Vengeance. Mystery Writers of America Presents B00A25NLU4

She looked out at the water. A gray day today, very still and humid, some of the skyline gone smudged in the haze. “When will that be?”
    “Saturday.” He looked over at her as he stuffed the cash in the inside pocket of his jacket. “None of your servants work then, right?”
    She chuckled. “I don’t have servants.”
    “No — what are they?”
    “Employees.”
    “Okay. Any of your employees work Saturday?”
    “No. Well, I mean, the chef, but he doesn’t come in until, I think, two.”
    “And you usually go out Saturday, go shopping, hang with your girlfriends, stuff like that?”
    “Not every Saturday, but it’s not uncommon.”
    “Good. That’s what you do this Saturday between ten and two.”
    “Between ten and two? What’re you, the cable company?”
    “That’s exactly what you’re going to tell Alan. On Thursday afternoon, your cable’s gonna go out.”
    “Out?”
    He popped his fingers at the air in front of his face. “Poof.”
    “Alan’ll go crazy. The Sox play the Yankees this weekend; there’s Wimbledon; some golf thing too, I think.”
    “Right. And the cable guy will be coming to fix it Saturday, between ten and two.”
    Kineavy stood and she had to look up at him from the bench.
    “You make sure your husband’s there to answer the door.”

    A T NINE S ATURDAY morning, Alan came into the kitchen from the gym. They’d had the gym built last year in the reconverted barn on the other side of the four-car garage. Alan had installed a sixty-inch Sony Bravia in there, and he’d watch movies that pumped him full of American pride as he ran on the treadmill —
Red Dawn, Rocky IV, Rambo III, The Blind Side.
Man, he loved
The Blind Slide,
walked around quoting it like it was the
Bhaga-vad Gita.
He was covered in sweat, dripping it all over the floor, as he pulled a bottle of OJ from the fridge, popped the cap with his thumb, and drank directly from the container.
    “Cable guy come yet?”
    Nicole took an elaborate look at the clock on the wall: 9:05. “Between ten and two, they said.”
    “Sometimes they come early.” He swigged half the bottle.
    “When do they come early?”
    “Sometimes.”
    “Name one time.”
    He shrugged, leaned against the counter, drank some more orange juice.
    Watching him suck down the orange juice, she was surprised to remember that she’d loved him this past week. Hated him too, of course, but there was still love there. He wasn’t a terrible guy, Alan. He could be funny, and he once flew in her brother, Ben, to surprise her for her thirty-third birthday — Lord knows, he could always be depended on for the grand gesture. When he spent two weeks in Shanghai on business right after her third miscarriage, he sent her white roses every day he was gone. She spent the week in bed, and sometimes she’d place one of those white petals on the tip of her nose and close her eyes and pretend she’d have a child someday.
    This past week, Alan had been surprisingly attentive, asking her if everything was okay, if there was anything she wanted, was she feeling under the weather, she seemed tense, anything he could do for her?
    They’d fucked twice, once in the bed at the end of the day, but once on the kitchen counter — the same counter he was leaning against now — good and lusty and erotic, Alan talking dirty into her right ear. For a full ten minutes after he’d come, she’d sat on the counter and considered calling the whole thing off.
    Now, only an hour (or four) away from ending her husband’s life, her heart pounded up through the veins in her neck, the blood roared in her ear canals, and she thought there might still be time to call it off. She could just run upstairs and grab the number of Kineavy’s burner cell and end this madness.
    Alan burped. He held up a hand in apology. “Where you going again?”
    She’d told him about a hundred times.
    “There’s an art fair in Sherborn.”
    Drops of sweat fell from his shorts and plopped onto the floor.
    “Art fair? Bunch of lesbos selling shit they painted in their attics from the backs of Subarus?”
    “Anyway,” she said, “we won’t be all day or anything.”
    He nodded. “Cable guy’s coming when?”
    She let out a slow breath, looked at the floor.
    “I’m just asking. Christ.”
    She nodded at the floor, her arms folded. She unfolded them and looked up, gave him a tight smile. “Between ten and two.”
    He smiled. Alan had a movie-star-wattage smile. Sometimes, if he put