Further Confessions of a Slightly Neurotic Hitwoman (6 page)

Thankfully, Aunt Leslie barged in just then, effectively ending the conversation. Hyped up from all the caffeine she was ingesting at her NA and AA meetings, she talked faster than an auctioneer about “sharing” and “steps” and “amends.” It didn’t take me long to zone out. I was preoccupied about the night’s “lesson” with Patrick. I really wasn’t up to any more surprises.

Chapter Six

I
WAS STILL
worrying about what the lesson would entail as I left Katie’s room, leaving behind the three cackling witches.

“Miss Lee?” a man called. “Miss Lee?”

Holding my breath, I turned slowly in the direction of the unfamiliar voice. The first strange man who’d greeted me by my name here in the hospital was Delveccio. The second had been Gary the Gun. Neither of those meetings had resulted in moments that gave me the warm fuzzies. Call me superstitious, but I’m a great believer in bad things happening in threes. Unlike the mob boss and the hired gun, the man approaching me from the waiting area didn’t appear to be menacing. He looked tired and sad. I didn’t recognize him, but maybe he too had someone lying in one of these beds. Maybe, like me, he’d been ground down by the weight of the endless waiting.

“How can I help you?” I asked as kindly as I could.

“Would you mind if we sat down and talked?” He waved at the waiting area.

“Of course.”

For once the space was visitor-free. Our only company would be the television tuned to the local station. I’d learned more about my fair state because of that damn TV than I had after a childhood spent in the public school system. We sat on a pair of chairs opposite one another. Neither of us spoke. He nervously fiddled with his wedding ring, a simple band that had seen better days.

“What can I do for you?” I finally asked.

“My name is Bruce . . . Bruce Calvin.” He waited, watching my reaction as the name sank in.

A vise tightened around my chest, making it difficult to breathe.

“My wife”—he glanced down at the symbol of their love encircling his finger—“my wife was Lois Calvin. I wanted to say, I wanted to tell you, to make sure you knew, how very sorry I am . . .” he said in a rush before trailing off lamely with “for what happened.”

“For what happened?” My voice, shaking with emotion, was barely more than a growl. “You mean that your wife murdered my sister and put my niece in a coma?”

He flinched. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry won’t bring my sister or Katie back.”

He hung his head. “This was a bad idea.”

“No,” I said, jumping to my feet, “your wife getting behind the wheel while higher than the Empire State Building, that was a bad idea. This was just a colossal waste of time.” I stalked away from him, my legs shaking from the righteous anger flooding my entire body.

“I tried to stop her!” he called.

I spun back. “You didn’t try hard enough.”

He’d gotten to his feet and had followed after me. “I got my daughter, Martha, she’s four . . . I got her out of the car and brought her inside. I went back out to get the keys from Lois, but she was gone.”

We stood there, staring at one another, each reeling from our respective losses.

Finally, when I thought I could speak without screaming, I asked, “What is it you want from me, Mr. Calvin?”

“Forgiveness?”

I laughed. Or at least tried to, but the sound that came out sounded like a grunt of pain. “You’re asking the wrong person.”

“Please,” he begged. “Haven’t you ever made a wrong choice? Haven’t you ever, in the moment, gone right when you should have gone left? Don’t you have any regrets about things you could have, should have done differently?”

An image of young Marlene tugging on my arm at the carnival, while I instead focused on our mother and her outlandish behavior, flashed through my mind. All too familiar regret and self-recrimination flooded through me. Instinctively I tensed against it, balling my fists.

I looked anew at Mr. Calvin and saw again how tired and sad he looked. I understood what it was like to carry that kind of guilt around. I knew what it felt like to need to be absolved for that kind of mistake.

I closed my eyes, gathering myself. I could do this. I could offer this man, who’d inadvertently destroyed my family, the one thing he wanted most. The very thing my own family had denied me.

I opened my eyes, the words
I forgive you
on the tip of my tongue, but the countenance of the man I faced was no longer desperately pleading. He stared past me, as though I didn’t even exist, with a consuming hatred.

I turned to see the target of his hate and realized he was watching the TV.

I recognized the face the camera was following. Jose Garcia.

“It’s all his fault,” Calvin ground out through gritted teeth.

“How?” I asked softly.

