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She turned to me, suddenly, “This one’s a keeper. You hold onto him. I don’t believe I caught your name?”
Smooth. No, I hadn’t told her my name during my earlier visit to the boutique. I imagined she’d already asked half the town trying to gain that information to no avail.
“Elodie,” I said, forcing an artificial smile that didn’t seem to come as naturally to me as it did to Shannon.
Before June could intrude further, the waiter rematerialized with Shannon’s card and receipt. He signed and added a tip, then stood.
“Well, Mrs. Privet, I’ll see you at the next town meeting, after we return from Thailand.”
“I hope you’re bringing Miss...”
Damn, she did not let up.
“Evans,” Shannon supplied. Not my real last name.
“Elodie Evans, yes we do hope to see her at the meeting.”
Shannon navigated the social etiquette of disentangling ourselves from the curious Mrs. Privet, and we made our way out to the car.
“I don’t think you should have given her your real first name. It’s too uncommon,” he said.
“I was put on the spot. What was I supposed to do? Besides, if I’m going to live here, it makes little sense to give a fake name I won’t remember to answer to. It’s not likenobodyhas my name. Besides, if somebody did remember it, they probably remembered it wrong. They probably think my name is Melody. People called me Melody all the time.”
Shannon was quiet as he started the car and we pulled out onto the road. Finally, he said, “I’m just careful. You know that.”
“I like that about you.” I’m not sure why that popped out of my mouth. It just felt like the thing to say. Ididlike that about him. It made me feel safe because he always thought of everything. I felt as though nothing could ever thwart or harm me while Shannon was around thinking so many steps ahead, always on high alert.
There was a little moment between us that I can’t quite describe—as if he were trying to determine if he should acknowledge that I’d said I liked something about him.
Apparently deciding against it, he instead said, “I hope you know, she’s going to Google you the moment she gets home. Let’s hope if there’s an Elodie Evans, she proves interesting. But not too much.”
10
Afew days later, Shannon had worked out all the logistics of killing Professor Stevens and had agreed to let me join him. He left a large amount of food and water out for the white cat and left all the toilet seats in the house up in case she knocked her water over. For someone with no soul to speak of, he had grown skilled at caring for small animals.
We pulled out of his driveway all packed, at eight that morning. He made it a point to drive through the middle of town to wave at Mrs. Privet. She waved back from behind her shop window, a dreamy smile on her face.
It occurred to me that June Privet was now part of Shannon’s alibi should something go wrong. I wondered how else he’d secured his Thailand alibi. I was sure he must know someone overseas who would claim he was there, helping bring clean water to some poor village. What a saint. He probably had a whole back story. Without a lot of tedious emotional baggage and drama to deal with, Shannon had lots of mental space to concoct all sorts of alibis and backup plans for every possible contingency.
Though I reminded myself it was just a contingency. Shannon planned things too well to have need of any of them. We couldn’t fly with the weapons, airport security being what it was. He told me that when he did big jobs overseas, he was sent by private plane. There was nobody bankrolling this job but Shannon, so we wouldn’t be flying private, though a part of me thought we probably could if he really wanted to.
I was sure he had a stockpile of money hoarded away somewhere. He lived nice, but modestly and didn’t appear to own anything too extravagant. But I knew being a contract killer wasn’t like being an accountant. There was some big money sitting around somewhere. It was possible that Shannon only did enough work to keep him in a modest comfortable lifestyle, but I had begun to be able to see the itch creep over him. It seemed increasingly likely to me that he took nearly any job that came his way just so he could feel like a normal person for short stretches of time and convince the rest of the world of the same.
It took nearly a week—with stops at night to sleep—for us to reach our destination on the other end of the country. I hoped my plants would be okay. Most of them could go a while between waterings without freaking out, but I was still concerned. I couldn’t help it. I’d say it was an occupational hazard if I’d ever gotten the chance to use my schooling in an actual occupation.
Every night during our journey, Shannon stopped at a run-down motel in some out of the way place, just before the front desk closed for the night. He always went in. I stayed outside. He always paid cash, and I was sure he was using a fake ID. Just like that first night, he always got a room around the back, away from any possible passing traffic, and backed the car into the parking space so the license wasn’t visible to anyone else who drove around for a secluded room in the back.
The primary difference in these nightly stops was that he didn’t seem paranoid if I took a longish shower. He no longer assumed I was fashioning weapons out of bathroom pipes, and he didn’t tie me up for the night. Well, he did one night, but that was sex games, and it wasn’t as if he made me sleep like that.
On Professor Stevens’ Day of Reckoning, we arrived at our destination a little after midnight. The Professor lived a few blocks from the university campus in a heavily wooded neighborhood. It was a full moon, but the moon was obscured by thick cloud cover, making the street even darker than it would normally be. There were no street lights on Professor Stevens’ street, which was just fine for our purposes.
Shannon backed the car into an unlocked empty garage at a house two doors down with afor salesign in the front. He’d done meticulous research. Even if the garage had been shut and locked, we could have still parked close enough to the abandoned house—given that there was a high row of hedges beside the house that allowed cover. But happily, the garage was open.
I thought it was dangerous doing this so close to the campus, but Shannon reasoned that if Stevens was able to commit sexual assault here and get away with it, that it was as good a place as any to kill him. And Stevens did have that horrible basement he’d taken me to. Of course Shannon was right, but I still looked over our shoulders from the front porch, paranoid someone would come up the path. But it was late on a weekday. Surely everyone was asleep already.
Shannon rang the bell, dragging Professor Stevens out of what must have been a sound sleep from the bleary-eyed grumpiness that answered the door. Shannon had instructed me to wait behind the bush until he was inside. So when the door opened, a strange man dressed in black was all the professor saw on the darkened porch.
“This better be good,” he snarled at Shannon.
