But that was then and this is now. I’m twenty-eight years young and I’ve ripened like nightshade berries or pungent French cheese. Since having my ass handed to me three years ago, I tried valiantly to leave my foul-mouthed, trigger-happy alter ego behind. Greener pastures were my original destination, but there truly is no rest for the wicked (despite our infectious charms), and I ended up being railroaded into a collision course with, you guessed it, Act Two of my tragic life story. I thought I’d nearly seen it all, but this not only takes the cake, it kidnaps, tortures, and dismembers the pastry chef.
So Kumbaya your asses round the campfire for a little prison bedtime story. If you’re already a member of the John Lago fan club, then none of what I’m about to tell you will come as a shock. After The Intern’s Handbook, you’re used to being bound, horsewhipped, and hung from the nearest tree by the prodigious yarns I’m apt to spin. In fact, if this were a movie sequel, it would be The Godfather, Part II—better than the original. For all you John Lago virgins, welcome to the party—a raucous affair where they dose your wine cooler with angel dust at the door and you wake up playing a supporting role in a ritual killing somewhere in a swamp outside Tampa.
I guess the best place to begin is with Alice—the beautiful and charming love of my life who deceived me in every conceivable way, beat me senseless, shot me, ripped my heart out and stomped it to bits, and burned everything important to me to the ground. Some of you know about her and can’t wait to get your fingers in the dirt, of which there is a veritable truckload. For those who don’t, she’s just like me—a killer who thought she was heartless but found out the hard way she wasn’t when Cupid, that fat, cheeky bastard, shot a 600-grain carbon fiber arrow with a bone-splitting broadhead right through her love muscle, and life as she knew it bled out onto the floor.
When Bukowski said, “If there are junk yards in hell, love is the dog that guards the gates,” he wasn’t kidding.
1
Everyone knows that the best part of any great love story is the beginning. The middle is like driving across the United States—flat, predictable, and offering little more than fast-food culture and rest stop romance. In what other context do men and women live under the same roof and go weeks without sex? The end of a love story is either a catastrophic tragedy or an anticlimactic whimper. And it’s the end, so unless it’s Jerry Springer–worthy, who even cares? But the bliss of ignorance that comes in the beginning is a drug we all wish we could cook, shoot, and ride till the wheels come off.
When people ask about relationships, they always say, “How did you guys meet?” Not, “OMG, tell me all about your third year!” And when a relationship is in trouble, the desperate couple is always trying to recapture the magic of when they first met. The real tragedy is that, without time travel or amnesia, it’s impossible to ever get back there. Which is why, to most people, marriage is about as magical as watching David Copperfield make Claudia Schiffer disappear.
The beginning of the love story between Alice and me was a bit more complicated than most. When we first met three years ago, we were mortal enemies, predators lurking in the woodwork of a prestigious Manhattan law firm. I had been sent there as an “intern” to exterminate one of the partners. And Alice, well let’s just say she’d been sent there to exterminate me. Hilarity ensued! Despite our impossible circumstances, and the fact that we were interacting with each other using cover identities, we still managed to fall in love in our own twisted way. Predictably, the whole thing ended badly, mainly due to the fact that Alice had been paid to have it end that way. But I was smitten nonetheless, almost literally, and have never been able to shake it.
What’s interesting is that our relationship was the perfect metaphor for all relationships. Love is the stepchild of pain and suffering, born of conflict and genetically predisposed to failure. Animals don’t love anything but their next meal, and guess what we are and have been for millions of years? Basically, this whole love thing is like a new ingredient added to the primordial soup. So, while we are wining and dining that special someone, buying them flowers and performing feats of strength and wonder in the orgasm circus, we are fighting back our inherently violent opposition to the opposite sex.
A lifetime of living in an emotional black hole, observing people from the outside looking in, made me realize all of this. Knowing I could never have what normal people had allowed me to disconnect from the world and see it through the microscope of reason, unmolested by emotion. But guess what? Eventually, I wanted what they had. I wanted it so bad I was like a wolf stalking a blood trail. The way I saw it at the time was that I needed to find love so that I could exist. Relativity is about context. I had no context other than HR, Inc., and that came to an end. Everything else in the normal world seemed like it would drive me to continue killing, but love . . . that was the only thing in life that seemed worth dying for. I felt it with Alice. And I got what I wanted. Ish.
But love is filled with conflict and volatility—especially new love. Of course, when you’re dealing with two “normal” people, the result of this conflict and volatility is what you might expect in a burgeoning relationship. You’re hot, then cold, fucking, then fighting, making plans, then burning bridges, and so on. Alice and I are about as far from normal as you can get. In fact, she and I are like the two compounds your chemistry teacher told you never to mix. We’re professional killers! That’s taking conflict and volatility to a whole new level. With normal couples, someone might get thrown out of the house after a fight. With us, someone is liable to get thrown out a window.
