Start Reading #9
“No,” he says quickly. “I’ll leave you your dad’s cut, and we can split Doug’s. But I have to get my money and get out of here. When she figures out I’m not dead, she’s going to come after me.”
“Who?” Though I think I know the answer.
“The bitch that killed your father and Doug.”
Regardless of the circumstances, I don’t love that word. There are so many reasons a man might consider a woman to be a bitch. Usually, it’s because he doesn’t like her words, or her ideas, or the fact that she has asserted dominion over her body.
“Roxanne Shevchenko?”
He raises his snow-white eyebrows at me. “You do your homework. She, uh, thinks we killed her husband.”
“Did you?”
He shrugs. “We solved a problem for a client.” He must clock my judgment. He lifts his palm. “Trust me, her husband wasn’t a good guy. He had it coming.”
“I see.”
His full name comes back to me, Brian “Buster” Chappell, his role with the government classified, according to the detective.
He looks like one of those guys, an old spook who, over the course of his career, has done all kinds of questionable things that he never questioned.
He opens a drawer in my father’s desk, rifles about, and comes out with a crinkled pack of cigarettes and a lighter.
“Gonna put the gun down?” he asks.
“Are you armed?”
He scowls at me, issues a wet cough. “Do I look armed? I couldn’t even find my underwear.”
“Open your coat.”
He complies with an eye roll. I see more of him than anyone would want to. I put the gun in my pants, which, by the way, is the worst place for it, dangerous and careless. But I’m not willing to put it down on any of the nearby surfaces. The situation feels unpredictable.
He lights a cigarette, which really seems like a bad idea. But when he offers me one, I take it. My nerve endings are sizzling as I lean in for a light.
“I’d offer you my seat,” he says. “But I don’t think I can stand up.”
“I’m good. Thanks.” I take a drag, feel instantly sick, drop it on the concrete floor, and stub it out.
“It was the pizza,” he says. “We got together that Tuesday and ordered a pie—mushroom and sausage. That’s how she got us. We ate the pie, watched the game, went our separate ways. I ate the least.” He pats his big belly. “Trying to watch my girlish figure. I’m guessing that’s why I’m still alive.”
“She thinks you killed her husband,” I say. “She wanted revenge. So she poisoned your pizza?”
He takes a phone from his pocket, taps it a few times, and then slides it across to me. There’s another grainy image of Roxanne heading into a bar. Does this woman know that people are photographing her all the time?
“Roxanne Shevchenko. Former dancer and hooker, she now runs the strip club down off the highway, the Blue Room. Her husband was the local drug dealer, big fish in a small pond. They were distributing a nasty mix from the club that they called Nirvana. There was a bad batch, and people died, brought heat. Borys’s boss wasn’t too happy about it, one of a number of fuckups, apparently. The final straw.”
Disappointment and anger mingle unpleasantly in my center.
“So . . . what? Pension’s not covering your living expenses in retirement, and you decide to become hit men?”
“Don’t be judgy, kid.” He offers a little shrug. “We prefer fixers. We’re the cleanup crew, the guys you call when things go fubar. At least we were.”
“Enough work for you here in this nowhere town?”
“We traveled some. Besides, it was more like part time. Like you said, we’re retired.”
“My dad.”
He lifts his palms. “Truth. Your dad didn’t get his hands dirty like that. Opted out of certain kinds of work. He was strictly surveillance and intelligence. Doug and me, we had a different history. Less delicate about what we would do or wouldn’t do.”
How am I supposed to react to that? I’ll cop to some sense of relief. That I was right about my father and what he’d do for money.
“He used to say ‘I’m not going to do anything that my daughter would hate me for, any more than she already does.’”
“I didn’t hate him,” I say quickly.
“I know,” he says. We lock eyes. “He knew that too. Men like us. Let’s just say we don’t make the best fathers. Occupational hazard. Like we didn’t even know what we were supposed to do.”
We’re getting off topic.
“So you’re telling me that you killed Borys Shevchenko in a paid hit. And his wife, Roxanne, came for revenge.”
“Poison is a woman’s weapon. And Roxanne has her hands in everything in this town.
Anyway, that’s my working theory. She’s from the Ukraine, you know,” he goes on, apparently a talker.
“The rumor is that she was trafficked as a teenager—smart, though, worked her way up to running the strip club, a total hard-ass. Borys fell in love with her; they got married. Happily ever after, right? Just like that old fairy tale—The Stripper and the Drug Dealer.”
When the pieces fit together, it happens in an instant.
