Chapter 52 Mack
Mack
The man who came jogging up Danekar Road was white.
Middle-aged. Pretty thick around the middle for someone who was supposed to be such a devoted runner.
It was barely light out, and Mack was tucked in a corner of the street (if you could call it that; Danekar was still mostly gravel, which actually made it more navigable in the snow), but the bright neon green of the man’s jacket was unmistakable. Exactly as described.
Imagine being so disciplined, so routine, that hiring someone to kill you would be this easy. What if this guy had had too much to drink on Christmas Day, or too much to eat, or had stayed up late putting Christmas presents together, or . . . but here this man was. Mack disliked him instantly.
If anybody wanted to kill Mack, it would be a lot harder.
They’d have to stake out at least three Starbucks, maybe make a contingency plan for gunning him down on the school run or behind his house while he hit golf balls.
It would take a village to kill Mack. He spent a long minute fantasizing about this as the man got closer to him: things would be so much easier if someone could just put Mack Evans out of his misery.
Hell, he even had some life insurance, so Hailey and the girls would be .
. . wait. What if this man had life insurance too?
That would make sense; that could be what this was all about.
Maybe the man wanted to die, maybe this was suicide lite.
But why would the selfish bastard choose Mack then? Why do this to him?
The man’s feet crunched on the gravel in time with Mack’s thoughts: Why, why, why.
This dude was probably a murderer, Mack reasoned. The voice had assured him that this person had caused unimaginable suffering, so what did that mean? Was he a Mafia don, a child molester, a wife-beater? He could be any of those things or all of them, Mack felt in that moment.
The guy didn’t run like someone who expected to die, either.
He ran with the sureness of a person who wasn’t thinking about stopping with every step, a style Mack envied.
The man had a skullcap on, and woolly mittens that made Mack think of a child.
If this selfish, murderous, perverted man-child noticed the Cherokee parked there—if it gave him a moment’s pause to see a strange car out here in this deserted spot—he did not let on, and he didn’t deviate from the route Mack had been assured that he would take: he jogged straight down the middle of the road, and then—just as the pounding in Mack’s head began to whisper Now!
Now! Now!—the man turned off to the left, into the woods.
Mack let him go, but he did not drive away. The man was coming back this way too—the voice on the phone had told him so.
Mack would wait.