Dangerous Women

A THOUSAND MILES FROM NOWHERE by LORENZO CARCATERRA

The tall man sat with his back resting against the thick glass window. His eyes were shut, three fingers of his right hand holding down a long-neck bottle of lukewarm beer. On a radio murmuring somewhere in the distance, the Dixie Chicks were working their way through “Give It Up or Let Me Go.” The man took a deep breath and ran his free hand across the top of his left knee, trying to ease the pain that too many years of medication and three operations had failed to lessen. He was tired, lacking the patience to wait out yet another winter snowstorm, the din of what had, only hours earlier, been a bustling airport terminal, reduced now to the quiet scrapings of cleaning crews and the fitful sleep of stranded passengers.

He was supposed to have been in Nashville four hours ago, finished his job three hours ago and been halfway through a smoked rib and baked bean dinner by now. Instead, here he was, sitting in the back of a bar whose name he didn’t know, manned by a middle-aged bartender who cared less about his next refill than he did about the tape-delayed lacrosse game coming down off the soundless TV above him. The tall man opened his eyes, turned his head and looked out through the steam-streaked glass. The snow was coming down at an angle, thick flakes building up on silent runways and against the wheels of stalled Boeing jets. An airport ground crew was spraying down an American Eagle jet with yellow foam, in a vain attempt to keep its engines from freezing in the midst of an unforgiving wind. The tall man turned away from the window and lifted his bottle of beer, finishing it off in two thick gulps.

There would be no flights tonight.

“You can blame me, if you want,” the woman’s voice said. “Happens every time I fly. I leave the house and the bad weather follows.”

She stood facing the long window, watching the flakes land and slide down the thick glass, a gray satchel resting against the points of her black boots, long blonde hair shielding half her face. A black leather coat stopped at the knee and did little to disguise her slim, shapely body. Her voice was cotton soft and her white skin shimmered off the glow from the low-watt lights that lined the room and the heavy floods that lit the outside runways.

“Make it up to me,” the tall man said to her.

She turned to look at him, her dark eyes giving off a glint of red, a cat caught in the glare of a flashlight. “How?” she asked.

“Let me buy you a drink,” the tall man said. “Thanks to the weather you brought in, it looks like there’s little else to do but wait. And I don’t much feel like reading the paper-again.”

The woman kicked aside her satchel and undid the buttons on her leather coat. She tossed the coat on an empty chair between them, swung aside strands of hair from her eyes, pulled back a chair and sat across from the tall man. “Bourbon,” she said. “Glass of ice water with lemon on the side.”

The tall man gave a hint of a smile, pushed his chair back, grabbed his empty beer bottle and walked toward the bar. The woman watched him leave and then turned her look to the raging storm, swirling gusts of powder and ice particles dancing in circles under the hot lights.

“You’re gonna have to make do with lemon peel,” the tall man said, resting the drinks on her side of the table. He sat back down and tilted a sweaty bottle of Heineken in her direction. “Cheers,” he said with a smile and a wink and downed a long swallow from the cold beer.

The woman nodded and sipped her bourbon, the familiar burn in her throat and chest as welcome as an old friend. She sat back and looked across the table at the tall man. He was in his mid-forties and in shape, hard upper body chiseled by daily workouts, his white, button-down J. Crew shirt tight around the arms and neck. His face was tanned and handsome, set off by Greek olive eyes and rich dark hair. His gestures and movements were deliberate, never rushed, his body language calm and free of stress, the habits of a man at ease in his own skin. “What city aren’t you going to tonight?” he asked.

“ Los Angeles,” the woman said, glancing down at the silver Tiffany watch latched around her thin wrist. “If the skies were clear, would have been in LAX twenty minutes ago.”

“What’s there?” he asked.

“Warm weather, palm trees, movie stars and an ocean you can swim in,” the woman said.

“What’s there for you?” he asked, leaning closer toward her, the beer bottle still in his right hand.

