Respectfully,
Allison Parker
Just below her name were two thick black lines of redaction. The redactor, however, had done a fast job of it. Holding the letter up to the light, you could just make out a street address. It would be her new house, whose location she would have gone to great lengths to keep secret from him.
“The second thing...” Merritt was leaning closer yet. “Special services.”
Ryan had a parcel of pink meat halfway to his mouth. The fork returned to the plate, fully loaded.
In the shadowy world of these two men, the phrase didn’t mean elite military units, or concierge treatment of VIP guests in posh hotels. The “services” referred to all things involving for-hire murder—from tracking down the target, to turning the living into the dead, to disposing of the resulting work product in clever ways so that the body was never found. Which was, Jon Merritt knew very well, a task far more difficult than, at first blush, it seemed.
12
Wearing a yellow plastic apron, the man stood in the middle of his workshop.
He’d pulled the latex gloves off to read the text he’d just received. Now he slipped the phone away and eyed the end table.
It was a functional piece, no particular era, about two by two feet, thirty inches high, the beaded trim around the top being the only fillip.
“Dawndue...” came the sound from his thin lips, the fabricated word a habit, an affectation. He uttered it the way someone might whistle or hum. He was often unaware of doing this. One woman he dated had asked if he was a bird-watcher and the sound was that of a dove.
Moll Frain was a big man, with broad shoulders and a thick neck. He was, in effect, a column. A slim paintbrush looked silly in his blunt hands. His face was pocked but not extensively. Sometimes you couldn’t even see it. He was today in what he wore frequently: black dress slacks and a white shirt, both of which the smock protected from paint.
Moll was a native Ferringtonian, born here, the son of laborers in one of the ironworks, father on the line, mother in bookkeeping.
He was infinitely grateful that he’d found within him some talent that sent him on a different career path from that of his parents.
Eyeing the table again.
The temptation was to continue, enhance some more. And more after that. But he’d learned to resist. Once you were done, you were done, and—in your heart—you knew it.
The table was made of machine-cut pine, but now, in its transformed state, it was something more: the legs were white marble, streaked with veins of black. The top appeared to be copper aged to green.
Such was the magic of faux finishing. Turning something into what it was not. The large, airy workshop behind his modest house contained fifteen pieces, some drying, some dry. Others were in their dull mass-marketed state, awaiting his magic touch.
Moll’s favorite was a chair sitting near the wall. It was constructed of aluminum. He’d painted it to resemble wood. He liked the irony. This piece he would never sell.
He washed his brushes in turpentine—he used only righteous oil paints, not acrylic—and sealed the cans tight with a rubber mallet.
He hung the smock on a hook, then returned to his living room. He pulled on a suit jacket and knotted a deep blue tie around his neck. He looked at his watch. It was time to go.
Come on, man. Come on.
Glancing past the timepiece at his wrist, he examined his ruddy skin. It was worse. He was having an allergic reaction to something—his arms, neck, legs and chest were red and burned and itched. He hadn’t noticed the condition right away because he was an outdoorsman and had a late-season sunburn. But this was something different. It was spreading.
The decor of his bungalow was pale green, the same shade as the exterior siding. The color in here was more vibrant; the windows were curtained and no sun intruded. The outside clapboard was bleached pale. While he produced a piece of furniture or pictureframe once a week or so, he had yet to paint the exterior of his dwelling.
The place felt empty today.
He was thinking, as he often had recently, that at this age, forty-three, he should settle down, be serious about it, get a woman.
That’s what his mother had written him in emails... while she still knew what a computer was.
And what writing was.
Settle down...
Well, he wasn’tthatold. Not nowadays. He’d get it worked out.