“He’s the one who got her hooked. We met him at a party some stupid work friend of hers threw, and he gave her a ‘free sample.’ It was all downhill from there. We had a life, a family, and now . . . now I have nothing.” He collapsed into the nearest chair, burying his face in his hands.

“You have Martha,” I reminded him gently.

“But he killed her!”

“And my sister.” My anger left as quickly as it had arrived. A cold, calculating need for revenge filled the void it left.

I never even thought about the decision. In that moment, I knew I was going to tell Delveccio that I’d kill Jose Garcia.

“I
’M GOING TO
kill him,” I told Patrick as Doomsday clambered into the back of his truck du jour. This one was forest green and smelled . . . delish.

Patrick waited until I’d climbed inside, before inquiring mildly, “Aren’t you going to put on your seat belt?”

As soon as I’d clicked my safety belt, he handed me a brown paper bag that smelled heavenly.

“What is it?” I asked, momentarily forgetting my need for revenge as I was overcome by the aroma of fresh-cooked food that hadn’t come out of a microwave.

“Dinner.”

“Me feed. Me feed,” Doomsday whined piteously.

“Okay, okay, big fella,” Patrick said, reaching behind us and rubbing the Doberman’s snout. “I didn’t forget about you.”

“She’s a girl,” I reminded him as I opened up the bag and pulled out a sandwich wrapped in aluminum foil. Shredded lettuce and chopped tomatoes fell into my lap, but I didn’t care. I took a giant bite.

“This isn’t a burger,” I said through my mouthful of food. Aunt Susan would have been appalled by my lack of manners.

“No.” Patrick chuckled, pulling another brown bag out and rummaging in it. “It’s a falafel. It won’t kill you to eat some vegetables. Don’t you like it?”

Considering that Patrick had bought me more meals in the short time I’d known him than all the other men I knew had in the past three years, I didn’t think it was right to complain. “It’s . . . interesting.”

“Did you bring the lizard?”

“No. Should I have?”

“No, but I thought maybe you’d bring him along for luck. I mean, you did bring it to a hit.” He tossed a piece of something that looked suspiciously like steak to the dog.

She gobbled it up greedily.

“You got me vegetables and the mutt a steak?” I asked incredulously.

“It’s lamb.”

Doomsday grinned at me. “Good. Good.”

“How come she gets lamb and I get . . . this?”

“Because she’s a good dog who is stuck eating dry kibble and you’re a grown woman who seems to subsist on microwavable meals, olives, and fast food. You should take better care of yourself.”

“I—”

“You,” he interrupted, “can do whatever you choose, but that doesn’t mean that
I
need to enable your self-destructive habits.” He tossed another piece of lamb to Doomsday.

Scolded, I slouched in my seat and concentrated on polishing off my sandwich.

Patrick pulled the truck out of the parking space and pulled onto the road. “See that blue Camaro up there? Keep your eyes on it.”

“That’s a car, right?”

“It’s not just a car, it’s a classic.”

“So that means it’s old, right?” I leaned forward, squinting. “Why didn’t you just say, ‘See that old car up there’? Then I would have known what you were talking about.”

“So you see it?”

“Yup. What’s important about it?”

“Nothing.”

I turned to glare at him. “So why the hell are you having me watch it?”

“It’s part of a lesson.”

“What kind of lesson?”

“How to tail someone. In our business it’s helpful to know how to follow someone.”

“I think I can handle that,” I groused. “How hard can it be?”

“Where’d it go?” he asked with deceptive mildness.

I looked back at the road. We were approaching an intersection. The old blue car was nowhere in sight. My mouthful of falafel got stuck in my throat. “I don’t know.”

Patrick sighed his disappointment.

“Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Sigh at me.”

Patrick slid a sideways glance in my direction as he pulled onto a side street. “Sighing is off limits now?”

“Sighing is the universal symbol for
Maggie’s a screw-up
.” The sharpness of my tone made Doomsday whine.

“Or,” he replied calmly, “it’s a sign that Patrick’s had a bad day.”

“You had a bad day too?” Here I’d been all wrapped up in my problems and the man beside me had endured an equally bad day. Maybe worse, since I’d never heard him complain before. “What happened?”

He shrugged.

I opened my mouth to ask why he’d bothered to bring it up if he didn’t want to talk about it, when I spotted the old, blue car, pulling into a driveway. “There it is! The Canary!”