“All of that,” she said. “Plus a home where I can walk to the beach, a car that loves winding hills and two cats that are always happy to see me.”

“The beach, a car and two cats,” the man said. “That usually means no kids and no husband.”

“You can’t have everything,” the woman said.

“That depends on what you want everything to be,” the man said.

“What’s it for you?” the woman asked.

The man sipped his beer and shrugged. “This, right now,” the man said. “Having a beer, sitting across from a beautiful woman in an empty airport. Being in the moment and enjoying it. Not having to huddle in a corner and burn out a cell phone battery to say goodnight to kids I never see enough to make a dent or listen to a wife complain about something I never even knew was a problem and could care less that it is. No mortgage, no bills, no worries. Live the way I travel. Light.”

“You need money to live like that,” the woman said. “And either a job or a rich father to hand it over. Which belongs to you?”

“If I’m going to open my heart, it’d be nice to know who it’s going to,” the man said, revealing a handsome smile.

“You could call me Josephine,” the woman said. “But I wouldn’t like it very much. Even when my mother used to use the name I’d cringe. Most of the people I talk to just call me Joey. It makes it easier for everyone that way.”

“I knew a nun named Josephine once,” the man said. “She didn’t seem to like the name much either. So, Joey it is.”

“And whose heart is it that’s about to be opened up to Joey?” the woman asked, more a smirk than a smile crossing her lips, bourbon glass held close to her mouth.

“I’m Frank,” the man said. “Same name as my father and grandfather. My family liked to keep things simple.”

“So do you, based on what I’ve heard so far,” Joey said.

“Pretty much,” Frank said. “There usually isn’t any kind of a payoff when you add in complications.”

“That’s not always easy to arrange,” Joey said. “Sometimes complications just seem to happen.”

“All the more reason not to toss our own into the mix,” Frank said. “There’s always somebody somewhere eager to make something simple hard. It’s what they live for and it’s what I do my best to avoid.”

“In my line of work we call them defense attorneys and judges,” Joey said.

“Is that what you do in L.A. when you’re not at the beach or hanging around the house with the cats?” Frank asked. “Practice law?”

“I don’t need to practice it all that much,” Joey said. “I pretty much have cornered all I need to know.”

“Which means you’re good,” he said.

“Which means I’m very good,” Joey said.

“Which is bad news for the bad guys, I guess,” Frank said, downing the last row of suds from his beer.

“Not if they cover their tracks,” Joey said, her voice calm and matter-of-fact. “But most of them don’t, which is how I get to meet them in the first place. Unless they commit the perfect crime, the absolute perfect crime, they’ll get to stare at me talking about them in a courtroom.”

“You ever see one?” Frank asked. “A perfect crime?”

“I’ve heard about a few,” Joey said. She took a long drink of her bourbon, brushing the last drop off her lower lip with her tongue, and took a slow and quiet deep breath. “But I’ve seen only one.”

“Was it one of yours?”

Joey shook her head. “I was still in law school,” she said.

“My first year in. A young girl was found dead in her bedroom. Her apartment was on the second floor of a five-story walk-up. No break-in, not from the front door or from any of the windows. Nothing stolen, nothing missing, no prints, no DNA, no bullet casings. Just a dead girl and three bullets.”

“And you think that’s what made it perfect?” Frank asked, sitting up and leaning closer toward Joey. “You don’t need to be a genius to know not to leave behind any prints, DNA or casings. Anybody who watches too many cop shows or reads too many legal thrillers can pick that up.”

“You’re right,” Joey said. “What made it perfect was that he was never caught.”

“Cops give a case as little or as much time as they think a case deserves,” Frank said. “They’re like car salesmen. They’re not looking to sell every car on the lot, just as many as allows them to keep their job.”

“Sounds like you’ve given this a lot of thought,” Joey said.

“Not really,” Frank said. “I’m just one of those people who watches too many cop shows and reads too many legal thrillers.”

