The Short List Page 2

  I breezed through the lobby of the hotel, and out the front door. There weren’t any cabs lined up outside, but I saw one half a block over and hailed it with a hearty whistle. And maybe I stuck my leg out, too. Just a little.

  The cabbie pulled up to a stop. I got in back, but left the door open. “Start the meter, but I’m waiting for someone.”

  “Sure thing, doll.” He smiled at me in the rearview mirror, his coffee-stained teeth looking yellow in the reflection of the streetlights.

  Doll?

  Normally, that would piss me off, but tonight was different. It was a strange night, and I was feeling it. Playing the sex kitten was actually a little bit...fun. And I might not be any threat to the legacy of Angelina Jolie, but I was a woman. And every woman can be sexy, right?

  You’re fucking right.

  3

  CAMERON

  As soon as I saw him slide off the bar stool, I jumped up to beat him to the men’s room. I banged the table with my knee, knocked over my brand new beer. A trio of co-workers at the table next to me stopped their conversation and gave me annoyed over-the-shoulder stares, but I didn’t have time to apologize. I had a man to kill.

  I must have looked like I had the runs while I hot-footed it to the bathroom. I got there only a few steps ahead of Mr. Swiss, but he got held up in the short hallway outside the john by a pair of backslapping ex-frat types. It gave me just enough cushion.

  In the bathroom were two stalls, two urinals and two sinks. No people. So far, so good.

  I knew he had to go into a stall to change into the underpants, all part of the plan. So I ducked into the first stall and shut the door. In my jacket pocket was the wire. A palm-sized wooden handle on each end, piano wire stretched between. I always wondered what note that string played, but I’d never found out.

  I unspooled the garrote and gripped it in both hands. A public place like this was fraught with way too many dangers. Trying to get away after gunshots was simply not on the list of smart options. So a silent kill was necessary. I wondered if we weren’t so hard up for cash if I’d take the same risks this job proposed.

  Soon after I had the weapon in both hands I heard the door open, the music getting momentarily louder and then being muffled again. The band playing over the speakers was Boston. Being played in the city of Boston. Weird. The last song this guy would ever hear.

  I followed the sound of his footsteps on the tile as he passed by my stall and entered the open one next to me. I heard his belt unbuckle, pants drop. All normal bathroom sounds.

  I gave him a second more, then put a foot up on the toilet, no lid, only a U-shaped seat. Kicking in the door to his stall was an approach I’d considered, but it was loud, would make the space cramped, and then left the kill on view for the next visitor when the job was done. To get to him while the door was still locked meant he wouldn’t be found until the cleaning crew after last call.

  I raised up slowly and peeked over the top, my feet balancing on the plastic toilet seat. From what I knew about this guy, he’d probably like being spied on while he dressed in women’s panties. If there was a glory hole between these two stalls, I bet I could get him to blow me.

  I saw the top of his head and a pronounced bald spot. There was a ring of sweat stain on the back collar of his white shirt. His head was down as he pulled on the lace number Bricks had given him. I reached over with the loop of wire and aimed it at his neck.

  As the thin piano string passed in front of his eyes his head jerked up and I yanked. Before he could turn his head up and see me, I had him in a noose of metal. I pulled hard, getting my elbows up to the top of the wall between stalls. He was thrashing now, his legs kicking in stunted half-kicks since the panties were around his ankles.

  His fingers dug at his neck, searching for the wire and an inch of space he could wedge himself into to ease the pressure, but there was none to be found. The wire dug deep in the folds of his neck, swallowed by flesh and starting to cut. I gave an upward jerk, sweat forming on my face as I grimaced with the effort. I realized I had been holding my breath and I let out a loud exhale. Only after I did it did I realize what a mocking gesture it was—loudly showing off all the air I could get in and out of my lungs.

  His elbows banged the metal walls between our cubicles. Sputters of the last air in his throat and mouth burst out. Then I was falling.

