her. “You brought me here alone, alone, because you needed to defy a broken system. Stay still. You were never actually going to get your so-called leverage—leverage you only happened to mention after you lost control. I admire you, Allison, but you’re done. Tell me who ordered the hit.”
She took one last strategic breath. She didn’t have my dog—I saw it in the way she flinched. It was a shift in dominance. She eyed me, searching for a promise that I wouldn’t kill her.
My question lingered in the air. She decided to answer it. “His brother.”
Chapter 26
His brother?
There it was. The fruit of my entire day’s work.
“His brother paid me to arrange the kill,” she said. “The son of Ivan Mesic called me to request a public hit.”
Ivan fathered a son who would request the murder of his other son. It would’ve been ghastly to hear if it didn’t make sense. In this business, the idea of an intrafamilial feud felt sadly obvious.
“Okay?” she said. “Now, why don’t you…let me leave this room…so that I can then live in healthy fear of you…so that you can then go home to your wife?”
“My wife?”
“She needs you.”
“My wife is…uh…well…She’s dead.”
“What?”
“She was sliced in half.”
“Who’d be stupid enough to kill the wife of a relentless maniac?”
“The maniac himself.”
It felt good to say.
“Please let me go, Michael. You’re smarter than this.”
“I killed my wife, face-to-face, just like we are now.”
“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you’re that far gone.”
So I ended the conversation with a parting gift. I shot Allison O’Hara for a third time, gun pointed at her head.
“Yeah,” I said to her as she slid down the wall, dead, “neither did she.”
Chapter 27
It felt good to admit it.
“The maniac killed his own wife,” I repeated. It was Allison’s phrasing. Maniac? That’s a bit flattering. Maniacs are go-getters, highly motivated, athletes, CEOs. I was none of that. I was just a guy driving the divinely sensual corpse of Allison O’Hara to the parking lot of the Alluvial Tavern. There I would leave her curled up with my spare tire as I sought one final beer.
“Triple IPA,” I said, taking a seat. “No lime.”
The instant she saw me, the bartender seemed to know I’d just had an encounter.
“You have a new lady?” she said. An accusation more than a query.
“Yeah, she’s in the trunk of my car.”
Ms. Bartender pushed a beer toward me and left it halfway out of my reach as she went back to the kitchen. She hadn’t liked me in general; now she didn’t like me specifically. I pulled out two books, one of which was of course Anna Karenina. The other was Le Parfum, its final chapters dog-eared so I could relive their glory.
Within minutes I was done and closed the book—an act that cued the bartender.
“I just want you to know,” she said, returning uninvited. “I think you’re manipulative. I think you tell people what they want to hear. Including yourself.”
I toasted her, midair. I had no rebuttal. She toasted back with her favorite finger.
I opened Anna Karenina. Chapter one. I read the overture to the greatest mirror ever held up to social chaos. Then I left the bar and drove Allison’s remarkably cooperative corpse to the home built on top of my basement. The front door was locked. The front porch was fine. Nobody had been there. Nobody had come for Updike.
“I tip my hat,” I said to the cadaver in my arms. “That was quite a bluff.”
From inside came a few happy yips, and once my chin was within reach, he greeted me with licks until I hugged him tight enough to force that wiggle that dogs do. Where they flop their head around and try to break your nose, then do a lap around the room to boomerang back.
We don’t deserve dogs.
I hoisted Dead Allison onto my shoulder and brought her down to the Kolpak 1010 freezer system to be the sixth inductee in my hall of fame. Maria, Milt, Byron, Byron’s two friends. Everyone was rigidly in place. It was a little scary to turn on the light—I’m not impervious to being spooked by ghosts, and so forth.
“I was loyal to you,” I said to Maria. “Allison made advances on me but I remained loyal.”
Maria didn’t seem to believe this.
“Yet,” I said, “of all the people in the world for you to betray me with, you chose a man who was out to get me?!”
I waited for a rebuttal. None. I left the freezer.