The Wrong Man (35 page)

He repeated to himself, She’s safe now.

Scott went to a small cabinet and took out a bottle of Scotch. He poured himself a stiff drink, took a sip, let the bitter amber liquid slide slowly down his throat, then raised his glass in a mock, solitary toast: “To us. To all of us. Whatever the hell that means.”

Michael O’Connell, too, was thinking about love. He was at a bar and had dropped a shot glass of Scotch into a mug of beer, making a boilermaker, a drink designed to dull the senses. He could feel himself seething within and realized that no drug and no drink would be sufficient to cover up the tension building inside him. No matter how much he drank, he was resigned to a nasty sobriety.

He stared at the mug in front of him, closed his eyes, and allowed rage to reverberate inside him, pinging off all the walls of his heart and imagination. He did not like being outmaneuvered or outthought or out-anythinged for that matter, and punishing the people who had done it was his immediate number-one priority. He was angry with himself for believing that the modest Internet troubles he’d already delivered to them would be adequate. Ashley’s family needed a far harsher series of lessons. They had cheated him out of something he was owed.

The more O’Connell raged at the indignity and insult to him, the more he found himself picturing Ashley. He imagined her hair, falling in red-blond strands to her shoulders, perfect, soft. He could draw in his mind’s eye every detail of her face, shading it like an artist, finding a smile for him on the lips, an invitation in the eyes. His thoughts cascaded down her body, measuring every curve, the sensuousness of her breasts, the subtle arc to her hips. He could imagine her legs stretched out beside him, and when he looked up into the dim light of the bar, he could sense himself getting aroused. He shifted on his barstool and thought that Ashley was ideal, except that she wasn’t because she had engineered this slap across his face. A blow to his heart. And as the liquor loosened his feelings, he could sense his reply; no caress, no gentle probing, he thought coldly. Hurt her, the way she’d hurt him. It was the only way to make her understand completely how much he loved her.

Again he twitched in his seat. He was fully aroused now.

He had once read in a novel that the warriors of certain African tribes had become engorged with passion in the moments before battle. Shield in one hand, killing spear in the other, an erection between their legs, they had charged their enemies.

He liked that.

Making no effort to hide the bulge in his pants, Michael O’Connell pushed away his empty glass and stood up. He hoped for a moment that someone would stare or comment. More than anything in that second, he wanted a fight.

No one did. A little disappointed, he crossed the room and walked out onto the street. Night had descended, and a cold chill touched his face. It did nothing to cool his imagination. He could picture himself looming over Ashley, thrusting at her, penetrating her, using every inch, every crevice, every space on the body for his own pleasure. He could hear her responding, and to him there was little difference between moans and cries of desire, and sobs of pain. Love and hurt. A caress and a blow. They were all the same.

Despite the cold, he undid his jacket, unbuttoned his shirt, letting the cool air slide over him as he marched along, head back, gulping in huge breaths. The chill did little to erase his desires. Love is like a disease, he thought to himself. Ashley was a virus that coursed along unchecked in his veins. He understood in that second that she would never leave him alone. Not for a single waking second, for the rest of his life. He walked on, thinking that the only way to control his love for Ashley was to control Ashley. Nothing had ever seemed so clear to him before.

Michael O’Connell rounded the corner to the block to his apartment, his mind churning with images of lust and blood, all mingling together in a great dangerous stew, and not paying quite the attention that he should have paid when he heard a low voice behind him.

“Let’s go have a little talk, O’Connell.” An iron-hard grip seized him by his upper arm.

Matthew Murphy had easily spotted O’Connell as he passed beneath the glow of a streetlamp. It had been a simple matter to sweep out of his shadow and come up behind him. Murphy had been trained in these techniques, and all his instincts over twenty-five years of police work told him that O’Connell was a novice at true criminality.

“Who the hell are you?” O’Connell stammered.

“I’m your biggest fucking nightmare, asshole. Now open up the door and let’s go up to your place nice and quiet like, so I can explain the world and the way it works to you in a civilized manner, without beating the shit out of you or far worse. You don’t want worse, do you, O’Connell? What do your friends call you? OC? Or maybe just plain Mike? What is it?”