“I managed to get ahold of her case file,” Joey said. “The cops did a pretty thorough job but they didn’t have much to work with. The murder happened in the middle of the day, when most of the other tenants were out, either at work, at school, in a gym or shopping. She hadn’t been living in the apartment very long, so didn’t have many friends in the building.”

“How’d he get in?” Frank asked. “Or I should ask, how do they think he got in?”

“You don’t have to break in to get in,” Joey said. “She might have known him, which I doubt. She might have let him in because he forced her to, but I don’t think that’s the case, either.”

“And what does the Sherlock Holmes of Los Angeles think happened?” Frank asked, his smile colder now, his eyes locked onto Joey’s face.

“I think he knew her routine,” Joey said. “What time she woke up. What time she went for her run and how long she ran. What her class schedule was and which buildings they were in. He studied her. He made it a point to get to know her, without ever having to meet her.”

“If he did all that, he must have had a reason,” Frank said. “Or been given one by somebody else.”

“Reasons are always simple enough to find,” Joey said. “Once you figure out the best place to look.”

“And what did you get?” Frank asked. “Once you figured out where to look?”

“That somebody paid money to have her killed,” Joey said, her fingers stroking at the sides of her water glass.

“If you dug deep enough to know that, then you know why he did it,” Frank said. “What’d you find, personal or business?”

Joey finished her water and slid the empty glass toward Frank. “I’m always thirsty to begin with,” she said. “Talking makes me even more so. You want another go-around? It’s my treat.”

“You’re the one telling the story,” he said, standing and turning toward the bar. “I’ll supply the refreshments.”

She watched him lean on the wood bar and wait while the bartender reached down for a fresh beer and then filled two empty glasses, one with bourbon and the other with ice and water. “She likes lemon in her water,” she heard Frank say.

“And I’d like to get the hell home,” the bartender said, dropping three lemon twists into the water glass. “This is last call. You want more than what I just gave you, order it now. I close up in twenty minutes.”

“What’s your rush?” Frank asked. “No plane is gonna pull outta here until the morning, if then.”

“But my car is,” the bartender said. “In twenty minutes.”

Frank rested the glasses on the table. “Used to be a bartender was better than a shrink,” he said. “Cared more or at least listened as if he did. I guess we found one that missed that part of bartending class.”

“Maybe he’s one of the lucky ones,” Joey said. “Maybe he’s got somebody somewhere waiting and worried.”

Frank turned to look at the bartender, cradling the beer in both hands. “I don’t think so,” he said. “My guess is you and me are as close to company as he’s gonna have tonight.”

“Some people learn to live without company,” Joey said. “Or family. Like you.”

“It does help keep it all simple,” Frank said, looking back at her, resting the beer on the edge of the table. “Things can get complicated real fast, pretty much for no reason, the second you let other people cross your radar.”

“It doesn’t bother you living the way you do?” Joey asked.

“I don’t know,” Frank said. “How is it you think I live?”

“You travel from city to city and from job to job,” Joey said with an air of confidence. “The work pays pretty well, judging by the clothes you’re wearing and the first-class ticket in your shirt pocket.”

“If you’re going to bother to put in the time on anything,” Frank said, “make sure it at least pays you for the trouble.”

“But yours is not a job for anyone,” Joey said. “At least that’s my guess.”

“Few are,” Frank said.

“But it must have its rewards,” Joey said. “All good jobs do.”

“What are yours?” Frank asked. “What is it about being a lawyer that makes you want to leave your bed in the morning?”

“That I can make it stop,” Joey said. “If only just for a lucky lew.

“Make what stop?”

“The evil at the other end of the table,” Joey said. “And the pain felt by the innocent ones who sit behind me in the courtroom every day on every case. Their faces change with every trial, but they all look the same to me. I don’t even need to see them to know what they’re feeling, what they’re thinking, all their regrets, all their wasted tears.”

