Nobody Dies For Free
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

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