The 13-Minute Murder Page 21

  Chapter 2

  “You can predict him?” said Milt.

  “Girl in the turtleneck,” I replied.

  There was a set of stairs in Goran’s path where foot traffic slowed down a bit. Goran would be passing a girl in a turtleneck sweater. He’d walk by her and create a small situation. I could foresee it.

  “Finger to the chest,” I said to Milt. “Watch.”

  “Her? She’s with a guy.” Milt pointed to the young man on her left. “Look. She’s holding hands with the kid in the flannel shirt.”

  “Keep watching.”

  My hobby is people. I see them do things before they know they even want to do those things. Goran passed the girl and reached out, quickly, to give her chin a brief, soft, bold, two-finger squeeze. In passing. Nothing anyone else would notice. But a grotesque violation of personal domain nonetheless. The girl hardly expected it, hardly saw who had done it, and couldn’t do anything but keep walking with the crowd, in total repulsion.

  “Big deal,” said Milt. “Wasn’t her chest.”

  “Not her chest.”

  I nodded, a heads-up to what was happening next. The kid in the flannel—the one holding the girl’s hand, the only witness—now felt he had a duty to call it out. He let go of the girl’s hand, turned around, and hurried to catch up to Goran.

  But before he could finish his first sentence, Goran put his finger to the kid’s chest and spoke directly in his face. Finger to the chest. I couldn’t tell what the exact words were, but the message was clear: I can have you damaged and no one will do anything about it. Which was the first time the two bodyguards got closer. We’d nicknamed them Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Tweedledee and Tweedledum were now hovering just near enough to be “felt.”

  The kid saw the doom. You could see him seeing it. You could see the instant fear. While in Goran’s face you could see the comfort. Goran would go home that night and sleep peacefully, thinking nothing of the moment, possibly forgetting it had occurred. But the flannel kid would be shaken for days. To say nothing of the girl. I’d seen it a hundred times.

  Infuriating that they’d let this oily boy and his expensive gang wander the halls of such a sacred place. That’s what money can buy behind closed doors.

  When Goran and his thugs exited the quad, I wanted to follow him home and end his life right then. But then Milt grabbed my shoulder to remind me, “We don’t get paid that way.”

  The job required a hit on Harvard soil. A hit tomorrow, not today.

  “Floral dress,” he said.

  It’d be a complicated kill, but with a predictable variable in the center of the equation—the kid himself—we could make it work. We could complete the assignment and get to safety.

  Just as long as we took care of the most important factor. “Need to keep it under six minutes,” I said to him.

  “Six? Sure. If we know our crowd well enough. Like we’ve been talking about. Gauging their reaction time.” He loved this part. He was already fixated on the young lady he’d been fixated on. “I’m still nominating her.” He pointed in her direction, packaging his suggestion in a flowery load of BS. “See how she turns to face you? That’s the dead giveaway, brother. How the front of the torso rotates. See? As you walk by? Rotates slowly toward the man she desires. Like a daisy in the sunlight.”

  “No. Not her. We need a reliable screamer.”

  “Who could be more reliable than a daisy?”

  I’d made my choice. “The barista.” She was behind the counter of the café across the street, checking her phone for likes—for whatever pic she’d just been tagged in. She was busy. She was trapped. She was perfect.

  We headed over to the café. Milt was right about the behavior of his chosen muse: the floral-dress girl had rotated as we passed her. I’d assumed when she locked eyes with me it was out of boredom. Was he right about her all along?

  Half plus seven—it’s socially acceptable to date someone who’s half your age plus seven years, according to Milt. That qualified me for a twenty-eight-year-old. Not sure my wife would have enjoyed that math, but lately I’d been desperately wondering if I had any appeal.

  We entered a room full of Harvard’s finest, a café abuzz with the chatter of freshly caffeinated opinions.

  I looked at Milt. He looked at me. He was clutching his chest, slightly bent over.

