The Good Kind of Bad (46 page)

We were travelling at speed. A highway. At least the car was still moving. At least there wasn’t soil in my mouth.

The pain was searing, like someone had bound my hands, veiled my face and punched me in the head, my breath hot and damp against the hat. Squirming and struggling felt like a token gesture for the piece, the cable tie only biting into my flesh as I did. For all that was out there, beyond the veil ahead of me, the fear was negotiable and the only thing I had left.

Were it not for my binds, the gentle rocking of the car as I lay over the back seats would have left me strangely serene. It could’ve been the sea, lapping the yacht Will and I would’ve hired in the Seychelles; it almost slipped my mind I was being driven to my death.

‘Finally. She wakes.’ Evan’s voice felt far away, like he was in another room.

With the hat over my eyes, my reply was little more than a murmur.

‘What’s that?’ he asked. ‘Say again?’

I felt the car swerve as Evan must’ve reached behind him, and it wasn’t long before I was unmasked. Through the window I glanced into a starless sky, the clouds sagging like water balloons. From the back of the car, the hum of the city and my soundtrack to the last few months was strangely muted. There were no horns, screeches or sirens crescendoing. Maybe I didn’t need the incidentals anymore.

With a face half-hidden in shadow, Evan smiled ever so slightly, his stare fixed on the nothingness ahead. I’d barely noticed the packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes tucked into the passenger seat pocket, barely realised this wasn’t Evan’s car at all.

‘Where are you taking me?’ My voice was raspy, like it was someone else’s. Shit, my head hurt.

‘Ah, you’re going to like it there. It’ll be like summer camp. There’re activities.’

‘I never went to summer camp.’

‘Wow. Sounds like one shitty childhood you had there. But we both know it wasn’t.’

‘Evan, tell me where we’re going,’ I croaked, covertly wrestling with the cable tie. I had to keep him talking until I could wrestle free. The bunch of cable ties stuck out of the rear seat pocket. I just had to snap my binds, reach for one, pin him to the seat by his neck and . . .

‘Want a clue where we’re headed? I’ve got a shovel in the trunk, and, if you’re lucky, I might even let you dig your own hole.’

I couldn’t tell if I was breathing. Maybe I wasn’t.

‘Let’s have some music. I can’t seem to shut you up tonight.’ Reaching to the radio and tuning the station to classical, Vaughan Williams seeped out between the darkness. ‘I’m more of a Beastie Boys kinda guy, but this’ll do. We’ve got a while before the woods. I’m up for some exposition. Don’t you want to know?’

‘Know what?’ I couldn’t stop my voice trembling. I was imagining the hole; imagining me in the hole. There had to be a way, to snap the cable tie before I was between the fallen branches and small ferns, in the hole Joe had recently vacated.

‘Hell, you’re going to die anyway. What does it matter if I tell you?’

As Evan’s eyes stared out from the mirror, glistening with excitement like a child’s at Christmas, I could see he’d been itching to tell me all about his macabre plan.

‘Okay, I’ve got a question for you. For ten points, is Joe dead, or did he survive that bullet to the chest?’

I didn’t answer. I wasn’t playing along with Evan’s stupid game.

‘Answer the goddamn question,’ Evan ordered, a gun nonchalantly pulled from his shoulder holster before he aimed it between the seats towards me. ‘Is. Joe. Dead?’

I kept my words to myself, concentrating on the binds, not the gun.

‘No comment? Nothing at all? Let me help. A gun filled with blanks, a guy on the floor covered in cow’s blood . . . Hate to break it to you, but you never saw him buried in that grave because, hell, he never was.’

Withdrawing the gun, Evan appeared to be waiting for me to compliment his brilliance. At least I knew he wouldn’t shoot me. I had this master plan to hear all about first.

Of course Joe wasn’t dead. Of course I’d seen him on the South Shore, taking Evan’s briefcase of money, though that Joe had been unrecognisable from our last embrace, so much so, I’d mistaken him for Mr F. Clean-shaven, and with his weight appearing to have halved, for the first time cheekbones had emerged from under his olive skin. The worn biker jacket had hung off his frame like there was nothing left of his sinewy outline. It was like he’d dissolved.