  My foot was wet. My wrist screamed in pain. I’d let one foot slide off the toilet seat and land in the bowl. My right arm was stretched out, my wrist painfully wrenched over the top of the stall as I held onto the loop of wire for dear life—and to end his.

  I lifted my foot out, only to have my other foot splash in its place. Looking down I could see in the gap under the stalls that his feet had left the ground. My body weight falling had lifted him.

  I rescued my other foot and had to step down onto the floor to reposition myself. My arms ached as I strained to keep hold of the garrote. Blood began pouring to the floor on his side of the wall. The wire had broken through.

  The Swiss man’s struggles stopped almost immediately. The blood came down quickly, like he was pissing away a night’s worth of beer and missing the bowl.

  I stood on the toilet seat again, easing up for a second on the wire. His body slipped and his feet touched ground. By the time I stood tall and tightened my grip again I realized I was holding dead weight.

  I didn’t hear the door open, but the music got louder. “More Than a Feeling.”

  “Hold on, I gotta take a wicked piss.”

  So I knew he was a local. Good news was he sounded alone. I slid as far back to the tiled wall of the bathroom as I could to keep my arms draped over the divider out of sight from the man headed for a urinal. I didn’t want to let the Swiss man drop. The sound would be a giveaway, plus he might slip a leg out from under the stall door or something.

  The muscles in my forearms burned. First from the strangulation, now the holding of a two-hundred-pound carcass of prime Swiss meat. Sweat dripped into my eyes but my hands were clawed onto the wooden handles of the wire loop and couldn’t help me.

  Piss hit the porcelain basin of the urinal outside the stalls, and this was indeed a wicked one. He kept going and going like he hadn’t seen a bathroom in a week.

  I grunted. Couldn’t help it. Still, not entirely out of place sound in a toilet stall.

  The fountain of urine outside continued to fall.

  My foot slipped again. I splashed into the bowl a third time. He had to have heard it, even over the sounds of his racehorse piss.

  “Jesus, buddy,” he said. The beer might’ve been leaving his body, but it had already made its way to his brain. He sounded drunk and had to laugh at me.

  “Don’t get the chowder,” I said, though I skipped trying to do the accent—chowdah. He laughed at that too, then started to wrap things up quickly, I assumed to head off the massive cloud of stink he thought would soon be emanating from my stall. Score one for my slippery foot.

  He set off the flusher and left the room without washing his hands, and for that I was grateful. As soon as the music settled back into the pillow-over-the-ears muffle, I let the Swiss man fall. The sound of his body collapsing, banging against the toilet bowl, echoed off the tile and mirror walls.

  I sat down on the toilet and panted for breath. My hands were frozen in a claw-fingered grip. I’d let one side of the wire loose and the other end dangled from my left hand, the wire slick with blood. On the tile floor between the stalls the pool of blood had found its way to the drain set in an indent in the floor, there to catch piss from those too drunk to aim well.

  I bent down and gave his legs a shove, pushing his body into the stall so no part of him hung out. I evaluated my work. Not good enough. If someone bent down to look, they’d see him in a heap. Probably see the blood too.

  I took off my jacket and hung it on the little hook there. First time in my life, I think, I’d ever used one of those things. I got down on the floor and slid under, hurrying since I knew there was more than one guy in the bar with a wicked piss in him.

  My shirt got streaked with blood as I passed from one stall to the other. Fresh blood was probably not the worst thing my shirt picked up under there. Working fast I got him seated on the toilet and balanced so he’d stay. Up close, I saw the damage my wire had done. A ragged line was torn across his neck, blood and strings of flesh like the torn hem of a garment. His eyes were a maze of burst blood vessels, his tongue swollen and purple, wouldn’t fit in his mouth. Worst of it all were the little black panties he wore.

  I slid back under, coating more of my shirt in blood and urine, who knows what else. The door opened again just as I got under into my own stall. I stood, wiped sweat off my forehead with a wad of toilet paper, and pulled my jacket on over my bloodstained shirt.

  I unlocked the stall door and almost forgot to flush. Gotta keep up the illusion.

