Cross - James Patterson [82]
So they cruised on out of the boatyard, and Father Frank X was never seen or heard from again. “God rest his immoral soul in hell,” Jimmy Hats joked on the way back.
And that morning, as he drove out on his latest job, Sullivan remembered the old Frankie Ford song—and he remembered how the pathetic priest had begged for his life, and then for his death, before he got cut up into shark food. But most of all, he remembered wondering whether he had just done a good deed with Father Frank, and whether or not it was possible that he could.
Could he do anything good in his life?
Or was he just all bad?
Chapter 107
HE FINALLY ARRIVED IN STOCKBRIDGE, near the Massachusetts-New York border, and used his GPS to find the right house. He was ready to do his worst, to be the Butcher again, to earn his day’s wage.
To hell with good deeds and good thoughts, whatever they were supposed to prove. He located the house, which was very “country” and, he thought, very tasteful. It sat on a tranquil pond in the middle of acres of maples and elms and pines. A black Porsche Targa was parked like a modern sculpture in the driveway.
The Butcher had been told that a forty-one-year-old woman named Melinda Steiner was at the house—but that she drove a spiffy red Mercedes convertible. So who did the black Porsche belong to?
Sullivan parked off the main road behind a copse of pines, and he watched the house for about twenty minutes. One of the things he noticed was that the garage door was closed. And maybe there was a fine red Mercedes convertible in the garage.
So—once again—who owned the black Porsche?
Careful to stay under the cover of thick branches, he put a pair of German binoculars to his eyes. Then he slowly scanned the east and south windows of the house, each and every one of them.
No one seemed to be in the kitchen—which was all darkened windows, no one moving about.
Or in the living room, either, which was also dark and looked deserted.
But somebody was in the house, right?
He finally found them in a corner bedroom on the second floor. Probably the master suite.
Melinda, or Mel, Steiner was up there.
And some blond dude. Probably in his early forties, presumably the owner of the Porsche.
Too many mistakes to calculate, he was thinking to himself. A real cluster-fuck of errors.
What he could also calculate was that his seventy-five-thousand-dollar fee for this job had just doubled, because he never did two for the price of one.
The Butcher started to walk toward the country house, gun in one hand, toolbox in the other, and he was feeling pretty good about this job, this day, this life he had for himself.
Chapter 108
THERE WAS VERY LITTLE IN LIFE that could beat the feeling of having confidence in your ability to do a job well. Michael Sullivan was thinking about the truth in that statement as he neared the house.
He was conscious of the amount of land surrounding the white Colonial house, three or four acres of secluded woods and fields. Off in the back he saw a tennis court that looked like green clay. Maybe it was Har-Tru, which the tennis buffs back in Maryland seemed to favor.
But mostly he was focused on his work, on the job to be done, on its two working parts.
Kill someone named Melinda Steiner—and her lover, since he was definitely in the way now.
Don’t get killed yourself.
No mistakes.
He slowly opened the wooden front door of the house, which wasn’t locked. People did that a lot out in the country, didn’t they? Mistake. And he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to get much resistance once he got upstairs, either.
Still, you never know, so don’t get cocky, don’t get sloppy, don’t get overly cute, Mikey.
He remembered the fiasco in Venice, Italy, what had happened there. The mess, and how he could have gotten tagged. La Cosa Nostra would be looking all over for him now, and one day they’d find him.
So why not today? Why not right here?
His contact for the job was an old