Twisted

mean, I just got your name out of that magazine, Worldwide Soldier. ”
    “You do this long enough, you get a feel for who’re real customers and who aren’t. Anyway, I spent the last week checking you out. You’re legitimate.”
    If a woman paying someone twenty-five thousanddollars to kill her husband can be called legitimate.
    Speaking of which . . .
    She took a thick envelope out of her pocket. Handed it to Dale. It disappeared into the pocket with the white rope.
    “Dale . . . wait, your name’s not really Dale, is it?”
    “No, but it’s the one I’m using for this job.”
    “Okay, well, Dale, he won’t feel anything?” she asked. “No pain?”
    “Not a thing. Even if he were conscious that water’s so cold he’ll probably pass out and die of shock before he drowns.”
    They’d reached the end of the park. Dale asked, “You’re sure about doing this?”
    And Marissa asked herself, Am I sure about wanting Jonathan dead?
    Jonathan—the man who tells me he goes fishing with the boys every weekend but in truth takes his nurses out on the boat for his little trysts. Who spends our savings on them. Who announced a few years after getting married that he’d had a vasectomy and didn’t want the children he’d promised we’d have. Who speaks to me like a ten-year-old about his job or current events, never even hearing me say, “I understand, honey. I’m a smart woman.” Who nagged me into quitting a job I loved. Who flies into a rage every time I want to go back to work. Who complains whenever I wear sexy clothes in public but who stopped sleeping with me years ago. Who gets violent whenever I bring up divorce because a doctor at a teaching hospital needs a wife to get ahead . . . and because he’s a sick control freak.
    Marissa Cooper suddenly pictured the shattered corpse of a rattlesnake lying bloody on a hot patch of yellow Texas sand so many years ago.
    That’s too bad. I want him to go to hell. . . .
    “I’m sure,” she said.
    Dale shook her hand and said, “I’ll take care of things from here. Go home. You should practice playing the grieving widow.”
    “I can handle that,” Marissa said. “I’ve been a grieving wife for years.”
    Pulling her coat collar up high, she returned to the parking lot, not looking back at either her husband or at the man who was about to kill him. She climbed into her Toyota and fired up the engine, found some rock and roll on the radio, turned the volume up high and left Green Harbor.
    Marissa cranked the windows down, filling the car with sharp autumn air, rich with the scent of wood smoke and old leaves, and drove fast through the night, thinking about her future, about her life without Jonathan.

T HE W EEKENDER

    T he night went bad fast.
    I looked in the rearview mirror and didn’t see any lights but I knew they were after us and it was only a matter of time till I’d see the flashers.
    Toth started to talk but I told him to shut up and got the Buick up to eighty. The road was empty, nothing but pine trees for miles around.
    “Oh, brother,” Toth muttered. I felt his eyes on me but I didn’t even want to look at him, I was so mad.
    They were never easy, drugstores.
    Because, just watch sometime, when cops make their rounds they cruise drugstores more often than anyplace else. Because of the perco and Valium and the other drugs. You know.
    You’d think they’d stake out convenience stores. But those’re a joke and with the closed-circuit TV you’re going to get your picture took, you just are. So nobody who knows the business, I mean really knows it, hits them. And banks, forget banks. Even ATMs. I mean, how much can you clear? Three, four hundred tops? And around here the “Fast Cash” button gives you twenty only. Which tells you something. So why even bother?
    No. We wanted cash and that meant a drugstore, even though they can be tricky. Ardmore Drugs. Which is a big store in a little town. Liggett Falls. Sixty miles from Albany and a hundred or so from where Toth and me lived, farther west into the mountains. Liggett Falls’s a poor place. You’d think it wouldn’t make sense to hit a store there. But that’s exactly why—because like everywhere else, people there need medicine and hair spray and makeup, only they don’t have credit cards. Except maybe a Sears or Penney’s. So they pay cash.
    “Oh, brother,” Toth whispered again. “Look.”
    And he made me even madder, him saying that. I wanted to shout