“Camaro, it’s a Camaro, not a Canary.” He drove past the classic. “Nice job spotting it.”

“Nice enough that it warrants you telling me why you had a bad day?”

A faint smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “My daughter’s mother wants to move to California.”

“Oh.” I mean what do you say to a guy when he tells you that his wife, who isn’t really his wife since he’s already married to someone else, is leaving him?

“She’s found someone else. She’s been seeing an old friend from Iraq and apparently they’re going to get married.”

“Oh.” Was I supposed to say I was sorry to hear that?

“I’m happy for her. She’s never been happy here . . . or with me.”

The sadness in his voice had Doomsday licking the back of his ear.

Reaching back, he rubbed her head affectionately. “I’m happy for her, but Daria, our daughter, is freaking out. The moment she found out her mom is moving across the country she burst into tears and threatened to drop out of school. She called me a dozen times today.” He dragged his hand down his face, signaling his frustration. “There’s nothing I can do to make this better for her. All these years trying to protect her and it’s her mom who knocks her world off its axis. I’m at a loss.”

“Understandable,” I murmured. “Does her mother want her to go with her?”

He shook his head. “She understands that Daria’s life is here. She wants her to visit and to go to the wedding, but she doesn’t expect her to move there.”

We rode in silence for a few moments. We didn’t appear to be tailing anyone. I finished my sandwich.

Finally he said, “So, why did you have a bad day?”

“I met the husband of the woman who killed Theresa.”

Patrick let out a low whistle.

Doomsday thumped her stump of a tail against the door.

“How’d that happen?”

“He came to the hospital looking for me.”

“Why?”

“He wanted my forgiveness.”

“Fat chance of that,” Patrick muttered.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked sharply.

Patrick glanced at me, an emotion I couldn’t identify flickering in the depths of his green gaze. “You do like to nurse your grudges.”

“So you think I can’t be empathetic toward a man who’s looking for forgiveness?”

Instead of answering me, Patrick eased over to the side of the road, parking beneath a streetlight. He twisted in his seat so that he faced me.

My stomach flipped nervously. I had the sudden urge to open my door and run from the truck.

As though he heard my thoughts, he caught my left wrist in his hand, gently trapping me.

Swallowing hard, I looked down at where our bodies met, wondering if he could feel how my pulse had sped up. I tried to tug away, but his fingers tightened, not painfully, just determinedly, on my skin.

“Do you believe in forgiveness?” he asked softly.

I looked up at him in surprise. The moment he’d touched me I’d forgotten what we’d been discussing.

He watched me with that quiet intensity of his that made me feel both special and frightened. My mouth went dry.

“Do you believe in forgiveness?” he prompted.

“Do you?”

He tilted his head to the side, considering the question. “It depends on whether it’s deserved.”

“Agreed.”

“Really?” His tone indicated he didn’t believe me.

Afraid of what he might see with his searching gaze, I turned away to look out the passenger window. Quite the trick considering he still held my wrist.

The only sound in the truck was Doomsday’s panting.

I heard Patrick expel a long breath. “I shouldn’t have pushed you.”

“You shouldn’t do a lot of things,” I snapped, tugging my wrist for emphasis.

He let go immediately. I tried not to think about how much I missed the contact.

“So you want to kill him?” Patrick asked, retreating to a safe topic of conversation. Murder was that between us. “The husband?”

“No.” I turned so that I was facing him again. “Garcia.”

“I thought you were on the fence about him. And after a little digging and seeing that he was married to your aunt, I understand why. Delveccio can find someone else for the job.”

“I don’t want anyone else,” I insisted. “I want to do it.”

The venom in my tone made Doomsday whine.

Patrick’s gaze narrowed. “Why the change of heart?”

“The husband.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Revenge.”

Patrick frowned. “I’m still lost.”

“The husband told me that Garcia got his wife hooked on drugs, so really it’s his fault that Theresa’s dead. Now he’s got to pay.”

I hadn’t realized I was yelling until Patrick winced.

“That’s a really bad idea,” he said quietly.

“Why?”

“Because . . .” He turned away, staring out the windshield, choosing his words with care. “Revenge never gets you what you want, and being this emotionally involved in a job multiplies the chances of you screwing up and getting caught.”