“By my own math I’m feeling like it was three minutes. Maybe more.”
“If you can do all this math, why do we need a stopwatch?” Milt said sarcastically.
“How much time went by before you arrived in the alley?”
“Me?”
I had to get it out of him. “Tell me, Milt. You must’ve seen a number at some point. Think. How much are we adding to your four forty-one and my three eight?”
“We’re on our way. I don’t know. I guess it was maybe…five minutes?”
“Five? Are you serious? That brings our total to thirteen fucking min—”
Then I was drowned out by the sound of glass shattering, as our rear window exploded into shards. The car lurched to the side and almost lost traction, and the horizon ahead jolted upward for a moment.
Because we were being shot at.
A glance in the mirror confirmed my fears. Cops.
Chapter 10
“Jesus,” screamed Milt, staring at the Cambridge Police Department. “Since when do these assholes just shoot at us?” They were unloading rounds of fully automatic MP5s in our direction. “No questions asked…just ‘Merry Christmas, here’s five hundred bullets in your windshield.’”
They hadn’t hit our bodies or our engine. But they’d hit Milt’s pride, like flicking the ears of a rhinoceros.
I floored the gas and made our Festiva earn every ounce of its five-year, fifty-thousand-mile, bumper-to-bumper warranty. We were going 110 miles per hour.
Milt leaned out the passenger window and tried to shoot left-handed.
“Back window!” I shouted.
I could see a curve in the road up ahead. We were veering to the right. That meant we’d open up an angle of attack, starboard. Milt let loose a barrage from his automatic, and fate played its hand. The trash truck to our right slammed on its brakes and thirty-two tons of bad news careened over us, towering for what felt like the majority of my adult life, as the other half of its wheels went airborne just long enough to make me swallow my larynx.
Stray fire must’ve stripped the truck driver of control.
Which was only the beginning of our very special moment, as an oncoming bus, desperate to avoid the trash truck, skidded back and forth, only to clip the trash truck—dink—before devouring the first two police cars behind us.
Head-on.
FWAAAAmmmbbbwwaaAAMMM.
It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard, as the trash truck also flipped—an overturned behemoth that slid a half block down the street in front of us—yielding just enough daylight for us to pass on the inside lane, speeding through the gap just before it cinched shut.
The carousel had closed. The cops were behind us.
I knew what would come next: helicopters. If they anticipated which parking structure we were heading toward before we reached it, dear Lord, we’d be doomed. They’d prep their other officers and have the building surrounded with SWAT well before our arrival. I screeched the car to a halt at the far side of a drainage ditch. If nothing else, we had our plan. I knew that the ditch snaked back under the main road and led straight to parking garage number two.
“Down the ditch,” I said to Milt. “Let’s go.”
We ran down the ditch and without incident reached the parking structure, where we had to race up five flights of stairs. Our golden goose was parked on the fifth floor.
“Hurry!” I yelled backward.
“Hurrying. Jeez!” yelled Milt, fat jiggling, lungs wheezing, asthma attack imminent. He looked even worse once he saw the chosen car. “This?!”
“Hurry!” I was already getting in. I pried open the door and tricked the ignition within nine seconds total.
“A Volkswagen Bug?” His disappointment was at a crescendo. “Bright yellow? Please tell me there’s a daisy on the dashbo—”
He got in and saw the daisy.
“We are completely visible,” he whined.
“That’s where we’re hiding. In broad daylight.”
I got in the driver’s seat and busted the casing off the console. By my mental clock, twenty-three seconds had elapsed. I’d counted them out while envisioning the last few turns the cop cars would make to narrow our location down to this particular garage.
Stock anti-theft alarms are easy. They go off but they don’t linger once the kill switch is bypassed. I had us on the road in eighty-one seconds total, from my hand first touching the door to my tires first touching the road. It wouldn’t fully compensate for the overall tardiness, but every microsecond helped. The turnpike was more crowded now, but we were safer. After a massive shoot-out, would you flag the brightest, friendliest, yellowest thing on the road?
We passed oncoming police cars, one after another, with Milt sweating each one.
Mine was a different concern. A deeper concern. I may have found us a successful vehicle to get back to Boston, but I didn’t have an answer to a very fundamental question. I turned to Milt to ask what had to be asked. “Who ordered the hit?”
Chapter 11
Five kids shot in the upper body. Three nicked in the limbs. One head wound. Two dead guards. One gutted female. And a young Mafia kid with his face missing. Today had been carnage on a level I had never signed up for.
“Who ordered the hit, Milt?”
“What?” he replied. Nonchalant.
He hadn’t picked up on how intensely I needed my answer. I kept my tone casual, because there was nothing casual about the question.
“Who?” I repeated.
“This car smells like pumpkin spice condoms,” said Milt. “Can’t believe we’re in this thing.”
Deflection. This wasn’t going to be easy.
“I can feel my manhood decrease by the mile,” he said.
“Oh, miles? I measure mine in millimeters.”
He laughed.
