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  Monroe went back inside, tossed a warm greeting to the receptionist, and took the elevator back up to the fourth floor. Angela’s door was open and Monroe entered.

  “You look upset. What did the detective have to say?”

  “The same thing, over and over again; he came to see me three times while I was in the hospital and he asks the same questions, to which I have no good answers.”

  “So they’re no closer to figuring out who shot you?”

  “It doesn’t seem so.”

  “I have something for you,” Monroe said, reaching into his jacket pocket and fishing out a pack of Newport and a cheap lighter. “Here you go.”

  “Thanks,” Angela said, smiling now. “Will you walk outside with me? I may need your hand to block the breeze.”

  Monroe managed to lift his phone from the planter by the door without her noticing. They went back down together, walked outside. Monroe cupped his hands around Angela’s one usable hand as she flicked the lighter and inhaled to get the smoke started.

  “We’re going to have to wait until tomorrow to start on our physical work,” Monroe said. “I have another patient to visit today and the detective’s visit has almost put me off schedule. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right, Rick,” Angela said. “Thanks for the talk earlier, and thanks for this.” She held up the cigarette between drags. “You’ll be back in the morning?”

  “I will, yes.”

  ***

  As soon as Monroe was again out of the parking area and back on the road, he placed the phone on the passenger seat and played back the words that had been spoken while he had been away.

  “What do you want this time, Detective?”

  “The same as I wanted last time, Miss MacIntyre. I want to know what the story is behind that money.”

  “I told you that was a personal matter and has nothing to do with what you’re supposedly investigating, not that you’ve made any progress, have you?”

  “Spare me the attitude. You’re the victim here and I’m on your side. When twenty-five grand goes missing from a woman’s bank account the same week that woman gets shot, the instincts of any decent cop are going to tell him that maybe…probably…there’s a connection. Now what was it: a gambling debt? Maybe you owed them more than just the twenty-five thousand and maybe they got pissed off when you didn’t pay the full amount. Is that why they shot you? Who was it, Miss MacIntyre? Who’d you owe that money to? I want the whole story.”

  “There is no story! I keep telling you that and you won’t listen! It was my money and I’ll do whatever I want with it. Maybe I gave it to charity. Did you ever think of that? And I don’t know who shot me! Try to come up with some new questions next time, Detective!”

  “I’ll be back soon enough, Miss MacIntyre. Find me some answers by then.”

  Monroe heard the sound of the door slamming as Tomasi left the room. The remaining minutes of the recording were filled with a few random profanities from Angela, the sound of her pacing about the room, and what might have been her fist banging once against the window in anger.

  After the recording, Monroe kept driving. He went right past the motel where he had stayed the night before, took a side road, and thought as he cruised.

  There was money, there was a shooting, but the victim had not died. Yet Simon Scythe, if he really was the one who pulled the trigger, had never, as far as Mr. Nine had reported, missed before. What if he had not really missed, Monroe thought. What if Angela MacIntyre had paid to be shot but not killed? A severe enough injury to put her in the hospital, require rehabilitation, but not kill; but why would an otherwise healthy young woman want to put herself through the pain and the trauma of such an event?

  Monroe reviewed his conversation with Angela, replayed it in his mind. She had loved acting in her early attempts at breaking into the profession but had grown frustrated with it later on in her twenties. She had gone back to school, finished her degree. And then she had hired a man to shoot her, if Monroe’s train of thought was accurate. She had said she did not truly miss acting as much as some might assume she did, claimed that perhaps she had been ‘tricked’ into thinking that life as a thespian meant more to her than it actually did. Tricked by whom?

  Monroe ran his new theory around in his head: Angela quits acting. She tries to find a new career even if her degree is tied to the theatre since it is, presumably, what she knows best. Someone then tries to push her back into the pursuit of an acting career. Angela can’t stand the thought of another decade of frustration, of scraping the surface but never really breaking in. She desperately wants a way out or at least a delay to allow her to get her mind sorted out, something to make her incapable of acting or auditioning or pursuing new opportunities for a while. She thinks about injuring herself in some way, not permanent but enough to put her out of commission. But she can’t do it herself; she either lacks the courage or is afraid she may do more damage than she intends. Then, somehow, she hears of the suicide-hitman for hire. She finds a way to contact him. She makes a deal with him. Twenty-five thousand dollars will buy one bullet, one perfectly placed shot to the right shoulder, just enough to give her a nice long break from the pressure being applied by whoever it is that still wants her to be an actress. Is it possible?

  The pieces fit, Monroe decided, although it amazed him to think that Angela could have been desperate enough to risk being shot. How could she have been certain the wound would not be slightly miscalculated and rip into a major artery or shatter a bone or cost her an arm? Still, people do stupid things when desperation rises to a certain level, Monroe knew. He decided to assume, until he learned differently, that he was close to the truth with what he had both discovered and theorized so far. Tomorrow he would try to confirm his suspicions.

  Chapter 5: Mouse, Waiting for Cat

  “If that’s you, Rick, come in!”

