Read In Too Deep for Free Online Page B

be the point in mentioning that I know a lot of unsavoury people who are good at making accidents happen, or that I have friends in the police who could, with a little prompting, open up old wounds and make things decidedly difficult for you?’
    â€˜You won’t do that,’ she said. ‘That would be putting your own head in the noose.’
    â€˜Well, since you bring that up, I have an alibi, a congressman in fact, who will swear up and down a Bible that I was with him that evening. Besides, there’s nothing to link me with anything improper.’
    She looked close to tears.
    â€˜Look,’ I sighed, ‘like I said, I’m not threatening you. I did what you hired me to do. Maybe I could force you to pay me, but I’m not going to do that.’ I stood, pulled on my coat and showed myself to the door. ‘Good-bye, Mrs Malone,’ I said, ‘and good luck.’
    That was two years ago. In my entire career, she was the only client who ever stiffed me on a bill. I guess people know about it, people who count, and they probably think that I got my money some other way, or that I’m just a sucker for a pretty face and a nice pair of legs. Maybe they’re right.
    I never heard from her again. It always felt like the only job that I had left unfinished, and it was unfinished, until this morning.
    Suicide, the papers said. As wealthy as she was, her death was high profile enough to make the national rags. The details were sketchy but, apparently, she cut her wrists. I could picture that, her gentle hands, the marble glow of her skin and the incision. Her in the bathtub, naked in a few inches of warm water, her cheeks wet from tears, working up the courage with a bottle of ten-year-old malt whiskey while the straight razor lay in its crooked fold on the tub’s porcelain edge. The papers put it down to depression caused by the tragic death of her husband, the transport magnate, Jake Malone, two years earlier. Things like that make nice news, tragic love, a strange kind of happy ending.
    Not the way I wanted it, even though she was the one blot on my copybook. Obviously, she took her life because she could no longer live with what she had done. But if she didn’t believe after all that her husband’s death had been accidental, then really, she should have paid me what I was owed, don’t you think?

Dog Days
    Dog days. That was what Melissa always called them, those January and February Sundays in any midwestern city, when they were down to the stitching of their pockets and the hunger for whiskey had made a festering pit of their bellies. The sort of days when the air has its own sound, when the streets are empty of people yet full of people’s waste. Rags of newspaper bound and tumble along, then mildew to death in the sodden gutters, their warnings and promises melting into the same inky pulp, to be forgotten by the world. Melissa is three years gone from Johnny’s life, but the dog days still come.
    This isn’t any kind of town for the likes of you, she used to say. Not for the likes of you.
    And actually, there was something in that, some meaning that he glimpsed from time to time but could never quite catch. He listened, almost understanding, but all he could do to ease her pain was nod his head in agreement. She smiled at his lie and so did he, and they both had something to share, even as little as that. He listened to her, but he could not leave, even after he had offered up every promise in the book that, okay, he would, just as soon as he … because all of that was just whiskey talk and everyone knows that there is no holding to those sort of promises. He told her what she wanted to hear but, as with all his other lies, these were just words spoken to fill the hollows and to add a little variation to the constant strumming of the wind. If she could take some additional solace from what he was saying, if she could somehow persuade herself that she