Vengeance(26)

This past week, Alan had been surprisingly attentive, asking her if everything was okay, if there was anything she wanted, was she feeling under the weather, she seemed tense, anything he could do for her?

They’d fucked twice, once in the bed at the end of the day, but once on the kitchen counter — the same counter he was leaning against now — good and lusty and erotic, Alan talking dirty into her right ear. For a full ten minutes after he’d come, she’d sat on the counter and considered calling the whole thing off.

Now, only an hour (or four) away from ending her husband’s life, her heart pounded up through the veins in her neck, the blood roared in her ear canals, and she thought there might still be time to call it off. She could just run upstairs and grab the number of Kineavy’s burner cell and end this madness.

Alan burped. He held up a hand in apology. “Where you going again?”

She’d told him about a hundred times.

“There’s an art fair in Sherborn.”

Drops of sweat fell from his shorts and plopped onto the floor.

“Art fair? Bunch of lesbos selling shit they painted in their attics from the backs of Subarus?”

“Anyway,” she said, “we won’t be all day or anything.”

He nodded. “Cable guy’s coming when?”

She let out a slow breath, looked at the floor.

“I’m just asking. Christ.”

She nodded at the floor, her arms folded. She unfolded them and looked up, gave him a tight smile. “Between ten and two.”

He smiled. Alan had a movie-star-wattage smile. Sometimes, if he put his big almond eyes behind it, tilted his chin just so, she could feel her panties evaporate in a hushed puff of flame.

Maybe. Maybe . . .

“Don’t be all day with the lesbians, that’s all, okay? Money’s like rust — shit doesn’t sleep.” He winked at her. “Know what I’m saying, sister?”

She nodded.

Alan took another slug of orange juice and some of it spilled into his chest hairs. He dropped the bottle on the counter, cap still off. He pinched her cheek on his way out of the room.

Nah. Fucking time for you to go, Alan.



KINEAVY HAD BEEN very clear about the timeline.

She was to stay in the house until 9:45 to make sure Alan didn’t forget he was supposed to stick around for the cable guy, because Alan, for all his attention to detail when it came to money, could be absentminded to the edge of retardation when it came to almost anything else. She was to go out through the front door, leaving it unlocked behind her. Not open, mind you, just unlocked. At some point while she was out with Lana on a Bloody Mary binge at the bar down the street from the Sherborn Arts Fair, Alan would answer the front door and the cable guy would shoot him in the head.

Oh, Alan, she thought. You aren’t a bad guy. You just aren’t a good one.

She heard him coughing upstairs. He was probably sitting in the bathroom waiting for the shower to get hot, even though that took about four seconds in this McMansion. But Alan liked to turn the bathroom into a steam room. She’d come in after him, see his wipe marks all over the mirrors as her hair curled around her ears.

He coughed again, closer to the stairs now, and she thought, Terrific. Your last gift to me will be a cold. My fucking luck, it’ll turn into a sinus infection.

He was hacking up a lung by the sounds of it, so she left the kitchen and crossed the family room, which would remain an ironic description unless she hired the von Trapps to fill it. And even then there’d be room for one of the smaller African nations and a circus.

He stood at the top of the stairs, naked, coughing blood out of his mouth and onto his chest. He had one hand over the hole in his throat and he kept blinking and coughing, blinking and coughing, like he was pretty sure if he could just swallow whatever was stuck in his throat, this too would pass.

Then he fell. He didn’t make it all the way down the stairs — there were a lot of them — but he made it nearly halfway before his right foot got jammed between the balusters. Alan ended his life facedown and bare-assed, dangling like something about to be dipped.

Nicole realized she’d been screaming only when she stopped.

She heard herself say, “Oh, boy. Jesus. Oh, boy.”

Alan’s head had landed on the wood between the runner and the balustrade, and he’d begun to drip.

“Oh, boy. Wow.”

“You got my money?”

To her credit she didn’t whip around or let out a yelp. She turned slowly to face him. He stood a couple feet behind her in the family room. He looked every inch the suburban dad out on Saturday errands — light blue shirt untucked over wrinkled khaki cargo shorts, boat shoes on his feet.