  Monroe had knocked and Angela answered, pleasantly and quickly. Monroe pressed down on the handle, pushed the door open, and entered her room. Angela was staring out the window again, which Monroe had observed that she seemed to do at every opportunity. It made sense to him and seemed like the sort of thing a perpetual dreamer might do. She was much less dressed than she had been the last time he’d seen her. No robe this time, just a tank top and shorts. Her hair was down, the injured arm was still in the sling, and she was barefoot. She turned to face him.

  “Good morning!”

  “Angela. How do you feel today?”

  “Not bad, and I can even move my fingers a little bit now.”

  Monroe looked down at the hand that hung in the sling. The fingertips swayed back and forth slightly. “Can you feel it, too?”

  “Somewhat,” Angela answered. “It’s coming back, slowly but steadily I think.”

  “That’s very good,” Monroe said, came closer to her, stopped and reached down to put his hand against hers, the one in the sling. “If you keep improving on your own, you’ll put me out of a job.”

  “You can always be my mental therapist if I don’t need a physical one anymore. You seemed quite good in that department yesterday.”

  “Well I’m happy to help however I can,” Monroe said, “and I enjoyed our talk.”

  “So what’s on for today?” Angela asked.

  “Can I ask you a question? Do you trust me enough to answer it?”

  “Ask and you’ll find out.”

  She smiled as she invited the question and Monroe realized she was flirting with him. He stared at her for a moment; let his eyes go cold, back to business. She saw the change in his expression and took a step back, pulling away from his touch.

  “Who shot you, Angela?”

  “Oh shit! You’re a cop! Tomasi sent you, didn’t he? The two of you are double-teaming me!”

  “No,” Monroe said. “I’m not a cop, Angela, I promise.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “Sit down,” Monroe said, pointing to the bed. The ice in his eyes made plain that it was
not a suggestion, but an order.

  Angela did as he said, sitting down on the edge of the bed then sliding back, pulling her legs up in front of her so her chin rested on her knees. Her shoulders shook with upset and she used her good hand to balance herself as she sat there trying not to cry.

  Monroe sat down next to her, not too close, but near enough that he could grab her if she tried to get up or run or scream. “I’m with the government…and I have some ideas about why you were shot.”

  “What ideas?”

  “Tell me this Angela: who’s been pushing you so hard toward doing something you didn’t want to do that you felt you had to resort to something so stupid as having yourself shot to make them back off?”

  “You figured it out?”

  “I think so.”

  “How much trouble am I in?”

  “Not as much as you think you might be,” Monroe assured her, “if you come clean with me. Who was it that insisted on your acting career? Was it your parents?”

  Angela let out a long sigh, a sound of surrender. “It was my mother mostly. She’d tried it when she was young and failed and now she’s trying, I suppose, to live life through me, but it’s her dream now, not mine any longer. I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

  “And so,” Monroe said, “you went to the trouble and the expense to get yourself shot? Isn’t that a bit extreme?”

  “You might think so from where you’re looking in,” Angela said, still staring down, looking ashamed, embarrassed, leaning further forward and bringing her uninjured hand in front of her now to fiddle with her little toe, the physical activity subconsciously intended to partially distract her from her fear and shame, “but I had to have a break!”

  “Angela,” Monroe said with his voice calm and steady but dead serious, “listen to me now. I’m not here to arrest you or anything like that. I’m not going to tell the police anything. All I want is for you to help me find the man who shot you.”

  “Why do you care? What does what happened to me have to do with the government?”

  “Nothing,” Monroe told her. “This man, assuming he is who we think he is, has been going around shooting people on request for years. Most of them die because they apparently want to. If regular citizens are getting themselves shot for personal reasons, then I truly don’t care what they do or what their reasons are. It simply isn’t my business. But this man recently stuck his nose far too deeply up the ass-end of international politics. One of his contracts had far-reaching consequences that cost hundreds of people their lives. In other words, he’s gone from what might be considered assisted-suicide to committing murder by association. That, I cannot allow. You may have wanted to be shot, although I still think you could have found a better, less dramatic way to have a vacation from your mother’s interference in your life, but think of all the people in the world who don’t want bullets tearing into their bodies, who don’t want to die, who get caught up in wars that were not their idea! Help me put a stop to that, Angela.”

  “And you promise,” Angela asked, turning her head to look at Monroe with the beginnings of tears in her eyes, “that I won’t get in trouble?”

  “Not by my doing, you won’t,” Monroe said.

  Angela fell silent for several minutes, as if weighing, in her mind, whether or not to speak further. She finally decided in favor of Monroe and began again.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “First of all,” Monroe asked, “did you ever meet in person or see the man who shot you?”

  “No.”

  “Damn,” Monroe said. “That would have made things a lot easier. All right then, let’s start at the beginning of the whole strange affair.”

  “Can we leave here for a while?” Angela asked. “I don’t want to talk about it here. Can we go for a drive?”

  “Will they let you leave the grounds?”

