The man’s eyes rolled in his head. D was put in mind of a deer he’d had to kill when his first shot hadn’t gotten him clean. His father had stood at his shoulder, saying “Gotta finish what ya started.” He’d used a knife, right to the animal’s heart. “Finish it, son. ’Til the blood ain’t pumpin’ no more.”
Sometimes he wondered about that, in light of his choice of profession. Sometimes he dreamed about it too.
The art dealer started trying to bargain with him, as they often did. He offered him double what he was being paid. He apologized for whatever he’d done to piss D off. D didn’t bother to answer. It wouldn’t do the man any favors to know that it wasn’t D that he’d pissed off.
Two shots to the heart. D never went for the head; it was too messy.
He went to a Starbucks around the corner; he hated their coffee, but loved the Wi-Fi. He e-mailed Josey a blank message through an anonymous remailer, with the subject line “Get BiggER TITTTS ASAP!!!” That meant the job was done. The penis-enlarger subject line was for an abort, and the Hot Asian Sluts were for a delay. He downloaded the photos and the MP3 of the art dealer’s confession, then saved everything to a stick drive. He slipped it into the envelope Josey had given him with the contract, then wiped the laptop’s hard drive. He tossed the envelope into a mailbox on his way out, then the laptop into a passing garbage truck. The camera and the iPod were his; they went back into his pockets.
Walk in the park.
~~~~~
Josey wasn’t at the next meet. He waited for an hour, but she didn’t show up. D felt a fluttering of uncharacteristic worry in his gut. Supposedly such things had been trained out of him, but his rusty emotional core still sent up the occasional signal flare. They weren’t exactly in a low-risk business, and any one of a number of unpleasant fates could have befallen his only compatriot.
He headed home to find an e-mail from her. The subject line was “Get VIAGRA Cheap!!!” That meant something was wrong.
He loaded up and got in his car, headed to the safe house. If there was trouble, Josey would meet him there.
There was, indeed, trouble, in the form of three large men who looked like they’d stepped out of the Hired Muscle Weekly catalog. D was hardly in the door before they were on him. He had a split second to wonder how they’d found the place before they’d pinned his arms and were dragging him inside. D whipped his head backward into a nose and heard a satisfying crunch. He pushed against the one still holding him and kicked upward across the jaw of the one in front of him. Clearly, they hadn’t been expecting him to put up a fight.
Unfortunately, the element of surprise didn’t last very long, and within a few seconds they had tossed him onto the living room couch. He stared up into two gun barrels, and was forced to rethink his thoughts of resistance. Josey was tied to a chair nearby, bruised and bloody. “You okay?” he asked.
She nodded. “I’m sorry, D,” she said. Her voice sounded scratchy, like someone had been strangling her. “I don’t know how they found me.”
“Don’t say nothin’,” he reminded her. Probably unnecessary. Even beaten up and bound as she was, Josey was likely thinking three steps ahead.
The shortest of their new friends, probably the brains of the outfit, approached him. “We got a job for you,” he said.
“I pick my own jobs, asshole,” he snarled.
Brains tossed him a folder. “She says you wouldn’t take this one if you had a choice. So we’re not giving you a choice. You’re taking it.” D started to open the folder. “No need to open it,” Brains said. “All you need to know is that you’re doing it.”
“Or what?” D said. It almost didn’t matter. They were now in a position to threaten him in almost any way they chose. His own life, his identity, Josey’s life, the target’s slow, painful death against the quick one D would mete out.
As it turned out, they’d come prepared. Brains tossed D another folder, motioning for him to examine its contents. D opened it. “Fuck me,” he said, clamping down on the dull horror that rose in his throat. The folder was full of pictures. Of him. Coming and going from the scene of every job he’d done in the past six months. All of them time stamped. He glanced over at Josey, the thought occurring that she might have sold him up the river, but the look on her face dispelled his doubts.
“You’ll take the contract. We have evidence to tie you to half a dozen contract killings this year alone. You’ll get six months in the electric chair.” Brains smiled, and D thought again of that deer he’d killed. “You’ve got one week. After that, those photos and a number of other salient pieces of documentation will find their way to the FBI.”
