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But to listen to Detective Marissa Hardy, I was the one behind this entire charade. I had someone out there pretending to be Brie to persuade Hardy, once and for all, that I had done nothing to harm my wife.
I was more confused now than I’d been all day. I was starting to wonder whether Brie really had returned, and was running a game on all of us.
And maybe that’s why my frustration level soared right up into the red, clouding my eyes with a bloody mist, but not so much that I couldn’t see the hammer atop my worktable. I grabbed it and swung it like a madman, over and over again, into the wood surface, leaving shallow, quarter-sized dents. The table shook so badly that a couple glass jars of nails slipped off the edge and hit the cement floor with a crash, nails and bits of glass scattering all over the place.
I thought I had my life together.
Yeah, well, not so fast, pal.
Twenty-Three
Truth be told, Matt Beekman was already feeling anxious and unsettled about this current assignment before he got the call, out of nowhere, concerning a problem with a previous job.
This latest gig had taken him all the way up to Hartford. Not that he hadn’t gone out of town before. About a year ago, there was a job that took him a few hundred miles away to Buffalo. In fact, that had been the last one he’d done before this. It wasn’t that Matt liked to space them out. It was more that this type of work didn’t come to him as often as he would have liked. He figured he only got the call when the A-list guys were busy. Pissed him off, but what could you do?
So when someone did have work for him, he jumped on it. He could always use the extra cash. Running the laundromat was keeping him and Tricia afloat, barely, but something unexpected was always coming up. Like when their fifteen-year-old fridge conked out last month. Beekman was pretty handy—he did most of the servicing of the washers and dryers at his business—but the old Frigidaire was toast. And Tricia was making noises about the kids needing new shoes. And had he noticed, she’d asked him the other day at breakfast, that their son Curtis’s two front teeth were sticking out, like maybe he was going to have buck teeth? They needed to get him to an orthodontist pronto for a consult.
Jesus fucking Christ, he thought. It’s always something.
So, a cash infusion was certainly welcome. A satisfactory outcome on this job would cover the fridge and maybe even the dental work.
The target’s name was Glenn Ford. No shit, just like the actor from years ago, the one who played Superman’s adoptive dad, Pa Kent, in the first Christopher Reeve movie. Not that many people today even knew who Glenn Ford was. Anyway, this Glenn Ford guy was a witness in a murder trial that was about to get under way. There’d been a little war between rival biker gangs around New Haven, and this Ford guy was some poor schlub who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and saw Wilson “Banger” Smith, from gang number one, shoot Delbert “Snooker” Bundy, from gang number two, right in the head.
Happened out front of a KFC, in the parking lot. Ford had just picked up a bucket of chicken and a side of slaw and was sitting behind the wheel of his Nissan Pathfinder. The windows were tinted dark enough that Wilson had taken no notice of him, but when the police showed up, Ford, a civic-minded individual—the dumbass—told them everything he had seen, providing not only a detailed description of Wilson, but the license plate number from his getaway car, which happened to be his wife’s Toyota Prius, she being more environmentally conscious than your average biker’s spouse.
Anyway, the state’s entire case rested on the testimony of Mr. Glenn Ford, so Wilson, through some of his associates, had put in a call to Matt to take care of things for him. Ordinarily he might have asked one of his biker buddies to do it, but the police were watching all of them pretty closely.
There was ten grand in it for Matt, so he said, “Okay.” Shit, if he’d been offered three he’d have done it.
The police hadn’t exactly hidden Ford away, although they’d taken some precautions. The first was the aforementioned surveillance of Wilson’s associates, the ones the cops believed were the most likely to do him harm. But the cops had also suggested Ford get the heck out of New Haven until the trial was over.
Ford was a writer who didn’t have to clock in to some factory or office every day from nine to five, so he could pretty much do his job from anyplace. Easy for him, but harder for his wife, who worked in a chiropractor’s office. But she opted to take a break from work and the two of them went to live with her sister, who had a nanny’s apartment in her basement and, as luck would have it, no longer any need for a nanny.
Ford and his wife had been pretty circumspect about their new living arrangement, but the bikers had gotten a tip from someone—didn’t much matter to Matt who it might have been—and were able to supply Matt with an address.
Matt had driven up to Hartford a couple of times to scope out the situation, get a sense of Ford’s routine. He felt there was a lot riding on this one. Do the job right, maybe more work would be coming his way. The wife left the house around eight every morning to go for a run that usually took about an hour, which was more than enough time to slip inside and kill Ford, but there was always the risk she might come back early, and then Matt would have to do her, as well. Then there was the issue of Ford’s sister-in-law, who lived in another part of the house. This whole thing could go south in a hurry if he wasn’t careful.
Ford and the missus left the house together midmorning to go to a local coffee shop. Weather permitting, they’d grab a table outside and chat while they sipped lattes and dipped biscotti. Again, not terribly helpful.
But in the evening, Ford liked to take a solitary contemplative walk, probably figuring out what he would write the next day. Matt didn’t know a lot about writers, but he figured they had to do a lot of thinking. Ford’s walk took him through a wooded area of a nearby park. And on the other side of the woods was a road where Matt could park his car.
Perfect.
So on his third trip to Hartford, Matt was ready. He dressed himself as a jogger—sneakers, track pants, T-shirt, iPod strapped to his arm with a wire running up to buds tucked into his ears—and timed it so he was running down the path through the wooded area as Ford was strolling along in the other direction.
No one else on the path.
When they were about thirty feet apart, Matt pretended to stumble, as though he had tripped on a lace, and went down.
“Shit!” he said.
And as he’d expected, Ford closed the distance, knelt down, and asked, “You okay?”
Which was when Matt took a mini-can of mace and sprayed it into Ford’s face. Ford let out a yelp as the mist blinded him, but he didn’t make noise for long. Matt made a fist and drove it into the man’s temple hard enough to render him unconscious. Then all he had to do was drag him into the bushes and finish him off, which he accomplished by straddling Ford and holding one hand over the man’s mouth while pinching his nose shut with the other.
Matt didn’t know quite how to explain it, but he liked this part. Was fascinated by it.
He’d be the first to admit he didn’t spend a lot of time pondering the mysteries of the universe, but he was intrigued by that moment when a living thing stopped being a living thing, and the power one felt at making that moment happen.