“Putting a guy in a cell makes them feel all better?” Frank asked.

“Not really,” Joey said. “But I think it doesn’t make the hurt they feel at losing someone they love get any worse to live with. A crime committed against one is always a memory shared by many.”

“Spoken more like a victim than a lawyer,” Frank said.

“Sometimes you can be both,” Joey said.

“Do you ever think about the guy at that other end of the table?” Frank asked. “The one you seem so eager to put away?”

“Every day,” Joey said. “The ones I helped convict and the ones that I couldn’t and the one I never had a chance to bring to trial.”

“What do you see when you look over there?” he asked. “Do you ever take the time to look beyond the hard eyes, the prison gym body and the hands resting flat on the wood table?”

“And if I did?” Joey said. “What is it I’d see?”

“Depends on who it is and what you’re looking for,” Frank said. “If you go in looking for pity, you’ll get that soon enough. Every guy in an orange jumpsuit has a sad story he’s eager to tell or sell. But if you go in search of the reasons a guy ends up sitting next to a lawyer he can’t afford, then you might find something more than a sad story at the other end.”

“Will it be enough to make me forget the victim?” Joey asked. “Or forgive what was done?”

“Not if you don’t want to,” Frank said.

“Aren’t all those stories pretty much the same?” Joey asked. “Abusive childhood, parents not around, or on drugs if they are, crime the only door left open to them. Have I left anything out?”

“That’s true nine out of ten times,” Frank said.

“What is it that one other time?”

“It’s a good cover for a guy who came from a solid home and a family that cared,” Frank said. “He went to the best school in his area, played Little League baseball and flag football and sat next to his mother every Sunday at church service. He had good grades and a part-time job after school that kept him in comic books and trading cards.”

“Sounds ideal,” Joey said, holding her drink close to her face, elbow on the side of the table.

“It’s the American way of life,” Frank said. “But only if you judge it by what you see on the surface. You don’t want to take it any lower than that.”

“And if you do?” Joey asked. “What happens then?”

“Then you might see a set of pictures you won’t like,” Frank said. “You see a mother wearing too much makeup to a PTA meeting to cover the heavy drinking from the night before. You see a father who keeps odd hours and travels long distances on business trips that no one talks about. You see three loaded handguns kept in the middle drawer of his bedroom bureau and bags filled with neatly folded bills hidden in the attic under a small mountain of winter quilts.”

“And how does any of that lead you to where you take someone else’s life and not care about it?” Joey asked.

“That kind of living makes you hard,” Frank said. “Teaches you to keep buried anything that would even come close to where you’d care about anybody. Before your skin has a chance lo clear up, you’ve already learned that people are never who they say they are and that even the most innocent person walking around is hiding some level of guilt underneath. In plain English, it makes it very easy not to care. About anything or about anybody.”

“That include the victims that are left behind?” Joey asked.

“Especially them,” Frank said. “They have to stay the way they were always meant to stay. Invisible. In fact, if you’re really on your game, they disappear the second the job’s done and they’re outta your line of sight. And their name becomes as easy for you to forget as yesterday’s weather. They become, out there on those streets, what the defendant becomes to somebody like you inside a courtroom. A face you try to put away and forget.”

Joey drank down half the bourbon in one hard gulp, her right hand twitching slightly, unnerved for the first time since she sat down. It was so much easier for her to keep her emotions in check inside the courtroom. There, she was the one who held the controls, or at least she felt enough like she did. She asked the questions and expected to get the answers she wanted and needed to hear. But it was so much different inside the confines of a warm and stuffy bar, miles removed from any halls of justice. The hard-edged man across the table from her was a better-equipped foe than any that she had come across in all her years as a trial lawyer. He was quick to sense her raw points and even quicker to pounce on them. And more than anything else, he took pleasure from their give and take, fearless in the face of the questions and the answers they required.

