The Alibi Man

Chapter 26

He was waiting for me, as I knew he would be, at the gate into the Palm Beach Point development. Alexi Kulak.

My headlights washed over him as he stood beside his car. He had pulled himself together since I’d seen him. He looked neat, dapper even, in a tailored brown suit. He had shaved and combed his hair. He looked like a businessman waiting for the auto club to show up and change his flat tire. Impatient.

I pulled my car over, parked it, and reached down into the hidden panel of my door. At least I was better prepared this time.

I got out of the car and walked toward him, my hands at my sides.

“Mr. Kulak,” I said, stopping just out of his reach.

“What have you found out?” he asked, skipping the social niceties.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Nothing? Don’t tell me nothing,” he snapped.

“What do you want me to say, then? Should I make something up?”

“You have a smart mouth.”

“Fire me, then. I didn’t audition for this job.”

I had left my headlights on. I kept my back to the light so I could see him clearly but the glare and my shadow would make it difficult for him to see me. I could see he didn’t appreciate my chutzpah.

“Do you know how I fire people, Ms. Estes?” he asked quietly.

“Fifty-five-gallon drum and forty gallons of acid?”

He smiled like a shark and looked every bit as deadly. “That is a good one. Perhaps I should add that to my repertoire. Would you like to be the first?”

“No,” I said calmly. “Do you want to find out who killed Irina?”

“Yes.”

“Then let me do my job.”

“You spent half the day with those men.”

“Yes, I did. Did you expect me to just ask the group over drinks whether or not any of them killed her? And did you expect any of them to just stand up and say, ”Why, yes, I killed her. Why do you ask?“”

He’d had it with my mouth. He took two aggressive steps forward, bringing a thick hand up to strike me or to grab me.

I pulled the 9mm from my waistband behind my back and planted it squarely between Kulak’s eyes, stopping him in his tracks.

“Don’t you fucking touch me,” I said, in a very different tone of voice.

My anger pushed him back a step, and then another. I stayed with him, never losing the contact between the gun barrel and his forehead. He backed up until he was trapped against his car. His eyes were wide with surprise or fear or both.

“You will never touch me again,” I declared, adrenaline humming through me like a narcotic. “I will fucking kill you where you stand. Don’t think for a second that I wouldn’t do it. I would kill you and stand on your corpse and howl at the moon.”

He was breathing shallowly and quickly. He didn’t think I was bluffing. Good. He needed to know he wasn’t the only unpredictable one in this strange arrangement.

I backed off and lowered the gun to my side. A car was coming toward the gate. The driver opened it with his remote control, drove through and on, never so much as glancing at us in curiosity.

“Which one do you suspect?” he asked.

“I don’t have a favorite, and I’m not a psychic. I need a lead, a witness, to catch someone in a lie,” I said. “If you want a quicker solution than that, why don’t you have a couple of your associates beat it out of them one at a time?”

He hesitated, looked a little away from me. Odd, I thought.

“This is my business,” he said. “My personal business.”

Alexi Kulak was the boss in his world. He could have snapped his fingers, and no one would ever see Jim Brody, or Bennett Walker, or any of that crowd again.

I shrugged. “Kill them all and let God sort it out.”

“That is what you would do?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I would do it all quietly, patiently. I would gather evidence and speak to her friends. I would speak to anyone who might have seen her that night, no matter how unlikely it may be that they would have an answer. By the time I went in for the kill, I would have absolutely no question who had murdered her. And I would have absolutely no mercy for that person.

“That’s what I would do,” I said. “That’s what I am doing. If you want to do it another way, that’s your business.”

He sighed and sat back against his car, his broad shoulders slumping. He rubbed his hands over his face. His head was bowed.

“This pain,” he said, rubbing a fist against his chest. “It is a thing that never ends. I want to scream it out of me. It is like a fire, and it burns and burns, and there is nothing I can do to put it out. I am mad with it.”

I actually felt bad for him. What an odd moment. Here was a man so ruthless he probably started his day eating the eyeballs he had plucked from enemies and traitors, and yet he was just a man, and he was grieving and in pain.

“You feel like you’re caged with a demon,” I said. “You can’t escape it. You can’t run away. There’s nowhere to hide.”

He looked at me, and his face shone with tears he had tried to wipe away. “You’ve known this pain?”

“I know what it’s like to want so badly to reverse the past that I would have turned myself inside out to do it,” I said quietly, thinking of the day Deputy Hector Ramirez had taken a hollow-point bullet in the face, blowing out the back of his skull and leaving his wife a widow and his children fatherless. Because of me. I knew what that pain was. The pain of guilt.

And I knew all about the pain of loss. Not of having a dream just fade away, but of having it yanked away and smashed before my eyes. I refused to let the faces surface in my mind. The pain came anyway, like an old friend who would just walk in the front door without knocking.

“Let me do my job, Mr. Kulak,” I said. “Then you can do yours.”

Without waiting for him to say anything, I went back to my car, did a U-turn on the street, and drove back toward Wellington.

“I would speak to anyone who might have seen her that night, no matter how unlikely it may be that they would have an answer.”

My own words came back to me, as did the vision of the strange woman who had approached Barbaro and me in the parking lot at Players the night before.

… no matter how unlikely…