was to stay in the house until 9:45 to make sure Alan didn’t forget he was supposed to stick around for the cable guy, because Alan, for a
ll his attention to detail when it came to money, could be absentminded to the edge of retardation when it came to almost anything else. She was to go out through the front door, leaving it unlocked behind her. Not open, mind you, just unlocked. At some point while she was out with Lana on a Bloody Mary binge at the bar down the street from the Sherborn Arts Fair, Alan would answer the front door and the cable guy would shoot him in the head.
Oh, Alan, she thought. You aren’t a bad guy. You just aren’t a good one.
She heard him coughing upstairs. He was probably sitting in the bathroom waiting for the shower to get hot, even though that took about four seconds in this McMansion. But Alan liked to turn the bathroom into a steam room. She’d come in after him, see his wipe marks all over the mirrors as her hair curled around her ears.
He coughed again, closer to the stairs now, and she thought, Terrific. Your last gift to me will be a cold. My fucking luck, it’ll turn into a sinus infection.
He was hacking up a lung by the sounds of it, so she left the kitchen and crossed the family room, which would remain an ironic description unless she hired the von Trapps to fill it. And even then there’d be room for one of the smaller African nations and a circus.
He stood at the top of the stairs, naked, coughing blood out of his mouth and onto his chest. He had one hand over the hole in his throat and he kept blinking and coughing, blinking and coughing, like he was pretty sure if he could just swallow whatever was stuck in his throat, this too would pass.
Then he fell. He didn’t make it all the way down the stairs — there were a lot of them — but he made it nearly halfway before his right foot got jammed between the balusters. Alan ended his life facedown and bare-assed, dangling like something about to be dipped.
Nicole realized she’d been screaming only when she stopped.
She heard herself say, “Oh, boy. Jesus. Oh, boy.”
Alan’s head had landed on the wood between the runner and the balustrade, and he’d begun to drip.
“Oh, boy. Wow.”
“You got my money?”
To her credit she didn’t whip around or let out a yelp. She turned slowly to face him. He stood a couple feet behind her in the family room. He looked every inch the suburban dad out on Saturday errands — light blue shirt untucked over wrinkled khaki cargo shorts, boat shoes on his feet.