Joey took another sip from her drink, rested the glass back on the table and rubbed the strain at the base of her neck. She looked up at Frank and caught him staring at her. “I guess this is what happens when you get snowed in,” she said, looking to bring the mood up a notch, eager to once again wrest control of the conversation.

“Bad weather and cold beer,” Frank said, holding up his close-to-empty bottle. “A lethal combination.”

“You would have made a good lawyer,” Joey told him.

“You couldn’t have figured that from the way I dress,” he said. “I must have done something foolish to give you that idea.”

“You argue your case well,” she said. “Make your points, but steer clear of any emotion. You keep it all in check. It’s often the only way to walk away with a win.”

“That’s not true just of lawyers,” Frank said. “It pretty much fits about any profession I can think of, good ones and bad. There are some lines of work where showing your emotions, letting your heart beat your brain to your mouth, can kill you faster than a stray bullet.”

“But only the best can function at that high a level,” Joey said, feeling like she was back on her offensive game, one leg crossed casually over the other. “And even the best lose that edge, even for just a minute. And that’s when the price that’s paid is always a steep one.”

“If you’re the best, I mean really are the best, not just think it or say it, then no matter what else you do you can’t ever afford to lose,” Frank said. “Not ever. In some lines of work, one loss is all you get.”

“But it happens,” Joey said. “No matter how much we plan, how much we prepare, no matter how ready we think we are, no matter how good we may be. It happens.”

“Maybe in a courtroom or a boxing ring,” Frank said. “Luck can sneak its way up on you inside those places. But in most of her lines, you can’t ever make room for either mistakes or luck.”

“Unless the luck is good,” Joey said, giving off a warm smile, once again at ease, working within her self-imposed comfort zone.

“I never count on luck,” Frank said, index finger stabbing the edge of the table for emphasis. “It’s not a risk worth the taking.”

“What about this?” Joey asked. “You and me, sitting here, talking to each other. You take away the storm and two canceled flights and none of that ever happens. That sounds like luck. At least to me.”

“Not luck,” Frank said, shaking his head, managing a weak smile. “Destiny.”

“That we would meet?” she asked.

“That you would find me,” Frank said, his eyes telling her that he knew who she was even before she sat down.

Joey sat back in her chair, looked away from Frank and out toward the storm, its anger running now at full vent. “I always knew I would,” she whispered, but in words loud enough for him to hear. “I never figured on not finding you.”

“So did I,” Frank said, staring at her, looking past the low glare of the table lamp. “I always knew you were out there, looking, asking questions, never more than one, two steps behind me.”

Joey looked back at Frank and pushed aside her water glass. “You didn’t make it easy,” she said. “Every time I thought I was close, you would vanish, pop up again a few months later in some other city, leaving behind another trail to be followed.”

“Part of what I do involves not getting caught,” Frank said with a slight shrug. “Another part is knowing who it is that’s out there looking for me.”

“How long have you known?” she asked. “About me?”

Frank downed the remainder of his beer and laughed, low and quiet, his face barely creased. “Probably long before you knew about me,” he said. “Number one in your class, both high school and college. Went through law school like flames through an old barn. Passed up the big firms and the bigger dollars, wanted no part of that world. It wasn’t what you were about and wouldn’t lead you to where you needed to go. Making partner didn’t matter to you. Getting convictions was what you were chasing and you did get plenty of those.”

“You could have brought it all to an end,” she said. “Could have eased me out of your picture. Wouldn’t have taken you much.”

“There was no profit in it,” Frank said. “And that made it not worth doing.”

“And what was the profit in killing my sister?” Joey asked. She was surprised at how calm she felt, how relaxed her body and mannerisms were. She had always believed this moment would one day arrive, but had never allowed her thinking to take her beyond that point, to what she would do once it did present itself, what she would say.

“Someone thought she was a threat and paid to have that threat removed,” Frank said. “It was nothing but a payout for me.”