  “Who’s going to stop us? I’m paying them a fortune to stay here and you’re a secret agent or something. Don’t you have a gun?”

  “Of course I do, but I can’t just go around shooting whomever I please.”

  “Whatever, Rick. This time you can help me get dressed so we can get out of here sooner.”

  Monroe could still see flirtation in her eyes and her smile, even after he had scared her with the truth. “My pleasure,” he said.

  ***

  It was chillier than the previous day and Monroe had the Lexus’s heat turned on as the window was slightly open on the passenger side so Angela could puff on a Newport. They had left the grounds of the rehab center and were cruising along at a leisurely pace.

  “I couldn’t injure myself,” Angela said. “I’m too much of a coward. So I went looking for a way to have someone else hurt me. I knew there had to be a way and money was no obstacle. I hired a private investigator and he very quickly found exactly what I was looking for. I paid a few thousand dollars for a phone number, and that’s how I contacted the man who shot me.”

  “It was that easy?” Monroe was amazed.

  “Getting the number was easy,” Angela answered, “but getting what I wanted once I called was much harder.”

  “In what way do you mean?” Monroe asked.

  “Getting from Point A to Point B once contact was made was quite labyrinthine.”

  “Describe the process to me,” Monroe said, “exactly as you remember it.”

  “I called the number I had been given,” Angela began, “and he answered. He didn’t tell me his name, but knew immediately why I was calling. His voice was male but he must have been using something to disguise it, because it sounded flat, cold, like I was talking to a robot. He asked me if I wanted to die and I told him that, no, I wanted to live but I needed to be hurt, and I told him how I wanted to be hurt. He asked if I understood how difficult it might be to injure me that way without doing anything worse, but I begged, told him to name his price, told him how desperate I was. And so he told me what the cost would be and what I would have to do to get him to do the job.”

  “And what was that?” Monroe urged her on.

  “The next few days,” Angela said, “were like some mystery movie, like I was a mouse and I had to run all over the city with the knowledge that the cat was watching me from some hidden vantage point. For two days, he would send me instructions and I would go to certain places and wait for further word. I think he was following me to make sure I didn’t have police watching. They were simple, mundane places like certain shops or parks or restaurants, and I’m afraid I no longer remember the order in which I was made to go to those places. After all that running about, he asked me what my schedule would be like in the next week. I told him what I could, and I asked him when he would do the job. He said he couldn’t tell me exactly when it would happen, but that as soon as he had the payment, the deal would be sealed with no opportunity for me to back out. I agreed and he told me where to drop the money, and I did so. After that, I waited, trying to go about my business as normally as possible.”

  “That must have been terrible,” Monroe said. “The waiting: walking around knowing you were going to be shot, but not knowing when or where.”

  “It was strange,” Angela said, “but there was a sort of nervous anticipation, and not all bad. I felt almost as if I was about to meet someone who had promised me love although I’d only spoken with him from afar.”

  “You, my dear,” Monroe said, “are a very troubled young lady. So that was it? You dropped the money somewhere and then, when you left that café, the bullet struck!”

  “Yes. That was the end of it. I remember a noise, pain, falling, and then the hospital and that damn annoying Detective Tomasi.”

  “What about your phone?” Monroe asked. “That would have traces of your communications with this man: saved numbers, text messages and such, even if you deleted them. Do you have that phone with you?”

  “No,” Angela said. “Somewhere between being shot and waking up in the hospital, the phone was lost. The one I have now is a repla
cement.”

  “What about the number you called to make contact with this killer in the first place?” Monroe asked. “Did you have it written down anywhere besides being stored in your phone?”

  “Yes,” Angela admitted. “He told me not to leave it written down anywhere, but I did. It’s in my apartment on a slip of paper hidden inside a book.”

  “Excellent,” Monroe said. “Although the bastard’s probably ditched that number by now, it’s a start, perhaps. What book is it hidden in? Do you remember?”

  “The Complete Works of Shakespeare,” Angela said. “It’s between the pages of Titus Andronicus.”

  “Thank you,” Monroe said. “I’m going to take you back now, Angela, and drop you off at the rehab center. This may be the last time you see me, but I need you to do one last thing for me.”

  “What?”

  “If you were to call your roommate and ask her to come and visit you this evening, do you think she would?”

  “Yes, I think so. We’re not very close, but I feel like we’ve started to become friends since we moved in together.”

  “Good,” Monroe said. “I need her out of your apartment tonight so I can sneak in and get that number. Call me after you’ve spoken to her and I’ll do what I have to do once she’s left the place. I’ll text you when I’ve got what I’m looking for so you can let her leave if she wants to. Can you do that for me?”

  “Of course,” Angela said. “Despite the lie that began our relationship, you’ve been good to me, Rick, and I think I’ll miss you. Be careful going after this man, please.”

  “I will,” Monroe said, reaching over to put a hand on Angela’s knee for a moment. “Now smoke your last cigarette before I take you back to your temporary prison. Tomorrow, your real physical therapist will show up and your life of leisurely strolls, drives, and chats will be at its end.”