code. But we all know there was enough physical evidence to send the bastard to the electric chair. It was those lawyers with all their tricks—cast doubt on this, get that thrown out, confuse and mislead the slack-jawed jury with complicated cell phone evidence. This satellite says he was there at this time, couldn’t have done it.
Still, I generally wait a year. Just to be sure. I watch and wait, do my research. At least a year, sometimes much, much longer, as you know. I choose very carefully. I think about it long and hard. Because it would suck to be wrong. I wouldn’t, couldn’t, justify that. It’s a line I can’t step over. Really. Because then—what am I?
Anyway, my old friend, I’m gratified to report that the year since he was acquitted of his wife’s murder has been very bad for Steve Markham. He lost his job. All his friends. His lover-slash-alibi Tami—you remember her, right? The whole case hung on that mousy blonde from Hoboken. Well, she broke up with him. I’m sure you know all this. If I know you, you’re keeping tabs, too.
You probably didn’t know that for a while he hung around Tami’s place, stalking. I thought we were going to have a problem, that I’d have to act before I was ready. But Steve is nothing else if not a smart guy. Probably figured it wouldn’t look great if his girlfriend turned up dead less than a year after his wife’s body was found in a shallow grave, just miles from her own home, she and her unborn child killed by multiple stab wounds with a six-inch serrated blade (from her own kitchen). He finally stopped following Tami, the one that got away.
He’s about to lose the house. Last month, the lights went out. The pool where they think he killed his wife has turned green, water thick now with algae. Sure, he had his book deal. He did the talk show circuit, this time playing the innocent man, wrongly accused, on a tireless hunt for his wife’s killer. He’d been unfaithful, he admitted, grim and remorseful. He was sorry. So sorry. More crocodile tears.
He burned through the advance money fast. It wasn’t that much. Between agent commission, taxes, it was no windfall. He might have made it last. But people don’t get it. Money, if you don’t protect it, is flammable. It goes up in flames and floats away like ash. The IRS is after him now. The system. Maybe it does have its ways of getting you, even if you slip through its cracks at first.
I make no attempt to be quiet as I unpack my bag. I drape a plastic tarp over the couch, lay another one in front of the door where he will enter the room when he hears me. I lay things out. The duct tape. The hunting knife. There’s a gun I carry in a shoulder holster, the sleek, light Beretta PX4 Compact Carry with a handy AmeriGlo night sight and Talon grip. It’s only meant to inspire cooperation. To have to use it will represent a failure of planning on my part. But there are always variables for which you can’t account.
By the time he rouses from sleep and moves cautiously into the front room, I am sitting in one of the cheap wingback chairs by the window. He is not armed. I know there is no weapon in this house. There was a baseball bat under the bed. Maybe he thought that someday Laney’s brother or her father would come for him. But the baseball bat is gone now. In the trunk of my very forgettable car, in fact.
“Hello, Steve,” I say quietly and watch him jump back. “Have a seat.”
“Who are you?”
I work the Cerakote slide that puts a bullet into the chamber and watch him freeze. It’s a sound a man recognizes even if he’s never had a gun pulled on him before.
“On the couch.”
The plastic tarp crinkles beneath his weight and he starts to cry again. This time? It’s real.
“Please.” His voice is small with fear and regret.
But do I also hear relief?
We all believe that story, that cheaters never win, and justice will be done. Even the bad guys believe it.
Isn’t that right, my old friend?
ONE
It was just a peep, the tiniest little chirp. But Rain’s eyes flew open and she lay there in the dim morning, listening. She could tell by the light outside the window, by the bubbling of