He sighed. “They pay when the job is done.”
“I thought you got something up front.”
“Well, this time I didn’t. I’ll see them today or tomorrow, settle up.”
“Because I need some money. I thought you’d have some cash. Cheryl needs new runners. I don’t want to put anything more on the Visa.”
Matt grumbled something into his pillow.
“And what was that call about last night?” Tricia asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Was it about another job? They think you’re getting good at this, more work’s going to come your way.”
“An old job,” he said, rolling onto his back, resigned to the idea that he was not going to have a chance to go back to sleep.
“Why would someone call you about an old jo—”
“For fuck’s sake,” he said, sitting up, “I’m barely awake, and you’re like the fucking Gestapo.”
Tricia didn’t even blink. “I want to be at the mall when they open.”
“You do that.”
“You promised the kids McDonald’s today.”
“I gotta go into the shop,” he said, referring to the laundromat. “One of the dryers is acting up, needs a new belt or something.” Matt had someone run the place on the weekends and didn’t usually have to go in.
“So do that after lunch,” Tricia said. “Snooze another hour if you want, but you’re not getting out of this.”
Matt dropped his head back onto the pillow and closed his eyes. He loved this woman, but God, she could be a bitch and a half.
He ended up getting out of bed half an hour later, once Tricia had gone downstairs to the kitchen. Had a long shower, standing there until the hot water ran out, thinking.
Matt and Tricia and their kids, Curtis and Cheryl — one big happy family — were in the mall by eleven, which was when Tricia pulled a fast one on him. She wanted to take Curtis to the music shop. He’d recently shown interest in learning to play the piano, and she wanted to check out one of those little electric ones.
“You take Cheryl to the shoe store and I’ll catch up with you,” she said.
“The fuck do I know about kids’ shoes?”
“Just let her look around. I’ll be there in time to decide.”
Like he couldn’t be trusted. People put their faith in him to go out and kill people, but he couldn’t pick out a pair of shoes for a five-year-old.
Little Cheryl knew her way around a shoe store. Walked straight in, grabbed a pair of white runners with pink stripes off the display, and found a saleswoman without any help from her father.
“Would you have these in my size?” she inquired in her tiny voice.
The saleswoman smiled and said, “Let’s have a look at those feet of yours and see what you need.”
Matt stood near the front of the store and watched the foot traffic go by.
She was buried in dirt, he thought. She was in a fucking grave. But if by some chance she wasn’t dead when I put her there...
And it was true, he hadn’t stuck around. Hadn’t seen the point. Why would he? When the job was done, the job was done, and it made sense to get the hell out of there as fast as he could.
It would have to have been like a scene in a movie. A hand coming up out of the dirt. Then another. Then a frantic scramble to get herself aboveground, get some air.
No no no no no.
And yet, she’d been seen. Supposedly.
He sensed a presence next to him. Someone very small, walking about awkwardly, trying on shoes to see how they felt.
Matt turned and knelt down and said, “How do they fit? Are your toes all squished—”
It was not Cheryl. It was a different girl, probably the same age, about the same size. The little girl looked at him, eyes wide, then turned and ran back to a woman standing by the cash register. Her mother, evidently.
Cheryl was still sitting in a chair, shoeless, legs swinging back and forth while she waited for the saleswoman to bring her something to try on.
And suddenly Matt had a thought.
I got the wrong girl.
Had the woman he was supposed to kill been seen in recent days because he never got her in the first place? It wasn’t like he’d asked to see her driver’s license or fill out a questionnaire when she’d come down to the kitchen early that morning. He went to the address he’d been given and left with the woman who lived there. Wasn’t a whole lot of chitchat. Could there have been someone else there instead? Someone staying over? A house swap? But even if that were the case, where had the woman he’d been paid to get rid of been the last six years?
“Daddy?”
He looked down, and this time it was, indeed, his little girl. “Yeah, sweetheart.”
“Do you like these?”
She held up one foot and then another, displaying a pair of shoes emblazoned with dozens of small, sparkling pink stars.
“Wait for your mother.”
He considered the possibilities. If Brie Mason really was alive, she’d either survived and dug herself out, or he’d killed someone else by mistake. There had to be a way to nail this down. He would need to toss a shovel into the truck and go for a drive.
And take someone along with him. Someone who might be able identify what was in that grave after all these years, if there was even anything there at all.
Maybe the client.
Maybe somebody else.
Matt was feeling something unfamiliar. He was feeling scared. And he would do whatever was necessary to make that feeling go away.
Thirty-One
Andrew
Brie had confessed to me about Norman.
I believed her when she said it had just been one time. I don’t think you can call having sex a single time with someone other than your spouse an affair. A mistake, sure. A betrayal, no doubt about it. An error in judgment, without question. But an affair? I wouldn’t say that. My transgression with Natalie Simmons fell into that category. And it also qualified as a mistake, a betrayal, and an error in judgment.
I would say, however, that to sleep with your brother-in-law, even once, is kind of fucked up.
What Brie did betrayed not only me, but her sister, Isabel, as well. Not that there wasn’t plenty of blame to go around. That son of a bitch Norman was at fault here, too.
I didn’t take it well.
Amazingly, I didn’t have to pry it out of her. But Brie, wracked with guilt, felt the need to unburden herself. Maybe she thought it was going to come out at some point anyway, and wanted to get ahead of it.
“I can only explain it one way,” she said. “Pity.”
“Pity?” I said.
She told me how it happened. Brie, while no accountant, had a head for figures and was a whiz at doing tax returns. She not only did ours, but she volunteered to do them for Albert and Dierdre, and Isabel and Norman. Brie always refused payment, no matter how much they insisted, but she — and by that, I mean we — were rewarded with numerous bottles of very drinkable, if not terribly expensive, wine.
Brie headed over to Isabel and Norman’s one evening to sit down at the kitchen table and, armed with a laptop and the most up-to-date tax software, proceeded to figure out their returns. Isabel was heading out for the evening with the kids to some school function, leaving Brie alone with Norman.
She had several questions for him, and he had gone searching for various forms and receipts that he and Isabel kept in a shoebox, then sat down at the table next to her, trying to find the information she needed.
Norman asked if Brie would like a beer, and she said yes. He decided to have one, too. There were, I guess, a couple more each after that.