“How much?” Joey asked. “How much money did my sister put inside your pockets?”

“Fifteen thousand,” Frank said. “Plus expenses. All in cash and all up front. That’s about what you average in take home to nail a twenty-five-to-life sentence.”

Joey took a deep breath, fighting off the visions of her sister’s face, closing out the sounds of her happy laughter, erasing the sight of her paintings lining the entryway of her parents’ home. She swallowed back the angry rumble in her stomach and the acid burn building in her throat. She had to keep herself emotionally detached from any and all feelings, ease her mind from the shadowed darkness of an empty bar and into the glaring light of an open courtroom. She had her prey in her sights, had him on the witness stand, had him where he could not ever run again. All she had left to do now, as she had done so many times before, across so many years, was to go in for the close. Nail the conviction and have the verdict rendered.

“They thought she was a witness to a hit and run,” Joey said. “That she had seen enough to get a good look at a make and model, maybe even an outside chance at a partial plate number. But they were wrong. She was walking away from the accident, not toward it. By the time she heard the crash and turned around, the victim was down and dead and the car was one full block away.”

“She was on that block,” Frank said. “And the only person near the scene that the cops even bothered to talk to. That was all they needed to put a call in to me.”

“It was a call that never needed to be made,” Joey said. “All they had to do was get their hands on the police report. My sister was what the cops call a DE. A dead end. She gave them nothing because she had nothing to give. But that nothing was more than enough to have her stamped for death. Some innocent girl was fingered and killed all because some New York gangster wanted his drug-addicted son to get away with a murder.”

“I don’t pick who I work for,” Frank said. “They pick me.”

“They pick you because they know the job will get done,” Joey said. “It’ll be clean and quiet. And almost impossible to trace, either back to you, or the money or to the voice at the other end of the telephone.”

“Not so impossible,” Frank said. “Or you wouldn’t be sitting here.”

“I made it my business to find you,” she said. “I made it my life.”

“I always knew you would,” Frank said. “All these years I knew you were out there and I knew you would never stop.”

“There were times I wished you would have stopped me,” Joey said, sadness etching her words. “Brought it all to an end. For you and for me.”

“I never gave it any thought,” Frank said.

Joey took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a brief moment. This was always the hardest part of the Q &A for her, asking the short, direct queries that were designed to bring a victim’s face to the jury. Keeping the victims alive, making them a presence in a courtroom often dominated by a charming, well-mannered and well-behaved defendant, was always the most painful part of a prosecution. “The victim is the one person they never see that they need to see,” an old judge had once told her. “It is so easy for the jury to forget. It is the prosecutor’s job to keep that victim alive. Full closure can only come with a guilty verdict and a conviction. Nothing else will do.”

The bartender turned off the silent television and pulled the switch on the blue-glow lights behind the rows of whiskey bottles. He stared over at Frank and Joey, his middle-aged face weary and void of any expression. He was short, with a squat frame that was balanced by two broad arms, a long line of aging purple tattoos running down their fleshy side. His bald head glistened with tiny sweat beads and slivers of scalp oil. Ralph Santo was the kind of man who went into life expecting little in return and he walked away never disappointed.

“Why did she let you into her apartment?” Joey asked.

“What story did you tell her that made her trust you enough to do that?”

“Why don’t you call her by her name?” Frank asked, returning the question with one of his own. “She’s not just another victim. She’s your sister.”

“You don’t deserve to hear her name,” Joey said, her low voice a venomous hiss.

“She had a good heart,” Frank said. “Like a lot of kids her age. I told her I had lost my wallet and needed to make a phone call. Try to reach my girlfriend and have her come pick me up.”

“She trusted you,” Joey said.

“Most people do,” Frank said. “You would have, too.”

“What if she didn’t have a good heart?” Joey asked. “What if she had just said no and kept walking or offered to give you money for a cab? What would have happened then?”

