Chapter Thirty-Seven
I find my way back to our hotel. There was only one room left, a last-second cancellation, and we snapped it up.
God, I’m such a cliché. Husband is cheating on me with a younger woman. I’m contemplating her murder, and meanwhile, sipping cheap wine as I spy on other apparently happy couples. Fuck every last one of them.
On the balcony overlooking the water, I watch as a couple in their seventies mingles with thirtysomethings.
They laugh, drink mojitos, and flirt as though they don’t know they are more than twice the age of their fellow beachgoers.
Once I fell for Brian, I always assumed that would be us someday, that the passion wouldn’t die.
I assumed he wouldn’t be sleeping with someone half my age and doing god knows what else.
I sigh and dial my sister, anything to shift my mind elsewhere as I wait for Ian to report back.
“Your dog pissed on my carpet,” she greets me.
“Did you take her on a walk?”
“Of course not! It’s a hundred and ten out. Or haven’t you heard of global warming?”
“Piper, you still have to take her out. She can’t hold it all day.”
Piper sighs. “I don’t want kids. I don’t want dogs. I don’t even want a cat. How am I going to be a single cat lady someday without a cat?”
I open my mouth, then snap it shut. I’m going to assume that’s a rhetorical question.
“So, how’s San Diego?”
“How did you know I’m in San Diego?” I stop with the tiny plastic bottle of wine halfway to my mouth.
Piper snorts. “Oh, please. Graham told me. And don’t try to give me the same BS story you gave him.
You obviously suspect Brian is cheating on you.
Something was going on the other night, and then he leaves town, and you need me to watch your dog and Graham to watch the girls last second?
And ask us to not tell Brian about it? Psh.
No way you’re going to all that trouble for a romantic evening in California. ”
Well, okay, put that way it seems obvious. I’d tried to give the impression I was planning a surprise and needed them to keep it quiet.
“So, what? Is he cheating on you or not?”
Yes, I think, but I don’t want to open that can of worms, not yet. “I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me? I would have helped you.”
I lick my lips. “I just—I mean, I didn’t want to tell anyone until I’m sure.”
“So what’re you gonna do if he’s cheating on you? Kick him out?”
Maybe this is a good thing. If she and my brother think he’s cheating on me, it’s a reason that Brian might suddenly disappear. I’ll just have to be sure to hide the body really well. Or get rid of it altogether.
“I was planning on killing him.” The words slip from my mouth.
She cackles. “Good. I’ll help you hide the body.”
“Haha,” I say, secretly wishing she would help me hide a body. Bodies are heavy—there’s a reason it’s called deadweight.
“So why are you calling?” she asks.
“Just…wanted to say hi. Drinking alone in a hotel. You know.”
“Oh, do I.”
We talk for another twenty minutes—mostly about the new fitness club location she hopes to open by next year. It’s around nine when we finally disconnect, Piper to take Bear on a much-needed walk, and me to skulk to the lobby for another mini bottle of wine.
I skip the elevator—so far, no one’s tried to make me collateral damage, but I’d rather not make it easy for them to do so.
In the lobby, I peer through a glass-front refrigerator, staring at the cheap plastic bottles of rosé, pinot grigio, merlot.
I’m no wine expert, but I am used to a certain quality, and the idea of another bottle of this crap makes my stomach turn.
But the alcohol will at least slow this rising pressure inside me, this need to kill.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and cheap wine or no, it might keep me from murdering someone tonight.
I grab the rosé—the sweetness will likely disguise the cheapness—and hand over cash to the attendant.
When I turn, I lock eyes with a woman watching me from across the lobby.
She’s tall, blond, maybe forty-five. There’s something about her, and the way she looks back at me, I’d guess she feels the same way about me.
Of course, the something about her I feel is along the lines of she’d be fun to kill, whereas the something about me portrayed in that twist of her lips tells me she’s thinking I’d be fun to fuck.
I grip the plastic wine bottle tighter, envision asking her back to my hotel room.
