Page 87 of A Week Away
“It’s pretty impossible to lift prints off fabric. Make sure we take the bag with us.”
He handed me the hoodie-wrapped gun and I slipped it into the space above me. I was reaching for the ceiling tile to pull back into place when the office door opened. I looked down and there was Mr. Cray.
“What exactly is it you’re doing? Never mind, I know what you’re doing.”
Cass seemed to spring awake. He picked up my jacket and reached into the pocket pulling out the Ruger. He clumsily aimed it at Mr. Cray, but the man was already rushing Cass. He slammed the boy up against the credenza behind the desk. Then he snatched the gun out of his hand. I can’t say I was surprised. Mr. Cray stepped back, aiming the gun at us. We all focused on our breathing for a moment.
“Did you forget something?” I asked, curious to know if this was simply bad luck.
“Blue Thunderbird. I saw it as I was leaving. I remembered seeing it yesterday at Joanne’s. I doubled back to see if it was here. And there it was in my parking space. And here you are in my office.”
“You killed my mom,” Cass said, petulant, sulky and powerless.
“Your mom was a deceitful bitch. You need to come to terms with that.”
Before Cass could respond to that, I asked, “If she was so awful why were you with her for so long?”
“We understood each other. Good people are so boring. My wife is a lovely person. Kind, generous, thoughtful, bland, dull, boring. I will miss Joanne. She was a deceitful bitch, and I loved her.”
“You killed my father, didn’t you?”
“Oh for god’s sake, why does that matter so much? You realize none of this would have happened if you hadn’t started nosing around. You barely knew the man.”
That was a lot for Cass to take in, but he pulled himself together and said, “I wanted to know him. And I couldn’t… because of you.”
“Yes, I had your father killed. That’s what Joanne wanted so I paid her cousin to do it. Stupid of me, really. I think Luca would have done it for free if she’d asked. As it was, I think she kept most of the ten thousand dollars I paid for him to do it. You’d have thought getting rid of a husband she didn’t want would have been enough. But that was Joanne for you. Why place one bet when you can place two?”
For a moment, I thought about reaching up and grabbing the other gun, but I couldn’t imagine a way in which he wouldn’t shoot me before I even got my hands on it. And then he was saying, “Well, I’ve told you my secrets. Now it’s time for you to die.”
He aimed the gun at Cass, I braced myself to watch the kid die. And then wait for my turn. Mr. Cray pulled the trigger and the gun clicked. And nothing happened. He pointed the gun down and looked at the safety. Then he began pulling at the slide.
Meanwhile, I was reaching for the gun above my head, so I wasn’t looking when the Ruger went off. I turned to see that Mr. Cray had shot himself, somewhere in the thigh region. Cass jumped forward and grabbed the gun out of his hand. Good boy. I got the gun down from the ceiling but didn’t take it out of the hoodie.
“I’m bleeding. Call an ambulance,” Mr. Cray said.
To Cass, I said, “Don’t try to fire that again. It’ll probably misfire.”
Mr. Cray had both hands around his thigh, squeezing hard as blood seeped through his fingers. There was already blood on the floor around his feet.
“Call an ambulance,” he said again.
“It won’t get here in time,” I said.
I took the gun from Cass and rubbed my fingers all over the spots where his had been. Hopefully, I made such a smudgy enough mess that neither of us would be identified. I tossed it into the pool of blood surrounding Mr. Cray. He stared at it a moment, then his knees folded and he slumped onto the floor.
I’d been right. There was no way he’d live until an ambulance arrived. I didn’t think he’d even live long enough to get to the telephone. To Cass I said, “I think it’s time for us to leave. Don’t step in the blood.”
The two of us carefully picked our way out of the office. As we did, Mr. Cray said his last words. “Wait… please… fuck.”
In the reception area I checked Cass over. There was a fine spray of blood on his clothes, but he wasn’t tracking any blood on the floor. And neither was I.
We left and went down the stairs to the first floor. Cass started to get into the rental but I stopped him. “Hold on.” I walked back to the trunk. I had a few T-shirts from a pack and some underwear.
“Ditch those clothes and put these on. Make sure you don’t leave anything in the pockets.”
“You want me to go around in my underwear?”
“You’re covered in little specs of blood. And we’re going right to your place as soon as I do one more thing.”