For those wondering, I am a fantastic actor. A trained actor, in fact, a theater major who had commanded the finest of stages in each of the three theaters on the Boston University campus, and who had voiced truth into the most stilted of classical monologues. The trick was to believe in what you were saying. I had that sort of brain. It floated between the wonderful realities of life and the vivid realities of fiction, and I rarely wanted to know which was which. I was performing for Milt.
“Who called the hit?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer.
I’d quit stage acting when my wife got pregnant. The baby was stillborn. The doctors were helpless. Maria spent the next few years resisting the urge to blame me. That effort had worn off recently, but I couldn’t deny that my unhealthy lifestyle was at fault.
“Goran Mesic, son of Ivan Mesic,” I said, without sounding too Lord of the Rings-y about it. “Tell me why he was chosen to fall.”
“You knew his father?” questioned Milt. More deflection. “I mean, I heard your big bullshit speech back in that alley. I assume it was big and bullshit. Was it?”
“How about I answer your question when you answer mine?”
“What difference does it make? A job’s a job. We’re about to be paid.”
Concord Avenue directly west. Toward New York. Then left on Arlington, then left on the turnpike, past Fenway Park, back into Boston. A bird’s-eye view of our journey would make it look like we were New Yorkers. The crisscrossing was to throw any bloodhounds off the scent.
Which made me think back to the morning. Why were Tweedledum and Tweedledee suddenly walking next to the boy? How did they know to do that?
“You’re right,” I said. “The paycheck’s coming. Thanks to you.”
He laughed. “And ain’t you retiring on it?”
“I’m retired as of twenty minutes ago. Unless what just happened with the kid was based on a feud.”
“Game at Fenway tonight.”
“Was it a feud? Did someone order a feud? Just tell me.”
“Three wins outa first,” he said before finally murmuring some semblance of an answer. “I dunno, man.”
He was a bad liar
. I knew the sign. He got louder.
“I really don’t know, Mike.”
“Who would know?”
I knew Milt had read some real estate sales book that said that people tuck their voice in the back of their throat when they lie. So he compensated by being so confident and loud—GOSH, I HAVE NO IDEA, MIKE—it was like he was suddenly in a discotheque. “I got the info from the normal channel. Y’know how it is. Anonymous.”
He was covering it up. Anything to hide the truth that I’d become aware of during this car ride. Milt was going to kill me.
Chapter 12
Why did I keep finding myself not at home? At the Alluvial Tavern I had my book open, beer poured, jukebox cranked.
“Another,” I said to the general area of the bar. No eye contact.
Another arrived.
The bartender made no conversation.
How did I get there? I could barely recap it. I’d dropped Milt off at the ditch site. We’d parked our car, wiped the prints, then abandoned it in a bad neighborhood, where it would be stripped clean like one of those time-lapse nature videos where bugs reduce a carcass to nothing. Next thing I knew I was in a cave in the South of France. A little village called Grasse.
Well, not me, but Grenouille, the protagonist of Le Parfum, now learning that he himself has no odor. An entire novel about odors—and he finds out he himself has none.
“I can relate, pal,” I murmured to no one.
I devoured pages and triple IPAs, one after another, never engaging with the gray-eyed bartender.
When my thoughts drifted to my day, all I could think was, I hate shooting kids. That’s why I was at the bar.
“Check,” I said out loud.
Once you name your self-deception, it loses its power.
I took a taxi home and got out a half block before my house. I’d enter quietly, hoping with all my heart that she would just—just for once, Maria—wake up when I came home. Touch me a little.
“Maria?” I whispered toward the closed door.
My house key clicked into the knob with an unusually loud gnash of teeth. The lock was grungier than normal and it scraped upon a stillness I hadn’t felt in years.
“Maria?”
Having an absent wife is one thing. Having a house absent of the absent wife is another.
Was she gone?
I started to enter, quietly, striving to avoid excess noise.
“Maria?” I said, loud enough to be heard if she were up, soft enough to be missed if she weren’t.
No answer.
“Maria?”
I crept toward the kitchen and turned on the lights.
Blood.
In large quantities.
There was blood all over our white linoleum. I reached for the gun inside my coat with a trembling hand. I could only pray that my wife wasn’t the source of the…
I couldn’t finish the thought. I knelt by the scarlet pool. It was dark, a spilled Merlot. I guessed by temperature that it’d been on the floor for at least an hour.
“Maria!?” I called out.
I inhaled the air in the kitchen. What had happened in the last hour?
All I could smell was my own breath—the faint trace of beer. There was nothing else to know in this kitchen.
“Maria!?” I let loose.
I stood up and ran from room to room. The den. The guest bathroom. The guest bedroom. No answer. I banged open every random door I could find. The closet. The laundry room. The hallway cupboards. I waded through piles of folded linen, books strewn, broken paintings, broken mirrors. A storm had come through this place. My gun’s muzzle led the way.
I was ready to blast anything that moved until I found Updike—my dog. He was curled up, ears flattened, tail rigid, shivering with fear.
“Here, li’l man,” I called to him. “Good? Where’s your mom?”
Whoever had come through here must’ve been a tornado of violence. Updike was now a cowering wreck. Part corgi, part Lab, part Jack Russell—rarely does this hyphenated beast back down. Yet he stayed glued to the wall, quivering, looking like he’d seen a ghost, like he was still seeing one.