‘I hit Joe with 5-in-1 cartridges, honey. I shot him with blanks. He was wearing a blood pack. Joe never died. I never put him in the trunk of my car and never buried him in the hole. I wrapped a mannequin in the carpet and weighed it down with bags of flour. All that trouble, and you ran away? But then, what wife helps bury their murdered husband in a shallow grave? For sure, not a
nice
girl like you.’

My head was swimming. The carpet. The gun. Next, he’d be telling me Joe wasn’t an alcoholic.

‘I saw Joe,’ I said, not realising I’d spoken out loud.

Evan glowered at me in the mirror. ‘That’s it? That’s all you’ve got to say? I’m baring my soul here.’

‘Joe stood by the bed and smiled at me. At your apartment.’

‘Honey bunny, you were drugged up on Angel Dust, on PCP. Of course you thought he was a ghost back from the dead. Not literally I mean, not like he is now . . . never mind!’ he yelled, punching the steering wheel. After a long pause, he calmed his tone. ‘Forget what you know about your life.’

‘Because it’s a lie?’

He wagged a finger at me. ‘The dumb blonde
has
grown a brain. Not clever enough to see who Joe was before you married him though: a violent drunk you’d soon crave an escape from. Then who comes along but a good-looking cop? He’s generous and caring and promises to protect you from that evil husband of yours. Joe threatens to kill you with a knife ‒ Charlie ‒ and leaves, then when I pick you up outside your hotel, what do you know happens? Joe appears, kidnaps you, and then I shoot him. You’ve been saved
and
incriminated in one fell swoop.’

‘Incriminated?’

‘Joe is one of my snitches. He doesn’t mind ratting out his friends for a buck or two, and one night over too many beers, he tells me about the hot new wife he’s been burdened with.
What’s the catch,
I ask.
It was great, at first
, he says, falling over himself to convince a high-end chick he was more than UPS’s finest delivery boy. By the time he realises what the hell he’s done, you’re already hitched. At first I figure it’s another of Joe’s sob stories, until he made a fatal mistake, and told me your name. Believe me, you wouldn’t be tied up on the backseat of a car if he hadn’t. Ms A. Clarke, daughter of Howard Clarke, the once joint owner of a
successful
investment company right here in Chicago. Do you know who your daddy’s partner was all those years ago? A guy who was driven to drink himself to death. Michal Francis Thomasz. Your daddy’s partner was my father.’

Out on the highway, the lights began to blur. Everything began to blur.

‘Come on, honey. You’ve pieced it together by now, right? Mrs Petrozzi, tied up on the back seat, what was the name of the company?’

I expelled one long breath. ‘T&C Associates. Thomasz and Clarke.’

Evan clapped his way through twenty seconds before grinning like the Joker. ‘Overnight, Howard, his beautiful wife and cute little daughter disappear, along with the ten million dollars my pa and your pa siphoned from the Great American Public.
Ten
million. Everything they stole. I was twenty-one, fresh out of the Academy and scared shitless with a gun on my belt. I had more to worry about than a father who never asked for anything but his whisky. Then Howard bullies my dad into this crazy Ponzi scheme, hoping my father wouldn’t last the year. Howard knew when they came looking for the money, there’d be a dead man to blame and he could make off with the cash. It meant I’d never see a dime. The old man then let that money-grabbing bitch take what was left of my inheritance and ended his life in a drunken stupor. But then you fall into my lap, slumming it with my snitch on the South Side. I couldn’t have written a better ending. Finally, you could suffer in their place; Howard’s
and
my father’s.’

It’d cut further into my wrist, but I’d managed to hook the cable tie around a piece of metal protruding out from the seatbelt buckle. Given enough friction, and time, I could cut myself free.