2
Flashback three years. It was Valentine’s Day, for those who enjoy irony with a side of psychosis. I was in Nowhere, New Hampshire, driving through one of the worst blizzards on record, feeling like Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man as my car slid all over the road. I couldn’t trust anyone. I knew that death was around every corner, the smiling friend who would invite me in for a hot cup of coffee to get out of the cold. But that was the least of my concerns. Finding Alice was all I cared about. The last time we had laid eyes on each other was in Honduras, through machine-gun sights. She had just finished fucking me over so royally that she made Judas look like Job. In fact, she and my old boss Bob had been in cahoots on the betrayal (long story), so I smoked his traitor ass, and Alice and I lost each other in the chaos that comes with Honduran death squads, a hail of bullets, and high explosives.
After crawling back to the U.S., I spent every waking moment tracking her down. Finally, I got a bead on her in New Hampshire and there I was, a jackass in a snow globe, making my way to Point A. After plowing through half the state, I saw the cabin where she was holed up through the four-inch circle on my windshield that wasn’t covered by a sheet of ice. I drove past, hid my car in a grove of trees a mile up the road, and backtracked to the cabin. I approached from the rear, concealing my tracks in the powdery snow with a pine bough. The day was so cold it was like Flannery O’Connor’s last breath—raw and as hard as the hammer of divine retribution. I entered through the back door. It was dark inside. I sat in a chair, covered myself with a blanket, and waited like some film noir detective. After an hour or so, I heard tires crunching in the snow out front, followed by the tread of boots coming up the steps. The door opened.
Alice walked in.
Sweet Alice. She looked amazing in her full-length Burberry black leather biker trench coat with a fox fur collar, carrying a bag of groceries. I reveled in her beauty, then greeted her by shooting her in the shoulder with my Walther P22. The groceries went flying and she fell back onto her butt, clutching the wound, a look of shock and confusion on her face. She reached for her gun but saw it was me and reconsidered.
“Hi, honey. I’m home.” I laughed.
“John? What the fuck are you doing here?” Alice asked as blood gushed through the fingers wrapped around her shoulder wound.
“Taking care of a loose end,” I said.
“Do you think I’d be up here if I was still after you?”
“You’re up here because you’re working a target. Based on the surroundings, my guess is it’s someone in intelligence. CIA. Rogue. About five-foot-ten, a hundred and forty-five pounds. Am I getting warmer?”
“What have you done?”
“I told him to get the fuck out of Dodge before he gets his brains splattered all over Robert Frost country. I told him that his lovely intern is really a cold-blooded killer who is using him to get close to his boss so that she can cut his throat with a tantō knife—yakuza-style, of course.”
“Congratulations. Now that you’ve destroyed my career, please say something hokey about tying up loose ends again and put me out of my misery.”
“You’re not a loose end. I am.”
“Now you’re making no sense,” she said.
“Maybe this will help.”
I set my gun on the floor.
“I love you,” I said.
I kicked my gun across the floor, well out of my reach and well within hers.
“All I need to know is if you love me.”
I rolled the box with a Harry Winston engagement ring I had given her when I proposed to her months ago across the floor. Ironically, at that time the ring had only been a ploy to emotionally manipulate her in order to gain information about my target. Now it was a symbol of my complete rejection of that part of me, and my complete acceptance of her. Alice just looked at me, waiting for the punch line. Then it was her turn to smile. Even though she had triple-crossed me and left me for dead, there were four carats of flawless clarity in that box that said “I forgive you.”
“You’re fucking crazy. You know that?”
“Not anymore.”
She pulled her own gun and leveled it at me.
“I don’t love you,” she said defiantly. “And I don’t see how you could possibly love me.”
“Believe me, if I could walk away from this, or better yet, put a bullet in your head, I would. But I know who I am now. And I know that you’re part of that,” I said with conviction.
“No, John. I’m not.”
“Then pull the trigger,” I said, ready for anything. “And I’ll have my answer.”
“I can’t do it,” she said quietly.
“Just squeeze.”
“I’m not talking about killing you. I’m talking about what happens if I don’t kill you. What you want. I can’t do it.”
She fought the tears that were rolling down her cheeks, mocking her bravado.
“Neither can I,” I said. “But I’m willing to die trying. Are you?”
We sat there staring at each other for a long time, both of us wondering what would happen next. Alice answered that question when I saw the muscles in the forearm of her gun hand flex and I heard the faint click of the trigger engaging the hammer.
“I’ll take that as a no,” I said calmly.
My heart sank and I closed my eyes, waiting for two bullets to double tap into my chest. Then I visualized the coup de grâce, the headshot—a blood, brain, and bone fragment masterpiece adorning the wall behind me—the Guernica of my life sliding to the floor in crimson chunks. But nothing came and I opened my eyes, hopeful that Alice was so overwhelmed by her love for me that she couldn’t kill me.
Then she pulled the trigger.