  “You look like you’re about to have a heart attack, buddy.”

  “What gives you that idea?”

  “Books on the topic. And the fact—”

  “Raaoooowwwgggggggooooddddd!” Milt screamed.

  He snapped his head back and tumbled in midair to fall backward, half onto nothing, half onto a circular café table so that the table flipped up all its dishes and glassware. Milton Prescott looked like he was dying.

  Chapter 3

  My partner of eleven years frantically grasped for his trachea, the universal gesture of zero air.

  “He’s choking!” yelled a brilliant mind from across the room.

  Milt flailed around on the floor. He’s a thick, stocky stegosaurus of a man, so he easily knocks things over. Tiny students were no match. Nobody could aid him.

  Wouldn’t matter, though.

  As quickly as he went down, Milt got up, stood up, took a moment for dramatic emphasis, pointed directly out the front door, yelled “Marrarrrruuuuwwggh!,” then ran out the opposite way, through the back exit of the café, top speed, bulldozing everyone along the way, making a spectacle.

  Over before it even started.

  Leaving a small but deafening moment of silence.

  “Holy shit,” said virtually every person in the room.

  Two girls then immediately rushed to assist him—the barista and another girl, in a hat. I followed and the three of us as a team ran into the back to find an empty corridor.

  “Was he stabbed more than once?” I asked the girl in the hat.

  “Stabbed?” she replied.

  You could see her gears turning, her pliable memory now searching for details that fit the suggestion. Stabbed?

  “You saw those three guys who ran out the front, right?” I asked her.

  “N-no,” said the girl in the hat.

  “No,” said the barista confidently. Confidently…until something occurred to her. “Wait.”

  “Jeez, is this a shooting?” I asked, my eyes widening.

  The barista looked at me. Shooting? The seed was planted. The garden of doubt—tilled. The barista was already calling 911.

  I left them. I returned to the café. Thankfully, there were very few people recording video. I don’t like being on camera. Especially in such drab lighting. I hustled over to the introverts in the corner. The farming had only just begun.

  “Did any of you see how many times he was stabbed?” I asked the group.

  A chorus of the word stabbed echoed throughout the herd. Child’s play. Their apparent leader made the next 911 call placed. “Um, nine one one?…Okay…um…there was a man who was stabbed…I think…multiple times…definitely stabbed…at least twice. Ran out to the alley.”

  In this modern era, any police response to an assault call from a college campus is going to be swift and crowded. They already have patrols every thirty minutes.

  The caller was doing our work for us. “We think there was an assailant who ran through the courtyard.”

  The beauty of a heart attack is that once the story was straightened out, hours from then, it’d stand as just a minor, weird incident while having granted me a powerful glimpse into the future. We’d tested the tissue of the local response system like a marine biologist might prod an anemone to test its reflexes: gently. Just enough of a prick to stimulate the response, but not too much that anyone would know it had happened. Harvard was the anemone. Milt was the prick.

  One hour later, the cops would review whatever surveillance video the café had and realize that the guy just choked on his muffin. They’d curse the unreliable reports of witnesses, and they’d be 3 percent sl
ower to react the next day. Most importantly, I’d have my measurement.

  One hour later, Milt and I rehashed what had happened, like two janitors mopping up the stadium after a Super Bowl.

  “Two minutes eight seconds,” said Milt.

  “I got two minutes twenty-five.”

  “No, no, they had the ambulance come after,” said Milt. “The cops were first.”

  “No, I saw an SUV parked on the avenue.”

  “How would the avenue be clear if it was already parked?”

  “You saw it clear?”

  “With my own eyes.”

  “Not parked?” That was different. “Then we’re in under six.”

  “In under six.”

  It’d be more than doable. We had eight minutes to cross out of a three-mile radius and our current estimates had us hovering just under six. That’s what I’d call a professional margin of error. The kind of leeway that ensures success.

