Eight Million Ways To Die

"Oh yeah?" The gray eyes focused on me as he registered this information. He picked up his glass and drank about half of it, set it down on the worn wooden table with a thunk. "You got the right idea,"

he said, and I thought he meant the ginger ale, but he had shifted gears by then. "Quitting the job. Getting out. You know what I want? All I want is six more years."

"Then you got your twenty?"

"Then I got my twenty," he said, "and then I got my pension, and then I'm fucking well gone. Out of this job and out of this shithole of a city. Florida, Texas, New Mexico, someplace warm and dry and clean.

Forget Florida, I heard things about Florida, all the fucking Cubans, they got crime like you get here. Plus they got all the dope coming in there. Those crazy Colombians. You know about the Colombians?"

I thought of Royal Waldron. "A fellow I know says they're all right," I said. "He said you just don't want to cheat 'em."

"You bet your ass you don't want to cheat 'em. You read about those two girls over in Long Island City? Must have been six, eight months ago. Sisters, one's twelve and one's fourteen, and they found 'em in the back room of this out-of-business gas station, hands tied behind their backs, each of 'em shot twice in the head with a small-caliber weapon, I think a .22, but who gives a shit?" He drank the rest of his drink. "Well, it didn't figure. No sex angle, nothing. It's an execution, but who executes a couple of teenage sisters?

"Well, it clears itself up, because a week later somebody breaks into the house where they lived and shoots their mother. We found her in the kitchen with dinner still cooking on the stove. See, the family's Colombian, and the father's in the cocaine business, which is the chief industry down there outside of smuggling emeralds—"

"I thought they grew a lot of coffee."

"That's probably a front. Where was I? The point is, the father turns up dead a month later in whatever's the capital of Colombia. He crossed somebody and he ran for it, and they wound up getting him in Colombia, but first they killed his kids and his wife. See, the Colombians, they play by a different set of rules. You fuck with them and they don't just kill you. They wipe out your whole family. Kids, any age, it don't matter. You got a dog and a cat and some tropical fish, they're dead too."

"Jesus."

"The Mafia was always considerate about family. They'd even make sure to arrange a hit so your family wouldn't be there to see it happen. Now we got criminals that kill the whole family. Nice?"

"Jesus."

He put his palms on the table for leverage, hoisted himself to his feet. "I'm getting this round," he announced. "I don't need some pimp payin' for my drinks."

Back at the table he said, "He's your client, right? Chance?" When I failed to respond he said, "Well, shit, you met with him last night. He wanted to see you, and now you got a client that you won't say his name.

Two and two's gotta be four, doesn't it?"

"I can't tell you how to add it."

"Let's just say I'm right and he's your client. For the sake of argument. You won't be givin' nothin' away."

"All right."

He leaned forward. "He killed her," he said. "So why would he hire you to investigate it?"

"Maybe he didn't kill her."

"Oh, sure he did." He dismissed the possibility of Chance's innocence with a wave of his hand. "She says she's quitting him and he says okay and the next day she's dead. Come on, Matt. What's that if it's not cut and dried?"

"Then we get back to your question. Why'd he hire me?"

"Maybe to take the heat off."

"How?"

"Maybe he'll figure we'll figure he must be innocent or he wouldn't have hired you."

"But that's not what you figured at all."

"No."

"You think he'd really think that?"

"How do I know what some coked-up spade pimp is gonna think?"

"You figure he's a cokehead?"

"He's got to spend it on something, doesn't he? It's not gonna go for country-club dues and a box at the charity ball. Lemme ask you something."

"Go ahead."

"You think there's a chance in the world he didn't kill her? Or set her up and hire it done?"

"I think there's a chance."

"Why?"

"For one thing, he hired me. And it wasn't to take the heat off because what heat are we talking about?

You already said there wasn't going to be any heat. You're planning to clear the case and work on something else."

"He wouldn't necessarily know that."

I let that pass. "Take it from another angle," I suggested. "Let's say I never called you."

"Called me when?"

"The first call I made. Let's say you didn't know she was breaking with her pimp."

"If we didn't get it from you we'd of gotten it somewhere else."

"Where? Kim was dead and Chance wouldn't volunteer the information. I'm not sure anybody else in the world knew." Except for Elaine, but I wasn't going to bring her into it. "I don't think you'd have gotten it.

Not right off the bat, anyway."

"So?"

"So how would you have figured the killing then?"