“And after it’s done? I ain’t gonna be your monkey forever,” he muttered.
“My employer has no interest in you. You can go back to your regular… schedule. When it’s done, it’s done.” He arched one eyebrow; D knew at once that this guy was one of those that was always imagining himself in a Tarantino movie. He knew the type. Same kind of guys that thought it was cool to hold their guns sideways, the way no one actually did in reality.
Brains and his pets left. D went to Josey and released her from her bonds. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “They made me bring them here and send you the trouble message.”
“Don’t matter,” he said, his attention already turning to the contract they’d dumped in his lap. He opened the folder and started reading, knowing that he wouldn’t like it, and he didn’t.
Josey was watching his face. “I wasn’t even going to show you that one.”
“A fuckin’ witness?” D snarled. “So now I’m killin’ innocent bystanders on the say-so a some drug lords? Fuck.” He tossed the folder aside and dragged a hand across his close-cropped hair. “How they been fuckin’ tailin’ me, anyhow?”
“I don’t know. They must have been hacking my records.”
“Thought that couldn’t happen.”
“Didn’t think it could.” He stood up and went to the window, feeling Josey’s eyes on his back. “You have to do it.”
“I know.”
“No, I mean you have to.”
“I said I fuckin’ know.”
“D… it’s what you do.”
“I know what I fuckin’ do, and this ain’t it.”
“You get paid to kill people.”
D ground his jaw. “When they deserve it.”
Silence. “What’s this guy’s name again?”
He didn’t have to consult the folder. One read-through and it was in his head. “Program got him in as Jack Macintosh. Real name’s Jack Francisco.” He shook his head. “Dr. Jack god-almighty-damn Francisco. Saw somethin’ he wasn’t s’posed ta see ‘n’ has the balls ta stand up ‘n’ say so. Now I gotta put a bullet in him for it.”
Chapter Two
It had been another long, hard day of doing nothing, and Jack was bushed.
His life, while conveniently unfettered by things like responsibilities and obligations, was starting to feel pretty damned pointless. He was alive for no other reason than to be life support for the brain cells that remembered Maria Dominguez’s murder. After he’d spewed it out and had it recorded by some stenographer, entered into the public record and set in stone for all time in the tablets of the justice system, he might as well just blink out of existence. He tried to keep his mind fixed on the days after his testimony, but those days were starting to feel as cruelly insubstantial as the mirages that lay across the desert like oil slicks, changing colors and luring the eye. What did he even have to live for? It wasn’t like he could go back to his job, which was all he really cared about.
He spent his days driving around, mostly. The tourist attractions and casinos of Las Vegas didn’t interest him. He was drawn to the endless flat expanse of desert surrounding this chrome-and-steel oasis, to the grandiose gestures of nature that people skipped right over to get to the damned Cirque de Soleil show. He’d been to Hoover Dam, he’d been to Lake Meade, he’d explored the desert country in and arou
nd his Henderson suburban neighborhood. Sometimes he parked his car off some deserted road and hiked aimlessly, listening to the nothingness and feeling his skin bake. Today, he’d driven down the Strip for the first time, and was shocked at how strange it looked in daylight. What at night became dazzling and beautiful just looked misshapen and weirdly tacky under the unforgiving sunlight. It was like going to a nightclub at noon, when what was nocturnally glamorous revealed itself to be nothing more than a dirty black box where your shoes stuck to the floor.
He came into his house, sighing with relief at the cool blast of the air-conditioning (he kept his thermostat set at “meat locker”) and tossing his keys on the hall table. His relief was short-lived.
There was a man sitting in his living room, looking at him.
Jack froze, his hand hanging in mid-air where it had started on its way to smooth his windblown hair. The spit dried up in his mouth.
The man looked relaxed, but Jack knew that he wasn’t. He was wearing jeans, a white T-shirt, and a black sport coat. His hair was barely more than stubble all over his skull, and his eyes were hidden by sunglasses. Across his lap, he was holding a silver handgun with a silencer on it.
He stood up, his lanky frame unfolding with near-audible creases and crackles. Jack wondered how long he’d been waiting.