  I, too, left without washing my hands.

  Outside I found Bricks waiting in a cab, as planned. I slid in next to her and it took her a second to realize all had not gone smoothly.

  “What the—”

  “Don’t ask,” I said.

  4

  BRICKS

  I made it through the cab ride back to our hotel without a word. Cam was fidgety next to me, but I’d gotten to know him well enough to know what kind of fidget it was. He had a few. There was the worried about the business fidget, which involved pacing and lots of talking. His pre-game fidget was actually pretty minimal, usually just a little bit of knee twitching and silence. Of course, I was very familiar with the Tia fidget, which was all over the map, but always included biting his upper lip. I’ve grown attached to the guy, but the way he frets about that girlfriend of his? Crazy.

  This ki
nd of fidgeting fit none of the above, though. And it wasn’t the euphoric, triumphant, we are so bad-ass reaction he sometimes had when we finished a job. I hadn’t seen this one in a while. Not since our ad hoc partnership started, when it was the first of his idiosyncrasies that I learned.

  No, this one was his I fucked up fidget.

  I casually looked him over during the cab ride. I didn’t see any obvious injuries on his face or hands. I couldn’t see any blood on his clothing, either, but his shoes were sopping wet.

  What the hell? Did he dance in the fucking toilets or what?

  I kept my mouth closed. At the hotel, I paid the cab driver, along with enough of a tip to make him happy but not remember us. Once we stepped onto the curb, Cam headed straight for the front door of the hotel. I caught up to him as he entered the lobby and snaked my arm around his.

  “Let’s hit the bar,” I said.

  His eyes widened in surprise, and he glanced down at where our arms were linked. “Uh...Bricks, I...I, uh, don’t know if...”

  I scowled. Seriously, does every man’s first thought go to sex?

  Stupid question.

  “For Christ’s sake, relax,” I told him. “I just want to talk.”

  “Oh.” He gave me a weak, worried grin.

  I ignored him and strode through the door to the lounge. Without a word, I guided us to a table in the corner and nudged him toward the chair. Then I flopped into the seat with my back to the wall. The bartender wasn’t busy but he seemed oblivious to us.

  I took off my jacket and motioned for Cam to do the same. I didn’t want him thinking this was going to end in five minutes. We were going to be there long enough to have a drink and talk.

  He shook his head.

  “Cam? Lose the jacket.”

  Head shake, a little more forcefully.

  “What is this Seinfeld shit? Take off your jacket and stay a few minutes. Christ.”

  He shook his head again.

  “Suit yourself,” I muttered. I rooted around in my purse for a tissue but couldn’t find one. I used the napkin wrapped around my silverware to wipe the whorish shade of lipstick off. I could feel Cam watching me. His nervous tension hadn’t dissipated. I balled up the napkin and gave him an even stare. “You want to tell me what happened?”

  He looked down at the table and sighed. Then he looked back up at me. “I did the job, Bricks. Swiss Man is dead. We’re getting paid.”

  “He was German.”

  “What?”

  “The target. He was—”

  “Something to drink?” A waiter appeared to my left and I’d been so focused on Cam that I didn’t see him approach and was surprised. My immediate inclination was to put him into a wrist lock and take him to his knees but I resisted. He was just a waiter, after all, and I was mad.

  “Two beers,” Cam ordered. “Whatever light you have on draft.”

  The waiter slinked away, and now I was irritated with Cam for ordering for me.

  I took a deep breath.

  Stop acting like a chick.

  Cam was about to say something but I held up my hand to stop him. “You want to explain why you’re acting like you just did a rehash of Slaughterhouse?”

  His face fell at the nickname. “It...it wasn’t like that.”

  “Yes, it was. I know your fidgets.”

  “My what?”

  I waved off his question. “Spill.”

  He glanced left and right for anyone nearby, then leaned in. “Like I said, I took care of it. The Swiss guy—”

  “German, I said.”

  He gave me an odd look. “How do you know that?”

