it goes both ways, Marin. I have to trust you, too. And I do, because I trust your good friend Sal.”
It takes her a minute to process this, and he waits patiently as her mind races through a hundred different scenarios. Finally, she whispers, “If I go through with this, how soon will I know when you’re planning to do it?”
“You won’t know anything about it. You’ll find out when it’s done. It could take a few weeks.”
“Weeks?”
He puts his coffee cup down. “The more time that passes between this conversation and the actual event, the better. The reason so many people get caught is because the job is completed too soon after payment, and the client is too involved in the plan. The more distance between you and everything else, the better.”
She says nothing. It all sounds so routine for him, and yet so inconceivable to her. They’re actually talking about this. She’s really doing this.
“What you’re paying me for isn’t just to kill someone, Marin.” Julian’s tone is conversational. He seems unconcerned that anyone around might overhear him. “If your only concern was the actual killing, you could do it yourself, assuming you were angry enough. Or pay any punk off the streets to do it for you, for a whole hell of a lot less money. The killing is the easiest part.”
She blinks. In her whole life, she’s never heard anyone say that.
“What you’re paying me for is to make sure it doesn’t lead back to you.” Julian sips his coffee. “It’s to do it so it looks like a car crash, or a random mugging gone wrong, maybe a freak illness, or a fire, or a drowning. Something unexpected, but plausible. For this to be believable, you need to be as shocked as everybody else, nowhere near the location, and completely unprepared for the news. Even better if you didn’t know he was cheating.” He pauses. “Does he know you know?”
“No.” Marin’s voice is shaking. Her entire body is shaking. The things he listed off, like they’re benign options, like they’re not a bunch of different ways to make someone … dead … she doesn’t know how to react to that.
“How did you find out he was having an affair?”
“Private investigator,” she says, and his eyes narrow.
“Which one?”
She shakes her head. “Again, I feel that’s irrelevant.”
For some reason, Marin doesn’t want to say Vanessa Castro’s name. Castro discovered the affair by accident, while investigating the disappearance of her son, which Marin also refuses to talk about. None of this is Julian’s business.
“If you keep things from me, it makes my job harder,” he says.
“And if you’re as good as you say you are, it shouldn’t matter,” she says. It comes out a challenge.
His jaw clenches, and then relaxes again. “Who else knows? Your therapist?”
“How do you know I have a therapist?” Is he testing her? Or did Sal give him that level of background?
“Women like you always do.”
“I don’t have a therapist anymore.” Marin has no intention of revealing Dr. Chen’s name, either. Julian intimidates her, but he’s also making her feel protective of the people in her life. “And if you’re going to question me about every single person in my life I might have told about the affair—which I learned about today, by the way—we’re going to be here awhile.”
A small smile crosses Julian’s lips. Whatever test she just took, it appears she passed.
“You’ll need to call off your investigator,” he says. “Immediately.”
“Done,” Marin says, but it’s a lie. While she understands that Julian doesn’t need the complication of a PI following the person he’s been hired to kill, she has no intention of telling Vanessa Castro to stop investigating everything. She’ll tell Castro not to bother investigating the affair. But nothing about her search for Sebastian will change.
“Okay then. This brings us to the most important thing.” Julian leans forward. “Once you wire me the money, it’s confirmed. Everything begins. You wake up a couple of mornings later, freak out, change your mind, fine. But the money is gone. You don’t get it back. You understand that?”
“Yes.” She’s starting to shake again, which feels silly, because they’ve come this far. She’s already shown him the worst part of herself, the part she could barely manage to tell Sal about except when joking or drunk, the part that might well send her straight to hell.
Or worse, prison. Because you can’t threaten a person with hell if they’re already living in it.