Taking her up via the staircase, pressing her into the concrete wall, slipping the knife in my leg sheath just beneath her ribs and watching her eyes alight with shock—
I turn away from the soft smile she’s giving me and tell myself to keep walking. To walk away from her, this woman who is a real person, probably a good person.
“Hey—” she calls.
I don’t stop. I don’t turn.
I go back to my hotel room, set the shitty wine on the desk—I really shouldn’t drink more—and pick up my phone to call John.
“I need to kill someone,” I say as soon as he answers.
John snorts. Heavy drums and staccato notes come through the phone, and it takes me a second to place the video game: Mortal Kombat.
How annoyingly appropriate.
“That’s nice,” he says. “You have a contract. A contract that is now over a week old. And remember the one before that? The one you royally fucked up? Do you have any idea how much money it cost to cover that up? Money that came out of my pocket, by the way.”
“I’ll pay you back. Just get me a contract. In San Diego.”
He huffs a sigh. “San fucking Diego? Nadia, kill your mark! He’s in Texas.”
John doesn’t know Brian isn’t in Texas. Which makes sense, I suppose; he’s not who hired Ian, nor who put the hit out on Brian.
“My mark is in San Diego,” I say.
“Then kill him.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Yes, it is.” The music shuts off abruptly.
I trace my fingertips over the patterns of the comforter on the hotel bed, then think of how many people have likely touched this comforter, had sex on it, and yank my hand away.
“I just need one more day,” I tell him. “Two at most.”
“You’re out of time. I’m not getting you another job. No one is getting you another job, in fact.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” I eye the mini bottle again, wonder if maybe the blond woman is still downstairs, if I could persuade her to go on a long walk with me…a walk she’d never return from.
“It means you’re done. You screwed up an easy job, and you failed to complete the big job you literally begged me for. No one wants to hire you.”
His words slam into me. But I knew this would happen. Ian said as much. I just thought…“Wait—we’ve worked together more than ten years, we—”
“I told you, over and over, to get this job done. That he was bad, that you just had to believe me. And you didn’t.
And then you—” He huffs a sigh. “Well, you know what you did. You lost control, Nadia. Or you don’t give a damn.
Either way, my boss doesn’t want to work with you. And frankly, neither do I.”
“John, wait.”
“What?” He sounds tired, like I do when I’ve told Eliza to brush her teeth for the fifth time in ten minutes.
“What if—” I swallow. I think of what life was like before I knew that killing people helped, before I met John and he found jobs for me that included slaying bad people.
And not just anyone, but people who could never be tied back to me.
After all, killing Piper’s boyfriend made sense, and sure, I knew some other not-so-savory types.
But if I only killed those people, it would create a pattern.
A pattern that could be traced back to me.
It would make me little more than a serial killer, practically dirty words.
What I do has purpose, whereas the other kind of killing is so often a waste of life.
And John has never been wrong before; when he says someone is bad, they always are.
It’s just usually very evident to me why they need to be removed from this earth.
“What if what?” he snaps. He must be truly annoyed; he never talks to me this way.
“I’ll repay you. And—” The words are on the tip of my tongue. I’ll kill him. I’ll just kill him and get it over with. I think the words, but I don’t mean them, not really. Not yet, anyway.
“And what?”
“I’ll finish the job,” I say, unable to articulate what that means—ending my husband’s life. But I’m desperate not to lose my connection to John, my career. I just need to buy a little time.
“Fine. Call me when you do.” The line disconnects.
I pace the room until I end up in the bathroom, where I stare at myself in the mirror without bothering to flick the light on. “What now?” I ask myself. “What fucking now?”
A knock on the door. I growl in annoyance, pull my gun from its holster without thinking. I don’t press my eye to the peephole, because that’s a great way to get shot through the head. Instead, I silently wait.
“Nadia. Open the door. It’s me.”
Ian. I unlock the bolt, swing the door wide.
He stands there, a bottle of whiskey in one hand, a bottle of wine in the other.
“What’s that for?”
He grimaces. “I’ve got bad news.”