O’Connell started to twist, which only made the pressure on his arm tighten, and he stopped. Before he could answer, Murphy thrust another rapid series of questions at him.

“Maybe Michael O’Connell doesn’t have any friends, so no nickname. So, tell you what, Mike-y boy, I’ll just make it up as we go along. Because, trust me, you want me to be your friend. You want that more than you’ve ever wanted anything in this world. Right now, Mike-y boy, that’s your absolute, top, number-one need on this planet: making sure that I remain your friend. Do you get that?”

O’Connell grunted, trying to turn enough to get a good look at Murphy, but the onetime trooper stayed right behind him, leaning in, whispering into his ear, while all the time keeping a steady pressure on his arm and in the small of his back, pushing him forward.

“Inside. Up the stairs. Your place, Mike-y boy. So we can have our little chat in private.”

Half-pushed, half-forced, O’Connell was steered through the entranceway and up to the second floor by the constant pressure from Matthew Murphy, who kept up a cold, mocking banter with each step.

Murphy increased his grip, squeezing at the muscle as they reached O’Connell’s door, and he could feel O’Connell react to the sharp pain. “That’s another thing about being friends, Mike-y boy. You don’t want me angry. You just don’t want me losing me temper. Might force me to do something you’d later regret, if you had a later in which to regret it, which I would sincerely doubt. You understand? Now open your door slowly.”

As O’Connell managed to get the key out of his pocket and into the lock, Murphy looked down the hallway and saw the neighboring old lady’s cat collection scurrying about. One even arched its back and hissed in O’Connell’s direction.

“Not too popular with the locals, are you, Mike-y boy?” Murphy said, twisting the younger man’s arm again. “You got something against cats? They got something against you?”

“We don’t get along,” O’Connell grunted.

“I’m not surprised.” Murphy gave the younger man a vicious shove, sending him stumbling ahead into the apartment. O’Connell tripped over a thread-bare rug on the floor, sprawling forward, thudding hard into a wall, twisting around to try to get his first real look at Murphy.

But the detective was on top of him with surprising quickness for a middle-aged man, looming over O’Connell like a gargoyle hanging from a medieval church, his face set in a half-mocking grin, but his eyes wearing a look of harsh anger. O’Connell scrambled to rise at least to a half-sitting position, and he stared up at Murphy, locking his eyes on the ex-detective’s.

“Not too happy, are you, Mike-y boy? Not accustomed to being tossed around, are you?”

O’Connell didn’t reply. He was still assessing the situation, and he knew enough to keep his mouth shut.

Murphy took that moment to slowly pull back his suit coat, revealing the .380 in its shoulder harness. “I brought a friend, Mike-y boy. As you can see.”

The younger man grunted again, shifting his eyes between the weapon and the private investigator. Murphy swiftly reached inside his jacket and removed the automatic. He had not been intending to do this, but something in O’Connell’s defiant stare told him to accelerate the process. With a rapid movement, he chambered a round and rested his thumb up against the safety catch. Slowly, he moved the pistol down toward O’Connell, until he finally rested the barrel up against the younger man’s forehead, directly between the eyes.

“Fuck you,” O’Connell said.

Murphy tapped the gun barrel against O’Connell’s nose. Just hard enough so it would hurt, not hard enough to break anything. “Poor choice of words,” Murphy said. With his left hand, he reached down and grasped O’Connell’s cheeks, pinching them between his fingers, squeezing tightly. “And I thought we were going to be friends.”

O’Connell continued to stare at the ex-detective, and Murphy abruptly slammed his head back against the wall. “A little more politeness,” he said coldly. “A little more civility. Makes everything go much smoother.” Then he reached down, grabbed O’Connell’s jacket, and lifted him up, keeping the handgun firmly planted on O’Connell’s forehead. Murphy maneuvered the younger man into a chair, half-tossing him so that O’Connell crashed back, the chair lifting on its back legs, and he had to struggle to keep his balance. “I haven’t even really been bad, yet, Mike-y boy. Not at all. We’re still just getting to know one another.”

“You’re not a cop, are you?”