Roxanne took my father’s phone from his hospice room. From whatever app he had installed there, she’s been watching the safe room. She’s been surveilling this space.
Maybe she knew about the money, or she was waiting for someone to come and retrieve it. Or she could have been waiting for me to come home, imagining that I might have the code.
And if that’s true, that she’s been watching, she’s probably already on the way here.
That’s when I hear the stair creak.
Buster hears it too. We lock eyes.
Standing by the door, I reach over quickly and kill the light. Buster freezes where he sits. I’m guessing a drop to the floor is not an option. I shift to the side of the entryway, heart thudding. There’s no back way out of this basement room.
The silence expands as I draw in a slow deep breath, just like Lenny taught me. You can slow down the passage of time with your breath. It sounded crazy when he first said it, but I have, over time, found it to be true. I take my gun from my waist.
Another breath.
An undeniably female form moves into the rectangle of the doorframe. She holds a large black handgun.
Time slows to a crawl.
“Did you think you were going to get away with it?” she asks, voice throaty. “That you could just kill him and walk away?”
Buster lets out a laugh. “None of us gets away with anything, Roxanne. You know that.”
There’s a history there, maybe. Something known between them.
“Let’s not do anything rash,” I say, keeping my voice low.
Her eyes fall on me in the dim. “I remember you,” she says, accent light, pleasant.
I remember her too. Not young, but younger than I am.
The look in her eyes is ancient, though, a person who has seen too much, lost too much, suffered too greatly.
I’ve had it easy, the child of relative privilege, loved enough, safe most of my life.
I can’t imagine the life she’s had, both our paths leading us here, to this dark moment.
“I have no problem with you,” she says, nodding toward the door. “Walk away from this.”
When was the last time I took good advice?
“I can’t let you kill him, Roxanne.”
Her gaze is flat and cold, moves to Buster, then back to me. “Why do you care?”
“Please.”
But we’re all too far gone. There’s no easy way out of this now.
Her shoulder twitches, telegraphing that she intends to shoot.
I fire first, but she gets off two rounds before her shadow crumples to the floor, a hard slap of flesh and clothing.
I wait. One heartbeat. Two. No pain, but sometimes it takes a moment. Am I hit? I think of Amelia, my pretty, smart, funny girl. I’m sorry, kiddo. What a fuckup.
Buster groans. There’s a terrible gurgling.
I reach for the light, flip it on. I’m okay. If she was aiming for me, she missed. But I don’t think she was. If she wanted me, she’d have come sooner.
Slouched in the doorway, Roxanne fixes her blue, blue stare at me. In her face I see recrimination, something else. Respect, maybe. I’m a good shot. I don’t miss. A pool of blood grows beneath her. She wears a pair of glittery platform heels. I’m impressed. I’d have worn sneakers.
“I’m sorry,” I say. And I am. Her eyes close.
I move over to Buster. A terrible black rose blooms in the center of his chest. Quite the shot in the dim lighting. Just confirms that she was watching on the camera, knew his position in the room.
In the distance, sirens. The detective must have been watching this house. On my phone, I dial 911 anyway, just to have it on the record. “There was an intruder,” I say. “I shot her. She’s dead. Another man is injured.” I give my address, agree to stay on the line.
Buster nods over to the safe, and I push it closed. He’s scribbled the combination on a piece of the cigarette package. I slide it into my pocket.
“Hang on, Buster,” I say, kneeling beside him and taking his hand. “Help’s coming.”
He’s a stranger, but he’s not, somehow. His breath smells terrible; his grip on my hand is strong. We are as close in that moment as two people can be.
“Don’t go,” I say. I realize that I’m crying. I’m not talking to him; I’m talking to my father. I have so many questions. Please don’t go.
“He’d want me to say,” he croaks. But he doesn’t finish. A shuddering breath, and then he’s gone.
It’s okay. I can fill in the blanks: He’d want me to say .
. . that he loved you. That he did his best with what he had.
That he wasn’t one to apologize but that he knew more as an old man than he did as a young one, and, even then, he didn’t have the words, and besides, it was far too late for all that.
The moment expands, and I hear the beat of footsteps upstairs, the shouting. “Police!” And when they get downstairs: “Hands where I can see them!”
I move away from Buster, put my hands on my head.
Detective Crowe stops short in the doorframe, eyes wide with fear, face flushed. Then he sees me on my knees and Buster slouched beside me. He lowers his gun, eyes taking it all in.
“Are you hurt?” he asks.
I shake my head. “No. I’m okay.”
And I mean it.
It takes me a second to realize that Roxanne is gone.