to hide any attraction I’d feel for her once I actually saw how pretty she was, face-to-face. But when it finally happened, I had no chance.
She was all I feared she’d be.
“Is everything okay here?” said the waiter.
He must’ve caught sight of our fracas from afar because he was suddenly at my side, attentive to Allison’s demeanor.
She kept looking at me and neither smiled nor frowned. “Everything’s fine,” she said to him.
The waiter glanced at me, then glanced back at her. “Are you…?” he began. “Are you sure that you…?”
…don’t want our staff to beat him to a deep-fried pulp?
“I’d like you to get him a drink,” said Allison, dispatching the waiter with the following: “He’ll have a triple IPA. With lime. Quartered.”
Chapter 23
She knew my drink. Jesus Christ, she knew it. Which was both hot and terrifying.
“Look,” I said to her, “I’m not here to drag this out.”
“You’re a moth,” she said. “You’re hovering by the flame because you have nowhere else to look. Get out of the house.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Get out before I have you singed.”
“I thought you wanted me to stay. You just told the waiter—”
“I wanted to avoid a scene.”
She was right. I had nowhere else to look.
“Listen,” I said. “I don’t know why Goran Šovagović Mesic was a name that passed across your desk…and part of me doesn’t care…but whatever the reason, you’re gonna tell me who put it there.”
She wasn’t listening. She was glaring at me—bored, annoyed.
“Or I make calls,” I whispered.
That’s when her face suddenly lit up. And the calculating woman subsided as a tiny laugh bubbled out of her.
“Wow,” she said, sitting back in her seat. “You really are at a breaking point, aren’t you?”
“What? No.”
“The legendary Mike Ryan. The contract killer. At my table. Trying to play it cool but…isn’t quite…”
I couldn’t move.
She leaned back in to say, “It’s okay if you’re losing your good judgment.”
“I am not.”
“Prove it.”
She sat there a moment to let her remark incubate. Prove it?
Then after a smirk, she relaxed, reclined, and recrossed her legs, letting her calf graze my shin, which she pretended not to notice.
“Follow me,” she said.
She got up. I had to hurry to stay with her, her long legs striding forcefully across the marble.
The next minute was a blur.
“On my tab,” she said to the maître d’.
This woman rendered me a heap of gibberish. I struggled to decipher what was happening as she stopped near the valet to chat with some guy—her chief goon, I think—who then maybe went to look after her soiled girlfriend.
Allison took me around the outside of the restaurant, guiding us toward the riverfront. She was taking me to the park behind the main road. It was late but the public restroom was still lit.
We entered the women’s side and she bolted the door behind us. We were alone.
I spoke first. “You certainly—”
She slammed me up against a wall.
If this was a kiss it was going to be wild and decadent. My eyes involuntarily closed. My mouth involuntarily softened. “Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be,” Karenina said unto Vronsky. I then looked up to find that, yes, Allison’s lips were hovering inches away from mine and that, yes, also, well, okay, she now had a gun in her hand, pressed into the softest part of my heart.
Chapter 24
I’ve been held at gunpoint before. Instead of thinking quickly or wisely, you fixate on one lone, pervasive thought.
You can’t believe it’s actually happening.
“Back up,” said Allison. “Get on your knees.”
“If you’re…If you’re gonna kill me…”
“Now!” she shouted.
I couldn’t believe this was happening. She nodded for me to move toward the rear. My spine complied. My mind raced clumsily for a way, some way—despite the indications that I truly was losing my edge—to reduce her control of the situation.
“Am I here to confess?” I asked.
I could guess what she’d told her henchman just now: to get permission from the top. Permission to kill me.
So I blurted out the only thing that could catch her attention. “You had sex with him, didn’t you?”
She had no reaction.
“Goran,” I specified. “You had sex with Goran.”
She didn’t respond right away, and by right away I mean there was a trillionth of a second too long in her eye contact with me as her brain improvised her retort.
“No,” she said.
Wait a minute.
“Why would you even think that?” she said.
She was lying. I had completely, idiotically, randomly stumbled upon the crux of her only position on this chessboard.