Page 79 of Take Your Breath Away

“You promised the kids McDonald’s today.”

“I gotta go into the shop,” he said, referring to the laundromat. “One of the dryers is acting up, needs a new belt or something.” Matt had someone run the place on the weekends and didn’t usually have to go in.

“So do that after lunch,” Tricia said. “Snooze another hour if you want, but you’re not getting out of this.”

Matt dropped his head back onto the pillow and closed his eyes. He loved this woman, but God, she could be a bitch and a half.

He ended up getting out of bed half an hour later, once Tricia had gone downstairs to the kitchen. Had a long shower, standing there until the hot water ran out, thinking.

Matt and Tricia and their kids, Curtis and Cheryl—one big happy family—were in the mall by eleven, which was when Tricia pulled a fast one on him. She wanted to take Curtis to the music shop. He’d recently shown interest in learning to play the piano, and she wanted to check out one of those little electric ones.

“You take Cheryl to the shoe store and I’ll catch up with you,” she said.

“The fuck do I know about kids’ shoes?”

“Just let her look around. I’ll be there in time to decide.”

Like he couldn’t be trusted. People put their faith in him to go out and kill people, but he couldn’t pick out a pair of shoes for a five-year-old.

Little Cheryl knew her way around a shoe store. Walked straight in, grabbed a pair of white runners with pink stripes off the display, and found a saleswoman without any help from her father.

“Would you have these in my size?” she inquired in her tiny voice.

The saleswoman smiled and said, “Let’s have a look at those feet of yours and see what you need.”

Matt stood near the front of the store and watched the foot traffic go by.

She was buried in dirt, he thought. She was in a fucking grave. But if by some chance she wasn’t dead when I put her there …

And it was true, he hadn’t stuck around. Hadn’t seen the point. Why would he? When the job was done, the job was done, and it made sense to get the hell out of there as fast as he could.

It would have to have been like a scene in a movie. A hand coming up out of the dirt. Then another. Then a frantic scramble to get herself aboveground, get some air.

No no no no no.

And yet, she’d been seen. Supposedly.

He sensed a presence next to him. Someone very small, walking about awkwardly, trying on shoes to see how they felt.

Matt turned and knelt down and said, “How do they fit? Are your toes all squished—”

It was not Cheryl. It was a different girl, probably the same age, about the same size. The little girl looked at him, eyes wide, then turned and ran back to a woman standing by the cash register. Her mother, evidently.

Cheryl was still sitting in a chair, shoeless, legs swinging back and forth while she waited for the saleswoman to bring her something to try on.

And suddenly Matt had a thought.

I got the wrong girl.

Had the woman he was supposed to kill been seen in recent days because he never got her in the first place? It wasn’t like he’d asked to see her driver’s license or fill out a questionnaire when she’d come down to the kitchen early that morning. He went to the address he’d been given and left with the woman who lived there. Wasn’t a whole lot of chitchat. Could there have been someone else there instead? Someone staying over? A house swap? But even if that were the case, where had the woman he’d been paid to get rid of been the last six years?

“Daddy?”

He looked down, and this time it was, indeed, his little girl. “Yeah, sweetheart.”

“Do you like these?”

She held up one foot and then another, displaying a pair of shoes emblazoned with dozens of small, sparkling pink stars.