Jack’s jaw felt stiff when he tried to speak; his face was numb in a way that made him think of shoveling the driveway in January. “Who are you?” he croaked. The man didn’t answer. He crossed the living room in even, deliberate strides and grabbed Jack by the upper arm. He pulled him forward and sat him down in his Eames chair. The man stepped back and stood before him, all quiet menace and deadly intent. Jack stared up at him, nothing in his mind but blankness. The circuit breakers in his brain had tripped and stopped the flow of emotions. “How’d you find me?” he asked. It was less a stall question and more legitimate curiosity. Jack had half-assumed that the Dominguez brothers would find a way to get to him, but he’d been so impressed by the thoroughness of his relocation that he didn’t know how on earth anyone could have found him here.
Still, it didn’t exactly surprise him that someone had.
Jack took slow, even breaths. I’m going to die any second. The thought was surprisingly bereft of power. The idea of death didn’t have much potency when confronted with the inescapable fact of it. It was a done deal. No use being afraid of it. It was almost a relief not to have to dread it anymore.
The man who’d come to kill him was just standing there, staring off into space at some point above Jack’s head, his gun held loosely at his side. The man raised his free hand and rubbed at his forehead, then began to walk slowly back and forth in front of Jack’s chair. Jack’s eyes tracked him, his body glued to the chair as if he’d been strapped in. Something in the man’s posture, his body language… a tiny, wriggling specter of hope worked its way into Jack’s mind.
He doesn’t want to do it.
Jack held his breath, watching his killer pace. Don’t be stupid. He’s gonna do it whether he wants to or not.
The man didn’t look at him. He paced, those dark, blank lenses swiveling back and forth like the unfeeling eye of a security camera. Jack’s brain made a random cross-connection and he found himself thinking of 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” That’s what this man’s shuttered stare reminded him of. The all-seeing cyclopean gaze of HAL. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.”
Don’t just sit there like some dumb sheep waiting to get slaughtered. Do something, for Christ’s sake. If you can’t do something, at least say something.
Jack swallowed hard, hearing a click in his dry throat. “Don’t do this,” he said. Nice one, asshole. Like this guy’s never heard anyone beg for their life before. Jack squared his shoulders a little. I’m not going to beg. No matter what else happens, I’m not going to beg. “You don’t have to do this.”
The man stopped pacing, then sat down on the couch facing him. He stared down at the gun in his hand. Jack watched him, trying to read something of his expression, which was damned difficult while his heart was pounding so hard it was making his vision shake. The circuit breakers were resetting. Terror was creeping into Jack’s body, robbing him of whatever fortitude he’d been able to muster. God, I don’t wanna die. Not like this. Not like this.
The man had his head down now, the gun clasped in both hands. Jack felt his tenuous self-control fading. He was shaking uncontrollably. Please, just don’t let me piss myself. I know I’ll do it when the bullet goes through my head anyway, but not when I’m still in charge. Gimme that, at least.
The man stood up and took two steps toward where Jack was sitting immobile, in his favorite chair. He raised the gun and pointed it at Jack’s head. Jack sucked in a breath and closed his eyes, his mouth curling into a tortured ribbon of terror. His breath puffed in and out through clenched teeth like he’d just run a mile, and he waited. What’s it going to feel like? Will it hurt? Any minute now…. Will I feel it at all, or will I just be dead? I hope it doesn’t hurt. Any minute now….
Five seconds passed. Ten. Fifteen. Jack cautiously opened one eye. His killer was still standing over him, the gun pointed at Jack’s head, but he hadn’t fired. With effort, Jack looked past the gun barrel—it seemed to fill the whole world—and saw the man’s clenched jaw and his lips, clamped tight in a thin white line.
He doesn’t want to do it. The thought recurred, stronger this time. Jack stared at the mouth of the gun’s barrel, that dark circle of death, and a sudden calm descended on him. All at once, he knew exactly what to do. Talk. Play him. Get him to talk to you. Tell him your name. Make yourself a person.
“You’re not going to do it,” he said, amazed at how calm he sounded. He’d stopped shaking.