  Chapter 4

  I’m supposed to go directly home. That was the agreement I’d made with myself. Work, then home. In that order. No other activities.

  But I didn’t go home.

  I stopped at a place called the Alluvial Tavern, a dive bar just outside the Boston city limits. It smelled like yesterday’s beer and last year’s urine. The perfect environment for an outcast like me to do the one thing no normal human would do in a noisy, poorly lit environment: read a book.

  I had Le Parfum with me, a beat-up French copy of Patrick Süskind’s tale of assaults and aromas.

  “Assaults?” asked the bartender. She’d asked about the pages I was turning but barely stuck around to hear my answer.

  “The story of a murderer,” I replied. “Grenouille. Guy’s got an obsession with scents. The whole story is like this exegesis on scents, but it’s got a larger meaning.”

  She’d left.

  Which was fine by me. I really just wanted to cross the halfway point in the novel.

  I ordered a trendy triple IPA, with lime quartered. I read my novel in spurts and thought in spurts, looking for the obvious idea to emerge. The book soon ended up wedged open against the bar counter, beneath my forearm. Grenouille was just about to slice open another victim. To him, the girl—his victim—smelled of both fireplace residue and her own natural vanilla scent. How a monster could be so attuned to the delicacies of life was exactly the appeal.

  I pulled out a pen and drew a map of the Harvard campus on my napkin. No place-names—no evidence to leave lying around the bar counter—just a vague sketch with all sorts of arrows and circles. Situational arrows. “If this, then that.” If the bodyguards pull out knives, we demobilize them from their flank. (We kill them.) If the crowd is sparse, then we act early. Early—because a fatal shot to a bodyguard is not nearly as much paperwork as a fatal shot to a Harvard bystander. And by paperwork I mean prison.

  “You gonna order another, Ryan?” The bartender pointed at my glass. “Or just fondle your library card?”

  The bar was half empty but somehow I was taking up all her lucrative territory, nor drinking enough beers.

  “Hey,” said the bartender. “I didn’t mean to kick you out.” I smiled politely and gathered my things.

  “So, I’m wondering. Why do you stick with her?” the bartender asked, watching me.

  “Stick…with…?” I didn’t know what she meant. “My wife?”

  “She doesn’t love you anymore, right? I mean…I’m not being harsh. I’m just being honest…about what I see and hear.”

  Ah, just being honest. In my experience, people who talk about how honest they’re being aren’t. I think this bartender wanted to have sex with me.

  I smiled, picked up my beer, toasted her in midair—trying to be suave, as it spilled down my knuckles—and headed for a distant booth across the bar. Myself. My novel. This beer.

  The magic was gone, though. I couldn’t reimmerse myself in the pages of the book about a journey through prewar Paris. And worse, I’d left my map at the bar—the map drawn on that napkin. Sure, I doubted anyone would pick it up and say, “Hey who’s drawing tactical schematics of an assassination on Harvard’s campus?” But the fact that I’d left it anywhere at all was a small but important sign that I’d started to lose what we in the business refer to as my edge.

  Five years ago I would not have made even one single mistake. Now I was watching a yuppie couple pull up barstools precisely where I’d been sitting. Precisely where I’d been drawing.

  I should’ve immediately gone to grab that napkin, just in case the yuppie was a cop, or a fed, or just even one of those annoying fans of the evening news who sees some report and proudly calls the 1-800 tip line at the bottom of the screen.

  Five years ago I’d already be at the counter, clutching the napkin, maybe breaking some nice man’s nose. But at this point in my life?

  I watched the guy’s lady friend nuzzle up behind his shirt collar and place a kiss upon his neck. They giggled about some joke they must’ve whispered to each other countless times. These two couldn’t care less about my napkin. She hugged him again.

  Why can’t Maria hug me for no reason?

  I stopped at a flower store on the way home. Desperate times, desperate measures. I bought her an orchid in a cubic vase.

