A Dark and Broken Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

Stomach wounds are the worst—the slowest, the most painful, the most difficult to repair.
    “You been a bad guy,” Madigan says. “Hell, what goes around comes around, eh? Seems to me that something like this is the only way it could end for you.”
    Madigan pauses, wonders if this will be the way for him as well. Sometime.
    Fulton is down on his right side. He tries to lift his left arm, but he has no strength. His fingers are trying to reach for something he cannot see, perhaps reaching out toward Madigan in a last, desperate attempt to provoke some slight sense of mercy.
    Madigan closes his eye and exhales. The adrenaline has gone. He is exhausted. He feels as if the edges of his mind have been frayed and weathered by some terrible storm.
    He feels the weight of the .38 in his pocket. He needs to get itinto Fulton’s hand and get the fuck out of there. He cannot leave until Fulton is dead.
    Madigan stands. He surveys the scene around him—the bodies, the blood, the money, the Econoline. Devastation every which way he looks. Kind of like his life.
    He takes three steps and is down on his haunches beside Fulton, careful not to get any more blood on his shoes.
    “Just fucking die already, will you?” Madigan says. “Just die and go to hell where you belong, you piece of shit.”
    Madigan gets the next words that Fulton tries to utter. He can lip-read enough to see Fuck you amidst the blood.
    “Fuck you too, Larry,” Madigan says, and the temptation to just reach out and close his hand over Fulton’s nose and mouth and let him suffocate is very strong, but he cannot touch the man.
    Madigan waits.
    Larry Fulton’s mouth opens and closes a couple of times, and then he is gone—eyes wide, looking right back at Madigan, and the light behind them goes out.
    Madigan takes the .38 from his pocket, wipes it down, and puts it in Fulton’s right hand. He moves the hand slightly and lets it come to rest in half an inch of blood. The blood, still fluid, closes around the hand, and the scene is set.
    Madigan spends a good ten minutes wiping down every possible surface in the Econoline, and then he’s behind the wheel of the sedan. He manages to maneuver it out past the van and up to the door of the storage unit. He looks back at the scene. On his passenger seat are three duffels, over three hundred and sixty grand in cash. He doesn’t know what he’s feeling. He doesn’t need a Mandy anymore. He could use a Brooklyn Pilsner, a shot of Jack, a smoke. That would do him right now. The adrenaline has lit a fire in him, and it ain’t going out anytime soon.
    Eight minutes later Vincent Madigan is heading toward the Triborough and home. That’s when his cellphone goes off. That’s when he checks the number of the caller and feels his balls tighten.
    He hesitates, then pulls over, takes one more look at the phone, and answers it.
    “Detective Madigan . . .”

6
THE LIE
    “Y ou are not the light of the world,” Angela said. She was his first wife, back when things were straight and clean, back when things were far closer to how he’d imagined they should be. She was beautiful and smart, and Madigan was handsome and charming and humorous. They were a great couple, at least for a while. And between them they made Cassie, Madigan’s first child, and anything that produced such a girl as Cassie couldn’t have been wrong.
    Cassie was the brightest, the best, the one that seemed to have inherited all his good and none of his bad. Cassie was everything to him. And though Madigan now saw Cassie infrequently, she seemed to be the one person in his life who recognized who he really was.
    Madigan could hear Angela’s voice anytime he chose. He just had to close his eyes and remember her face, and with her face came her voice, and with her voice came all the subsequent years of accusations and bullshit that seemed to have been part of both his marriages. At least at the end. After the fire had died.
    Angela soured the pitch,