‘My Cute Little Rich Bitch. That’s what I used to call you; not Joe’s usual trailer trash for sure. It’s been fifteen years, I know, but my father told me enough about Howard. I knew he wouldn’t have squandered the money. He would’ve made sure you were provided for. So, how could I take it back? What I was owed and more? You might’ve been married to Joe, but there was no pre-nup and he didn’t know shit about the money. You didn’t tell him, did you? Blackmail was the only sensible option. I did some digging, but what do you know? Apart from the money itself, you and your family were squeaky clean. Yeah, there was some psyche ward shit, which gave me the drugging idea, but nothing to blackmail you over. You were boring. This is why you wanted Joe? Jesus, bitch, how cliché can you get?’

‘Fuck you, Evan,’ I sneered, kicking out at the door in frustration.

Evan’s hands rose from the steering wheel in mock surprise. ‘Not so boring now, not so Cute Little Rich Bitch! A feisty one I made here. You can thank me later.’

‘
Thank
you?’ I breathed.

‘Come on, I’ve met that stiff upper lip, tea-drinking fool. He wasn’t good enough, was he? So you ran away and married the first
exciting
guy you came across, which happened to be Joe. Stage one was set. Joe would treat you like crap so you’d
want
to leave him. After waving two hundred grand in his face and then promising more, I didn’t have to ask twice.
That’s
the man you married, honey.’

After I strangled Evan with the cable tie, Joe was next.

‘I mean, stage one wasn’t perfect, I admit. You could’ve run to the cops, which you did, but at least
I
was the one who took the statement.’

I let out a strained laugh. ‘That’s why Zupansky didn’t know about the report.’

‘Why would I file it? So the cops could go arrest Joe? Then came stage two. You’d leave your husband and fall into my arms.’

I dared another laugh. Evan was becoming more delusional by the minute. ‘And why would I
ever
do that?’

‘I know, I was coming on too strong. I took the hint and got a girlfriend.’

‘Brandi?’

‘You weren’t taking the bait. You were supposed to leave Joe’s shitty apartment and move in with me, but instead you book a room at the Four Seasons? Talk about gratitude. I saved your goddamn life! You weren’t falling for me, you didn’t trust me, but if I had a girlfriend . . . there was no threat. You wouldn’t assume I wanted to be anything other than friends. When you
finally
moved in, she took a long walk off a short pier.’

I hoped not literally. ‘I think she had a lucky escape.’

‘You know what? I think you’re right.’

Not that I was dying to know, but: ‘What was stage three?’ The binds had begun to loosen. If he focused on the story, he’d spend less time focusing on me.

‘You don’t have any secrets? I invent some. Joe dies, you’re involved, and bam! Instant blackmail material. You became my accessory to murder. Now you couldn’t run to the cops. The jeopardy was enough to keep you from buckling under the pressure and shooting off your mouth to the police. Joe wanted to divorce you. I offered a way out that paid. He just had to kick you in the head a couple of times and pretend to be an alcoholic, to give him something to blame his change of character on. Come on, don’t look at me like that. Everyone as a price.’

The vodka I was supposed to see him drink. The post-kick Joe on the lounge floor, grimacing through his fake withdrawal. The carefully orchestrated escalation of violence. None of it was true.

‘What’s so funny?’ he asked after I realised I was laughing.

‘It’s an amazing plan, Evan, really. Apart from you having no way of anticipating what I’d do.’

‘It wasn’t anticipation, just careful planning and suggestion. Plus, I took cues from you. Like the night of the attack – I knew you wouldn’t call the hospital, but you’d probably call Nina, so Mickey hid her phone. I parked in an alley further down South Evergreen and waited for you to stagger onto the street. That evil bastard worked you over a little too well, didn’t he? I picked you up before anyone else had chance to find you. You called to someone across the street but they didn’t want to know. How do
I
know that? Because it was Frankie Petrozzi and I put him there, to call me when you emerged. If no one helped you I’d be ten times the hero. You’d be eternally grateful.’

Frankie?
Dead
brother
Frankie?

‘You all right, honey? You look like you’ve lost some colour.’

‘Maybe because I’m tied up on the back seat of a car?’ Maybe because Evan’s
brilliant
plan was making me want to throw up, more like.