“You know cops, do you, Mike-y boy? You’ve sat across from a cop more than once or twice, haven’t you?”

O’Connell nodded.

“Well, you’re absolutely fucking one hundred percent correct,” Murphy said, smiling. He had known this question was coming. “You should wish I was a cop. I mean, you should be praying right now to whatever God it is that you think might just listen to you, praying, ‘Please, Lord, let him be a cop,’ because cops, they’ve got rules, Mike-y boy. Rules and regulations. Nope. Not me. I’m a lot more trouble than that. Much worse. Much much worse. I’m a private investigator.”

O’Connell sneered, and Murphy slapped him hard across the face. The sound of his palm striking O’Connell’s cheek resounded through the small apartment.

Murphy smiled. “I shouldn’t have to explain these things to you, not someone who thinks he knows his way around like you do, Mike-y boy. But, just for the sakes of our little discussion this evening, let me explain a few items. One, I was a cop. Put in more than twenty years fucking with folks a whole lot tougher than you. Most of those tough guys are sitting in stir, cursing my name. Or else they’re real dead, and not thinking too much about yours truly because they probably have much more significant problems in the hereafter. Two, I am duly licensed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the United States federal government and fully authorized to carry this weapon. Now, you know what those two little things add up to?”

O’Connell didn’t reply, and Murphy slapped him again.

“Shit!” The word burst out of O’Connell’s lips.

“When I ask you a question, Mike-y boy, please respond.”

Murphy pulled back his hand again, and O’Connell said, “I don’t know. What do they add up to?”

Murphy grinned. “What it means is that I’ve got friends—real friends, not like our little play friendship here tonight, Mike-y boy, but real friends who owe me all sorts of real favors, whose butts I might just have pulled out of one fire or another over all those years and would be more than willing to do absolutely fucking anything for me, and who are gonna believe everything I say about our little get-together here tonight if it comes to that. They aren’t going to give a damn about a punk like you, no matter what happens. And when I tell them that you came at me with a knife or just about any sort of weapon that I can plant in your dead and lifeless hand, and I tell ’em it was just some damn tough luck, but I just had to blow your sorry little ass away, they’re going to believe me. In fact, Mike-y boy, they’re gonna congratulate me for cleaning up this world a little bit, before you had a chance to make any really big trouble. They’ll file it away under
preventative maintenance.
So, that’s the situation you’re currently in, Mike-y boy. In other words, I can do just about anything I fucking well want to, and you can’t do a thing. Is that clear?”

O’Connell hesitated, then nodded when he caught sight of Murphy pulling back his hand for another slap.

“Good. Understanding, they say, is the path to enlightenment.”

O’Connell could taste a little blood on his lips.

“Let me just repeat this so that we are completely clear: I am free to do anything I might think right, including send your sorry little life straight to kingdom come or more likely hell. You get this, Mike-y boy?”

“I get the picture.”

Murphy started to walk around the chair. He kept the barrel of the automatic in contact with O’Connell’s skin, occasionally tapping it painfully against his head, or digging it into the soft space between O’Connell’s neck and his shoulders.

“This is a really crummy place you’ve got here, Mike-y boy. Pretty rundown. Dirty.” Murphy stared across the room and saw a laptop computer on a table, making a mental note to take a handful of O’Connell’s backup discs with him.

So far, things were going more or less as Murphy had anticipated. O’Connell was as predicted. He could sense the younger man’s discomfort, knew that the insistent rapping of the weapon against his head was creating indecision and doubt. In all moments of confrontation, Murphy thought, at some point the skilled interrogator simply takes over the subject’s identity, controlling, steering him to compliance. We’re on track, Murphy thought to himself. We’re definitely making progress.

“Not much of a life, is it, Mike-y boy? I mean, I’m not seeing much of a future here.”

“It suits me.”

“Yes. But what is it about this that makes you think for a single second that Ashley Freeman would want to be a part of it?”

O’Connell remained quiet, and Murphy whacked him from behind with his free hand. “Answer the question, asshole.”

“I love her. She loves me.”

Murphy slapped him again. “I don’t think so, you low-life, bottom-dwelling slug.”

A thin line of blood came from O’Connell’s ear.