3
She fired all ten rounds from her Beretta Px4 SubCompact. They zipped past my head, missing by millimeters, and punched holes in the solid log walls behind me. The sulfur smell of gunpowder hung in the air, burning my nostrils and throat. A flurry of wood splinters blanketed the top of my head like snow. I opened my eyes. Alice was gone. Her gun was on the floor, a cynical wisp of smoke curling out of the barrel. I wasn’t exactly sure what to do. I was half-deaf from the gunshots and dumbstruck by the fact that I was still breathing.
The sound of a faucet running jerked me back into lucidity and I followed it into the bathroom. Alice had taken off her top and was examining her shoulder wound in the mirror. A combat grade first aid kit laid open on the counter. She didn’t look at me. She just handed me a scalpel, a Magill forceps, and a packet of surgical gloves. I took them and tried unsuccessfully to make eye contact with her.
“What are you waiting for?” she asked, her eyes fixed on the mirror.
I pulled on the surgical gloves.
Alice gripped the bathroom counter and braced herself as I took a good look at the bullet hole I’d put in her shoulder. I didn’t feel bad. She deserved a hell of a lot worse. I pulled a syringe from the kit.
“Let me hit you with a local first—”
“No.”
“Alice, you—”
“I said no. You going to do this or do I have to do it myself?”
“I’ll do it,” I said quietly.
She closed her eyes and her light, rhythmic breathing was indicative of a deep, almost sensual meditative state. I gently palpated the powder-burned flesh around the two-inch star-shaped entry wound. She flinched briefly, but then I felt her wounded arm soften, as if she had just mentally separated it from her body. My fingers found the bullet, a hard, jagged lump buried in muscle and soft tissue.
“Got it.”
No reply.
I gently inserted my finger into the wound. She didn’t move despite what had to be searing pain. I probed deeper, making mental notes on the proximity of larger blood vessels and nerves, clearing a path for scalpel and forceps. Still no reaction. I’d seen breath and focus-induced pain management before but never to this degree. Even if there is no facial affect or muscle tension, there is always increased heart rate and breathing. Not with Alice. By my count her pulse was hovering at around sixty beats or fewer per minute, and her breathing was shallow and relaxed. If warm blood hadn’t been dripping down my hand, I would have been convinced that her veins were filled with ice water.
I widened the opening to the wound with my index and middle finger, half hoping I’d get even the slightest wince. Nothing. I put a flashlight in my mouth and looked for the bullet. A slight glint of light told me it was trapped in a web of cauterized flesh that had burned and adhered to it. I slid the scalpel in and gently cut the little blackened tendrils away, freeing the lead mushroom. Then I carefully pulled it out with the forceps, sliding its sharp, superheated edges past the blood vessels I’d noted before. The bullet fell with a wet clatter in the bathroom sink. And there was still no movement from her, even when I proceeded to fill and rinse the gaping hole with saline and antibiotic wash and sutured it with more than thirty stitches. It was not until the final piece of gauze was taped over the seeping gash that she opened her eyes.
“How does it feel?” I asked.
She turned and kissed me—not with gratitude, but with the hungry aggression of an animal that has gone for days without food or water. There was surrender in the way she embraced me. Her hold on me was firm, but she wasn’t pulling me in. She was hanging on to me, as if she knew that letting go meant falling to her certain death.
I know the feeling, I thought as we fell into bed.
As we methodically consumed one another, I was struck by the newness of it all. I’d been with Alice, but the unfamiliarity of what I was feeling while occupying familiar territory inexplicably filled me with mortal terror. And I realized it was vulnerability that ran through both of us like an electric current, powering our desire but threatening to burn us alive.
The point I’m trying to make is that, until that moment, I had never trusted a soul in my life. Instead I manipulated people in order to ensure I had leverage over them. No one has ever had the power to hurt me . . . or love me for that matter. I made sure of that. Mostly because my life depended on it. However, stepping away from the illusion of survival and lying next to a woman who was once my enemy—without a gun under the pillow and with both eyes closed—filled me with a feel
ing of power that being a predator never gave me. That night, I slept the deep, dreamless sleep of the dead, my resurrection coming in the form of the rising sun and a delicate kiss.
I win, I thought as we made love again. I saved myself by giving myself up. Happiness? I felt it. I knew it because I had never felt it before. Not really. Of course I had a hard time trusting it, but when I looked into Alice’s eyes and felt the playful warmth of her smile, I had no choice but to surrender to it. Then her smile faded and her eyes welled with tears.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I feel so . . . awful . . . about everything.”
“And this is the kind of apology that makes it all irrelevant.”
“You’re either completely psychotic or you really do love me,” she said.
“Probably a little bit of both,” I said, pulling her close.
“There’s so much I want to tell you,” she said. “I want to come clean so we can move on.”
“About what?” I asked.
“About what happened. New York, Honduras, me, Bob. You must have so many questions. I don’t blame you really. I mean, if I were you—”
“Actually, I do have a question, Alice,” I said, feigning concern.
“Good. Ask me anything.”
“Will you marry me?”
4
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to join . . . I’m sorry, I never got your names.”