“Old family friend,” I replied. I didn’t even consider it to be a lie.
“Well, it’s nice to see Dan have visitors. It seems that fortune hasn’t dealt him the easiest hand.” Don’t remind me, I thought. “It’s nice to know that there are still people out there in the world thinking about him. Sometimes, it feels like we’re in our own little world down here, floating off into space. It’s only when we have family or friends, young people like you coming for a visit, that we’re reminded that we’re still attached to reality. Can I get you something to drink?”
“A glass of water would be great.” Jim stepped into the kitchen and I could hear him opening up a shelf to get a glass for me. While he was gone, I did a quick study of the sitting room to see if there was anything inside that Jim could use as a weapon. The most lethal thing in the room appeared to be a lamp. I wasn’t worried. The room had two exits, one into the kitchen and the other into a hallway that must have led toward the bathroom and bedrooms. Jim wouldn’t have anyplace to run. There was a window facing the backyard, but the blinds were drawn.
In only a couple of minutes, Jim came back holding two glasses of water, each with two floating ice cubes inside. He handed me a glass. “Would you like to sit down?” Jim asked, motioning toward one of the sofa seats along the wall in the room.
“No, thanks,” I replied. “I’m fine standing for now.”
“Do you mind if I sit?” Jim asked. “Old legs.”
“Be my guest,” I replied. Jim walked over and eased himself down in a chair. As long as he didn’t have a gun hidden between the cushions, he couldn’t be in a worse position. “You said before that you thought Dan’s had it kind of rough. How about yourself?” I asked. I don’t know why I was bothering with the small talk.
Jim sat and thought for a moment before speaking. When he answered, he stared into my eyes with the same prescient look that he had given me the morning before. “The fortunes, I believe, have been a bit kinder to me. I never married or had any children, but I’ve lived an eventful life. Even now, I keep busy.” I bet you do, I thought. “I do some military consulting here and there. But still, getting old is never easy for anyone. I’ve been in three wars, young man, and I daresay that getting old is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
Jim leveled his gaze at me and it sent a chill through my body. “So, Joe, to what do I owe this little visit of yours?”
“Three wars?” I asked. “Dan told me that you were a veteran of two wars.”
“Well, until recently, I suppose, Dan only knew about two of the wars.” Jim swirled the ice in his glass and then took another drink. “But there are three: Korea, Vietnam, and this godforsaken War that you and I are fighting in now. Three wars, over fifty years, and I still don’t have one damn clue why we fought any of them.” He knew. I could feel sweat beginning to seep out of my pores. I held my glass of water down in front of my face and swirled the water, trying to see if I could see anything inside. Jim laughed at me. “Don’t worry. There’s nothing in your water. Although, I do have to say, you’ve been doing a pretty careless job.”
My emotions quickly ran from fear of being poisoned to embarrassment. “How long have you known?” I asked.
“I’ve known that Dan was one of you for years. But I also knew that he wasn’t causing us any harm. He hadn’t done anything to us since we had his daughter killed. That’s when they retired him, whether or not he wanted to retire. And I like him. He’s a good friend.” There was something in his words that disgusted me. It was a reflex.
“Did you have something to do with his daughter’s death?”
“No. That happened long before I met Dan. Since meeting him, I’ve heard the stories, though. She, apparently, was a pistol. I really don’t think we had much of an option.”
“You don’t think you had an option about killing your friend’s daughter?”
For the first time, Jim’s tone was less than pleasant. “I told you, Joe. I had nothing to do with it. But this is war and ugly things happen during wars. There’s little that you or I can do about it.”
“Well, you could always end the War.”
“My God, son. You still think that you’re the good guys and we’re the bad guys? The same way I was taught to think about you when I was young, over half a century ago. The same way that I was told to think about the Chinese and the North Vietnamese. Good guys and bad guys. Cops and robbers. Cowboys and Indians. They’re all children’s games, Joe.”