His would-be killer’s head turned slightly, cocked, interrogative. He still did not speak.
Jack shook his head. “You would have already done it.” He lifted one hand, palm forward. It’s okay, I’m not a threat. “What’s your name?” he asked. Great. Now you sound like a five-year-old on the recess playground trying to make friends with the coolest kid in the class and hoping he doesn’t pound you for your trouble.
His killer didn’t respond, verbally or otherwise. He didn’t appear to have heard him. “My name’s Jack Francisco. I, uh… guess you know that, though. I’m a doctor. Did they tell you that? Maxillofacial surgeon.” The man took a step backward. A little thrill of triumph ran down Jack’s overtaxed nerves. I’m getting to him. “I’m from Baltimore.” The man raised both hands to his face, his gun still clutched in his right. “Hey… it’s okay,” Jack said. “You don’t have to do this. Do you even know why you’re here? Or why I’m here? I saw somebody get killed, and now….”
“I know,” the killer suddenly snarled, the first words he’d spoken. He’d snatched his hands away from his face and turned the blank dark-matter lamps of his sunglasses directly onto Jack. He could almost feel their high beams on him, like the rays of a black hole that sucked warmth from him instead of laying it on. “I fuckin’ know what you saw,” he repeated.
Jack swallowed hard. Don’t lose it now. You’ve got him talking. “Look, I don’t know what your bosses told you….”
“They ain’t my bosses,” the killer said, his lip still curled in a half-sneer, his voice a cornered-animal growl. “Fuckin’ drug lords.” He shook his head. “Ain’t takin’ no orders from the likes a them.” The pacing started up again. “Don’t own me. Motherfuckers. Ain’t doin’ no job on their say-so.” Jack watched him. The man didn’t really seem to be addressing him anymore.
Jack’s brain was twirling too fast; the thoughts kept getting tossed off in all directions like kids that didn’t keep their grip on a playground merry-go-round. He managed to snag one with his numb fingertips. He doesn’t want to do it, and he’s chafing against being made to do it. Use it. Get under his skin. Jack shifted in his chair a little. But don’t piss him off.
Right. “So, you wor
k for the Dominguez brothers?” he said. “They pay you well to do their dirty work?”
The killer paused in his pacing and, incredibly, chuckled. “You playin’ me, Francisco?” he said.
Hearing his name spoken aloud by the man who’d been sent here to get it carved on a headstone gave Jack an unpleasant shiver. Amateur, he scolded himself. “I just want to know if you’re going to kill me, or what.”
The killer—Jack’s mind was starting to think of him as HAL—swung around, his gun rising to target Jack’s head again. “Could jus’ do ya right now,” he said. “Don’t wanna waste yer time or nothin’.”
Jack recoiled. “No rush.” HAL nodded, then resumed his pacing. Talk to him. The more you talk, the harder it’ll be for him to execute you. The longer you stall, the less likely he’ll be to pull that trigger. “So you don’t work for them, then.”
“Fuck no.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Ain’t none a yer business.”
“Are you going to kill me?” Jack asked.
HAL sighed. “I dunno.”
“You could just leave. I… I won’t tell anyone you were here. I won’t call the police or the Marshals or anything. I swear.”
He sniffed. “Think I care who you fuckin’ call? Ain’t the problem.”
“Oh,” Jack said, feeling abruptly out of his depth. This man wasn’t afraid of the law. “The brothers? Guess they’d be mad if you don’t kill me.”
HAL shook his head, taking a seat on the couch again. “You ain’t got no idea, doc,” he grumbled.
~~~~~
The guy wasn’t a pussy, D had to give him that. Sat right there in that fancy chair and tried to play him. Needled him about being the Dominguez’s bitch, slapping him with words to see if he flinched. He’d thought the guy would be a pussy. Big city doctor, some kind of specialist, from the file. Thought that he’d wet himself and start blubbering the minute he saw the gun. He hadn’t, though. Just got that thousand-yard stare that he’d seen on lots of folks, that look that said they’d gone as far as they could, and now death was here and it was time to just present your belly and let it gut you. Fact of it blew a fuse in the mind, so the feelings didn’t shut down the whole damned system.