“Maria Amelia Ryan!” I yelled.
I took a step back from Updike. Poor guy—he looked eternally relieved when I retreated.
I don’t know why I checked the bedroom last. I opened the door and there she was. My wife. Cut in half.
Chapter 13
There was blood across the majority of the bed. There was spattering on the walls, even on our ceiling fan.
“Baby?” I squished the nearly inaudible word from my empty lungs.
There she was.
I grabbed her outstretched hand, the last remaining body part that was clean. A sliver of moonlight found its way through our window. With my horror was a tinge of fear.
I listened for breathing. Hers. Mine. The dog’s. Was her killer here? I heard nothing, my gun aimed toward the closet. If anything burst out of those doors, I’d bury every bullet I owned in it.
But nothing would come that night.
“Baby, we have to get up,” I whispered to her rigid body.
I gathered the front half of her, staring at her face, looking for a greeting, a nod of approval—that what I was about to do needed to be done.
“Babe?”
I carried her torso down to the basement.
“This is just for now, okay?”
In the basement, we have a Kolpak 1010, one of the first walk-in freezers available for installation in a residential home. No, she didn’t get a Whole Foods employee discount. What she did get was the most consistent cooling flow professionally feasible. I opened the door without setting her body down, crouching awkwardly to get my left hand on the knob. She loved this freezer. It contained about forty pounds of top sirloin, thirty pounds of pork, thirty pounds of salmon, and now its owner.
As I left her resting, I don’t know how I was able to think with such merciless objectivity, but I knew it was imperative to avoid calling the cops.
Cops would occupy my time. Contain me. They would try to prevent me from doing what I had to do next. I went upstairs and grabbed my shotgun. I grabbed a dozen shells. I grabbed my dog and his leash. Sadness was giving way to a new feeling, a very important one. The French word is spelled very similarly to its English translation. Revenche.
Chapter 14
I drove to the one place I knew I’d find none of the answers I needed and even less of the satisfaction I craved. Shotgun in my lap, I drove to Milt’s home.
Milt would resist my inquiries, but I had nowhere else to go. My fingers were trembling on the steering wheel. I was taking deep breaths to fend off a panic attack. I screeched to a halt and stormed out of the car, pulling my dog’s leash. Shotgun in my right hand, Cerberus in the other. Revenche. Revenge.
“Milt!” I yelled toward the house as I started dashing up his steps. “Milton!”
He opened the door and I instantly bashed him in the stomach with the back of my weapon.
“Ooooph!” said his diaphragm.
He tumbled onto his back while my momentum took me right into his house. I donkey-kicked the front door shut behind me. We were in a shady neighborhood, but not so shady that neighbors wouldn’t take an interest.
Things got loud. Updike barked a few times at our commotion, then skedaddled into the corner of the living room, paws clawing with zero traction on the wood floor. I grabbed Milt by the scruff and shoved his crumpled, compliant body into the crook of his couch.
He was heaving for breath until he gathered his strength to say, “What the living hell is wrong with you?”
“You tell me,” I replied.
His face was mostly angry but now a little puzzled.
“She’s dead!” I yelled.
“Who?”
I shifted my tone a bit. Business mode. “I’m only going to ask you once, Milt.”
“Who’s dead?”
“My wife!” I yelled, then returned to the mode. “I’m o
nly going to ask you once.”
His face was going into shock. Brilliant acting on his part. He looked authentically sad.
“Who ordered the hits?” I asked him.
“Wait,” he responded. “What do you mean? Maria? Your wife?”
“Stop pretending.”
“She’s dead?” He looked genuinely upset, more upset than I had anticipated.
“They obviously tried to kill me and ended up with her carcass. Who ordered the hit?”
“Uh…the…the hit on Goran? I told you I don’t—”
“No! The hit on me!”
This silenced him. He stared at me, unsure if I was really asking what I was asking. He stood up. He knew I’d allow him to do so. There was a protocol. He walked to his wet bar and poured himself a dizzying ratio of bourbon and water. Stalling.
“That’s…That’s crazy talk,” he said, beginning to gesture toward me. “Why would anyone put a hit on this town’s best mechanic?”
Just as he was about to drink, I smashed my shotgun through his cabinet.
“No more charades!” I shouted. Slightly overblown.
“What are you…? What are you talking about?”
“Milt, I swear to God, if you ask me one more question…” I raised my shotgun to aim near him. Not at him. Not yet. Near him. Hovering in his southeast region. “I’m the one with the twelve gauge. You’re the one envying it.”
“Jesus, Mike, yeah, of course, I’m telling you all I know. I just wanted to clarify what you mean by charades is all.” He paused and realized he shouldn’t pause. “The guy who called the hit was just a middleman. I don’t have access to the top of the food chain.”
“Who’s the middleman?”
“The name? I don’t know who it was”—catching himself again—“but-but-but I was told at the docks. What I was told was, uh, that place at four fifty-one. At the docks. I’m sorry about Maria. Is she okay?”
“Is death okay?”
He took this in for a moment. It was starting to sink in. He started to cry.
So I shot him.
Chapter 15
The 13-Minute Murder Page 23