“It never got to that,” Frank said. “It seldom does.”

“What if it had?” Joey asked. “Would you have killed her on the street?”

“Only if I was really eager to get caught,” Frank said. “Which I wasn’t.”

“When did she know?” Joey asked. “That a phone call wasn’t what you were after.”

“Why are you doing this?” Frank asked. “You know everything you need to know. Skip the details. It’ll make it easier to live with yourself. No matter how tonight ends up being played out.

“When did she know?” Joey asked, her question now more pointed and direct, her anger residing just below the surface.

“We were in the apartment and she led me to the small dining room, turned to me and pointed out the phone,” Frank said. “That was the first time she saw the gun.”

“Did she cry?” Joey asked. “Or scream for help?”

“No,” Frank said.

“Did she say anything to you at all?”

“She asked me not to rape her,” Frank said.

“And that’s why you didn’t?”

“You know better than to ask that,” Frank said. “I didn’t rape her because I don’t rape anybody. I was there to do a job. I did it and then I left. If it means anything, I wasn’t looking to cause her any great pain. I did it the best I could and as fast as I could.”

“She say anything before she died?” Joey asked.

“No,” Frank said. “She just closed her eyes and waited for it to happen.”

“Did you ever think of not doing it?” Joey said. “Didn’t seeing that sweet, innocent girl, shivering on a bed, waiting for you to pump bullets into her body, not make you just want to walk away from it all?”

“What difference would my answer to that make to you?” Frank said. “It doesn’t matter what I thought or how I felt. All that matters is what I did.”

“You made a name for yourself off that murder,” Joey said. “It put you in demand. The calls came in steady after that, the work more than you could handle.”

“Let’s just say it got easier after that,” Frank said.

“And you only got better,” Joey said. “Here it is more than twenty years later and no one has even come close to putting handcuffs on you.”

“Is that what you’re waiting to see?” Frank asked.

“Maybe that would have been enough twenty years ago,” Joey said. “But not now. I need more than that.”

“If you were going to kill me you would have done it when you had the chance,” Frank said. “And that chance was when you first walked in and right before you ordered that first drink.”

“I wish I could kill you,” Joey said. “I wish I could pull out a gun and shoot you until you were dead. I wish I could do to you what you did to my sister. But we both know that I can’t and talking about it is just a waste of time.”

“You came a long way and waited through a lot of years just to hear me say I did it,” Frank said. “Is that going to be enough for you?”

“You can’t get a conviction without a guilty plea,” Joey said. “ I didn’t have that until tonight.”

“Well then, you got what you came for,” Frank said. “I’m guilty as charged, Counselor. Which leaves you where? Calling the cops won’t do you much good. It’s going to take a terrorist attack to get them out in this weather, not a twenty-year-old murder case none of them even remember. And airport security couldn’t catch their ass with both hands, let alone someone who’s been running for as long as me.”

“There’s just one more thing left for me to do,” Joey said. “And I don’t need the cops, or security to get that done.”

“Do I need to guess?” Frank asked. “Or you going to spoil the suspense and tell me?”

“It’s what I’ve been waiting more than twenty years to do,” Joey said. “I get to sentence you.”

“That’s a judge’s job,” Frank said. “You get promoted and not tell me about it?”

“In this case, I’m one-stop shopping,” Joey said. “Prosecutor, jury and judge.”

“I hope it’s not community service,” Frank said. “I would really hate that.”

“And it’s not life in prison, either,” Joey said. “I don’t have the power to do that. Or for that matter, the desire.”

“Which leaves what?”

Joey pushed her chair back and stood, her eyes glaring down at Frank. “The death penalty,” she said. “I sentence you to die for the murder of my sister. There will be no appeals filed and the twenty years that have passed since the crime was committed take care of any stays of execution you might have earned.”

“I’ve only had a couple of beers,” Frank said, smiling and brushing off the harshness of her words. “That’s not much of a last meal.”