I was in no mood for a lecture. Jared’s words echoed through my head. It’s either them or us. Either Jim’s evil, or I am. “You do realize that I’m going to kill you?” I was hoping that this sentence would end the lecture.
“I’ve had my suspicions ever since I heard that Dan was going to have a guest. A visitor that I have never heard of. A man whose background Dan couldn’t explain. That’s why I went outside yesterday to watch you run by, after your first pass by my house. I thought you might be the young man sent to do me in.”
“So are you going to fight me?”
“Is there any sense in fighting?” Jim finished off his water and placed his glass on the coffee table. The liquid was thicker than I had thought at first. He’d given me water. He was drinking vodka.
“No. There’s no sense in fighting. You’re not trained for this.”
“Don’t be silly, Joe. I’ve been training for this day my entire life.”
“So you plan on putting up a fight?”
Jim laughed. “I haven’t been training to fight, Joe. I’ve been training to die. Three wars, countless deaths. Some at my hands, some in my arms. I’ve seen enough.”
So had I. I took my backpack off. I reached in and pulled out the gloves and placed them on my hands. Then I pulled out the rope, which I had tied into a cinch with a loop. The cinch could be tightened but it couldn’t be loosened without untying the knot. The loop was large enough to fit a man’s head through, along with some extra space, in case he struggled. I walked over and stood behind the chair in which Jim was sitting. I slipped the noose around his neck. “I do worry what this will do to Dan,” Jim said. Those were his last words.
“That’s not what I’d be worried about if I were you,” I whispered in his ear and tightened the noose around his neck. As the life wrenched out of Jim’s body, he struggled, but there was no clawing or hitting. There was no attempt to reach out and pry the rope away from his neck. Instead, Jim struggled against his own will to survive. His reflexes kept kicking in and he would start to lift his hands up toward the rope wrapped around his neck but then he would fight his own reflexes, stopping his hand in midair before it had a chance to reach the rope. His face started to glisten with sweat as he struggled. During the final few moments, his eyes began to bulge and his entire body jolted in such a strong spasm that he almost flew out of the chair. Eventually his body weakened, his arms dropped listlessly to his sides, and his will slipped out of his body. The moment before his life left him, his mouth opened as if he were trying to say something, but with no air going in or out of his throat, no sound came out either. Then his eyes glazed over and he was gone. Once I was sure he was dead, I untied the knot and slipped the rope back off his neck. I had to move in close to untie the rope. When I did I could see the blood on his neck from where the rope had burned through his skin. Even without his wanting it to, his body had put up a hell of a fight. It always does.
I left Jim’s lifeless body sitting in the chair. I couldn’t help but wonder how long it would be before anyone missed him, before anyone realized he was dead. I poured the rest of my water into the sink. I cleaned my cup off with the Wet-Naps that I had brought. I placed the slightly bloody rope back in the backpack and headed for the door. After closing the door behind me, I took off my gloves and placed them into my backpack as well. The rest of it should have been simply making it back to Dan’s house without being noticed. Killing someone shouldn’t be that easy.
I really didn’t expect to see Dan when I got ba
ck to his house. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he somehow managed to avoid me until I left. I wouldn’t have blamed him. It came as a bit of a shock, then, when I walked through the door and Dan was sitting at his kitchen counter, nursing another beer. He looked up at me when I walked in. He had gotten some of his strength back. The eyes weren’t nearly as heavy as they had been the day before. I didn’t say anything. He had to break the silence. He took a swig of his beer. “So, is it done?”
“Yeah,” I replied. I walked passed him and into my room, where I dropped off my backpack. I didn’t want there to be a chance that Dan might see some of the evidence. Then I came back out into the kitchen.
“You want a beer?” Dan asked me when I got back out.
“Sure,” I responded. I took a seat in the stool next to Dan’s. Dan got up and went to the refrigerator and pulled me out a bottle of beer. I noticed when he opened the refrigerator door that there was only one beer left. This meant that he had saved the last beer for me. It also meant that he’d had a lot to drink in the last twenty-four hours.
