Vengeance(27)
“I do,” she said. “It’s in the kitchen. Do you want to come with me?”
“No, I’m good here.”
She started to take a step and stopped. She jerked a thumb toward the kitchen. “May I?”
“What?” he said. “Yeah, sure.”
She felt his eyes on her as she crossed the family room to the kitchen. She had no reason to think he had, in fact, turned to watch her go, but she felt it all the same. In the kitchen, her purse was where she’d left it, on one of the high bar stools, and she took the envelope from it, the envelope she’d been instructed to leave in the ivy at the base of the wall by the entrance gate on her way out. But she’d never gone out.
“You cook?” He stood in the doorway, in the portico they’d designed to look like porticos in Tuscan kitchens.
“Me? No. No.” She brought him the envelope.
He took it from her with a courteous nod. “Thank you.” He looked around the room. “This is a hell of a kitchen for someone who doesn’t cook.”
“Well, no, it’s for the chef.”
“Oh, the chef. Well, there you go then. Makes sense again. I always wanted one of those hanging-pot things. And those pots, what’re they — copper?”
“Some of them, yeah.”
He nodded and seemed impressed. He walked back into the family room and stuffed the envelope into the pocket of his cargo shorts. He took a seat by the hearth and smiled in such a way that she knew she was expected to take the seat across from him.
She did.
Directly behind him was an eight-foot-tall mirror in a marble frame that matched the marble of the hearth. She was reflected in it, along with the back of his head and the back of his chair. Her lower eyelids needed work. They were growing darker lately, deeper.
“What do you do for a living, Nicole?”
“I’m a homemaker.”
“So you make things?”
“No.” She chuckled.
“Why’s that funny?”
Her smile died in the mirror. “It’s not.”
“Then why’re you chuckling?”
“I didn’t realize I was.”
“You say you’re a homemaker; it’s a fair question to ask what you make.”
“I make this house,” she said softly, “a home.”
“Ah, I get it,” he said. He looked around the room for a moment and his face darkened. “No, I don’t. That’s one of those things that sounds good — I make the house a home — but is really bullshit. I mean, this doesn’t feel like a home, it feels like a fucking monument to, I don’t know, hoarding a bunch of useless shit. I saw your bedroom — well, one of them, one with the bed the size of Air Force One; that yours?”
She nodded. “That’s the master, yeah.”
“That’s the master’s? Okay.”
“No, I said —”
“Anyway, I’m up there thinking you could hold NFL combines in that room. It’s fucking huge. It ain’t intimate, that’s for sure. And homes, to me, always feel intimate. Houses, on the other hand — they can feel like anything.”
He pulled a handful of coins out of his pocket for some reason, shook them in his palm.
She glanced at the clock. “Lana’s expecting me.”
He nodded. “So you don’t have a job.”
“No.”
“And you don’t produce anything.”
“No.”
“You consume.”
“Huh?”
“You consume,” he repeated. “Air, food, energy” — he looked up at the ceiling and over at the walls —“space.”
She followed his gaze and when she looked back at him, the gun was out on his lap. It was black and smaller than she would have imagined and it had a very long suppressor attached to the muzzle, the kind hit men always used in movies like Grosse Pointe Blank or The Professional, the kind that went pffft when fired.
“I’m meeting Lana,” she said again.
“I know.” He shook the change in his hand once more and she looked closer, realized they weren’t coins at all. Some kind of small metal things that reminded her of snowflakes.
“Lana knows who you are.”
“She thinks she does, but she actually knew of another guy, the real Kineavy. See, they never met. Her father met him, but her father died — what — three years ago, after the stroke.”
Her therapist had taught her breathing exercises for tense situations. She tried one now. She took long slow breaths and tried to visualize their colors, but the only color that came up was red.
He plucked one of the metal snowflakes from his palm and held it between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. “So, Kineavy, I knew him well. He died too. About two years ago. Natural causes. And faux Kineavy — that’s me — sees no point in meeting most clients a second time, which suits them fine. What do you do, Mrs. Walford? What do you do?”