“You picked the place,” Joey said, picking up her black leather coat. “Not me. But I’ll get the tab. A condemned man shouldn’t have to pay for anything other than for his crime.”

“You’re really not following proper procedure,” Frank said. “I always had you pinned as a stickler for details. But here I am sentenced to die and no last shower and no fresh batch of clothes. That’s not like you to be sloppy, Counselor.”

“I have to use what’s available to me,” Joey said, tossing the coat on and reaching for her bag. “Besides, you don’t look like you need either a shower or new clothes. But I did make arrangements for your remains.”

“Buried or burned?” he asked.

“That’s at the discretion of the executioner,” Joey said. She picked up her bag, took one final look at Frank and turned to leave the bar.

“If he’s a pro, he’ll probably do both,” Frank said, his eyes not moving from the table.

“You would know that better than I would,” Joey said, her head down, walking toward the open entrance to the bar.

“Hope to run into you again, Counselor,” Frank said, raising his voice one notch, looking at her back.

Joey stopped and dropped her bag; its low-impact thud echoed inside the silent and empty bar. She lowered her head and closed her eyes, her two hands balled into tight fists. “I’m afraid not, Frank,” she said, calling him by his name for the only time that night. “This was our first and last meeting. It’s all over between us. This case is now closed.”

Frank nodded. He didn’t need to turn around to know that he’d been locked into the perfect setup from the time he walked into the bar. He didn’t need to hear the muted footsteps coming his way or the click of the nine-millimeter that was sure to be aimed at the back of his head. He knew his run was over.

He glanced up at Joey, her back to him, her body still, her head hanging low. He knew she’d been on his tail all these years and wondered why they had both waited until this night to bring the chase to an abrupt end. He was relaxed and relieved in those few silent moments before the first bullet hit. He had chosen the life and now had chosen his own way out of it. He was glad that Joey had been the one, knew she would eventually find the courage to take it to the next step. In that sense, there were two people in that bar on that snowy night that felt a burden lifted.

Joey heard the three muted shots and then heard Frank utter a low, guttural moan and then heard a thud as his upper body fell face forward on the small table, an empty beer bottle smashing to the floor. She stayed frozen in place, waiting with her head bowed as the footsteps now came walking in her direction.

“It’s done,” she heard the bartender say as he stood next to her. “He’s dead.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“I’ll clean the place up and get rid of the body,” he told her. “By the time the storm clears, he’ll be gone for good.”

“And so will you,” she said.

“No profit in sticking around,” the bartender said. “I hate bars and I hate airports. This is definitely not the place for me.”

Joey reached down and picked up her bag. “How good was he?” she asked. “Do you know?”

“Frank Corso was the best,” the bartender said. “None better. There are enough stories about him to fill a dozen books.”

“But you got to him,” she said. “Does that make you better than him now?”

“I got to him because he wanted me to,” the bartender said. “Believe me, if he didn’t want to go down, it would have been my body being left under a mound of snow.”

“Why would he do that?” she asked. “Give up the way he did?”

“Maybe he just got tired of the game,” the bartender said. “It’s been known to happen sometimes. Or maybe, he felt he owed you. That happens, too. Or maybe it was something else. Something a guy like him could never allow to happen.”

“What?”

“Maybe Frank fell in love with you,” the bartender said. “You chasing him all these years, he ended up knowing as much about you as you did about him. You get close to a person that way, closer even than to somebody you see every day of your life. You end up feeling for that person. Usually it’s hate. But, on a one-in-a-million shot, it does roll out as love.”

“We’ll never know then,” Joey said.

“You can catch a cab if you need one on the lower level,” the bartender said. “There are buses, too, but you might have to wait the rest of the night for one to take you back to the city.”

“I’m not in any hurry,” Joey said, walking slowly out of the darkness of the bar and into the soft glare of the terminal, lined on both sides by shuttered stores. “I have nowhere else to go.”