  When I got home and entered our creaky bedroom, Maria was asleep. I knelt in front of her side of the bed, and stared at her for longer than I’d care to admit. She looked so vulnerable. So lovable. The hundred fights we’d had that year didn’t seem to erode her. She was still quite pretty in the right light. Her creases were coming, yes, but those creases were coming for us all, weren’t they?

  She wanted me dead.

  But several minutes later I was in the laundry room, at 2:00 a.m., washing her butcher frocks so she’d have a dry frock for her shift the next day. It was something she’d always forget to plan for.

  She didn’t know I did stuff like wash and iron her clothes.

  I crawled into bed at 3:15 a.m., taking one last look at the cover of Le Parfum for inspiration. I would be back at the Harvard courtyard at ten in the morning, executing my last assignment ever.

  Retirement would pave the way for me to go to marital therapy. To be a better husband. To heal our romance. I rolled over toward Maria, hoping she might softly retreat into a spoon. She didn’t. We were both unaware that by the start of the next evening, one of us would be dead.

  Chapter 5

  “Let’s say it to each other one more time,” I said to Milt.

  “Really?” he groaned.

  We were walking toward the main courtyard and already noticing cops. And cops were noticing us. Not outright. But we got glanced at. You don’t want eye contact in my line of work.

  “We converge from opposite sides,” said Milt, beginning his summary of the pivotal six minutes of our plan. “You’re the primary. I’m the cleanup.” He was speaking in monotone, reciting memorized facts. “We shoot for the heart and keep the exit wound contained in his backpack to minimize the visual blood. If his bodyguards react to us, we shoot to neutralize. We exit opposite corners.”

  “No phones,” I added.

  “I said that.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “We don’t use phones.” He gave me an annoyed look. “If something goes wrong, communication is via email from a random computer at a random Apple Store.”

  “We don’t rendezvous until after forty-eight hours.”

  “Right.”

  It was a traditional setup for us, in many ways. But this was far from a traditional hit. Shooting a kid? Amidst kids? How do you answer for that when you stand before the Almighty?

  “Christ,” said Milt. “It’s raining.”

  I was praying for any hiccup to derail the day. I was. But things were well on their way to going wrong, and the bad weather was merely an appetizer for the bad news. When we arrived at the courtyard, we saw the essential issue: foot traffic had completely rerouted to the perimeter. Nobody was crisscrossing the
middle of the yard. That meant our walking paycheck, Goran Mesic, would be in the mobbed side walkways.

  We did check the weather. But there’d been only a forecast of “light wind with possible light drizzle.” Now it looked like some classes were getting out early to handle the surprise downpour, which meant we were already behind schedule.

  Our contingency plans could handle that. We were already in position, ready for Goran. What our plans couldn’t handle was the fact that Goran was walking directly between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Not in front, not to the rear. But between his two bodyguards.

  Barely any of our reconnaissance would be of use now. I closed my eyes for a fraction of a moment. I took a breath. I pictured the most chaotic possible outcome of the next hour and let its climactic moment unfold in front of me in slow motion.

  People reaching for weapons. Witnesses diving for cover. Slow motion. Like an NFL replay. I tried to see where each step could go wrong, letting the frozen moments inform me how to re-choose the better step. If the guards protectively shove Goran down to the pavement: I shoot all three of them. If Goran runs directly away: I let Milt handle them while I footrace the kid off campus. When you think like a victim, you choose paths based on fear. Fear trumps all. Goran would panic at the threat on campus and think to run from campus. That would mean crossing Quincy Street. I could head him off if I circled around the library and ambushed from solid cover.

  What a fun job—shooting kids.

  I felt nauseous.

  “He’s twenty,” argued Milt. “He ain’t no kid.”

  I’d already wanted to leave this career. I’d been searching for a doable exit plan for months. I had a wife who would barely kiss me anymore. A dog who barely nuzzled me. Ulcers. A leaky roof.