  “I sat with Mr. Sauerkraut for half an hour, listening to his bullshit. He’s from Dusseldorf.”

  He stared at me. “Okaaaaaay. Swiss, German, why does that matter?”

  I pushed up the sleeve of my blouse, showing him the marbled scars on my left forearm. “That’s why.”

  He stared at the scar tissue for a little while. That irritated me, too, so I dropped my arm and pushed the sleeve forward again.

  Jesus. Did anything not rub me wrong tonight?

  “Which one was that?” Cam asked me quietly. His voice had a little boy quality to it, one that was genuine and unpretentious. Kinda sweet. It reminded me that I liked the guy. That he was a friend, which was something I didn’t have many of.

  Try none, if I’m being honest.

  And Cam was more than a friend. He wasn’t quite like a little brother, though I felt that way about him sometimes. Mostly, he was a good partner.

  And I was being a bitch.

  “Tommy Davenport,” I said, not meeting his gaze at first. Then I looked up at him. “He had a dog, pit bull with no vocal cords.”

  He gaped. “What the hell for?”

  “I’m not sure. He was guarding a stash. Or a bank, more likely. It doesn’t matter. The important part is this.” I waited a beat for emphasis, then said, “I walked into a situation with shit intel, and what happened was that things went to shit. That was no coincidence.”

  He nodded slowly, then stopped. “Wait. So you’re saying things went to shit on this one? Or that they went to shit because the Swiss guy was German?”

  “Neither. I’m saying I can tell something happened in the bathroom because you’re acting like Slaughterhouse over here. And I’m saying that details matter. We’ve got to stay on top of the intel, or things can go sideways. Will go sideways.”

  Cam was silent for a while. The waiter arrived with our beers and he turned his glass on the table without drinking any of it. He just stared into the amber liquid, his face somber. Finally, he sighed and shrugged. “What can I say, Bricks? Some guys are good at sports, some are lucky at cards, and some guys get the babes. Me? I get the job done, and it always gets messy.”

  “That what happened in the bathroom?”

  “Yeah, kinda.”

  “How?”

  “He bled a lot. That’s why I kept my jacket on. I got blood on my shirt.”

  “How much?”

  “Streaks, I think. It’s on my back.”

  “On your back? What the hell?”

  So he told me the story. How the garrote cut deep. How Konrad from Dusseldorf bled like a stuck schwein. Holding up the dead weight while some Southie took a “wicked piss.” And then going under the stall to prop Konrad up on the toilet.

  He told the whole thing without touching his beer, and I listened without touching mine.

  “I really need a shower,” he said when he’d finished.

  “And we gotta lose those clothes.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “You keep hitting on me, partner, and I’m either going to take you up on it or file sexual harassment charges.”

  “Cut it,” I said. “You aren’t suave enough to pull off a line like that. Besides, you’re not my type.”

  I caught another look from him before he looked down at the beer in front of him. It was the loud question that occasionally popped up in our friendship but went unasked. Which was good, because I wasn’t answering it. The last person to ask me about my love life was Bruno Taggliarti, one of Don Giordano’s thugs. He was obsessed about whether I liked men or women and took every opportunity to be obnoxious about it. He was obnoxious about everything else, too, but especially that.

  He stopped being obnoxious, though. For good.

  Regarding his fixation, though, my thought on the matter was simple. Whose business was it? And in the grand scheme of things, why did it matter?

  But it seemed to matter to some people. More than it should. And I knew Cam wanted to ask, but he also knew better than to do so. It’s not that I feel particularly secretive about that part of my life. It’s that I feel particularly secretive about all of my life. Yeah, Cam was part of that life, but he was on a need to know basis. For that matter, he didn’t know what I named the cactus I bought last week, either.

  Like I said, a need to know basis.

  I let the awkward moment pass. That was the nice thing about Cam. There were sometimes awkward moments, but they all passed pretty quickly.

  Cam sat glumly staring into his beer again. Telling the story seemed to have brought him down. I reached for my beer and raised it in a toast. “To finishing the job.”