He handed me the bottle and I immediately began to drink from it. I didn’t even want the beer. Drinking after a job seemed disrespectful to me. But as long as I had the beer bottle to my lips, I had an excuse not to talk.
So we sat next to each other in silence. It was the loudest silence I’d ever experienced. Eventually we both finished off our beers. When the bottles were empty, Dan turned to me. “I’m going to go to bed,” he said. “It’s been a long day.” I nodded and watched him as he walked toward his bedroom door.
Right before he closed the door behind him, I finally mustered up the courage to speak. “He wanted to die, Dan,” I said. “He was waiting for me.” Dan looked at me and nodded to let me know that he understood. Then he closed the door. I’m glad that I said something. I wish it had been enough.
I sat at the counter for another twenty minutes or so before I decided to go to sleep myself. I don’t remember what I thought about for those twenty minutes. Before walking back to my bedroom, I turned off all the lights. The darkness felt good. When I got to the bed, I stripped down to my boxers and climbed in. I usually showered after a job, but I didn’t need to this time. I just lay in the darkness and closed my eyes.
I awoke to the sound of a bang. A loud, horrible bang. I remember shooting up in bed, sitting up straight, my heart racing, short of breath, before I could even remember what it was that had startled me. Then I remembered. The bang. I jumped out of bed and ran over to the dresser. I pulled open the top drawer and peered inside. My gun, it was still there. I pulled it out of the drawer and carried it with me as I moved through the house. The bang. Had they found out? Had they come back for vengeance already? I moved through the house without turning the lights on. If there was anyone in there, I’d get the jump on them. I moved quickly, holding the gun up near my head so that I could aim and fire it quickly if I needed to. The gun was starting to feel dangerously comfortable in my hands. The living room was empty, as was the kitchen. I noticed a light coming from Dan’s room. I moved more slowly and quietly as I approached. I turned the doorknob to his bedroom and swung open the door. His bedroom was empty, his bed unmade. There were six or seven empty beer bottles sitting on top of his nightstand. The light was coming from the crack below the door that led to his bathroom. “Dan?” I shouted. There was no response, no movement whatsoever. I held the gun out in front of me and pushed open the bathroom door.
The white linoleum was covered in blood. It was splattered all over the tiles on the wall. It had already begun to drip toward the floor, creating long red stripes against the white wall. Dan’s body was slumped against the wall, his head slacked and his jaw hanging open. The back of his head was missing. In his hand was an old revolver. I looked down at the gun. There were still five bullets left. The only one that was missing was the one that had traveled through Dan’s mouth, out the back of his head, and into the wall.
I had no time for sympathy or anger or whatever other emotion I was supposed to have at that moment, looking down on Dan’s wasted body. I had to get out of there. I had to move fast. Anyone could have heard that gunshot and called the police. The police could already be on their way. Dan’s suicide would be easy enough to cover, but they’d eventually find Jim’s body too. I had to leave, and I had to cover my tracks. I ran back into my bedroom and grabbed my backpack and my duffel bag. I’d be leaving on foot, so I would have liked to carry as little as possible. I took the gloves back out of the backpack and slipped them back onto my hands. I pulled the rope that I had used to strangle Jim out of the backpack as well. Then I dropped the backpack and the duffel bag near the back door and went back into the bathroom where Dan’s body was lying. I knelt down beside his body, careful not to step in any of the blood that had seeped down to the floor. I didn’t want to leave any suspicious shoe prints. I took the gun out of Dan’s hand. I took both his hands in mine and began to wring them around the rope that I had used to kill his best friend. I rubbed until there was visible rope burn on his hands. “Sorry to tarnish your good name, Dan, but you didn’t exactly leave me with much choice,” I said to what was left of Dan’s head. Some of the fiber from the rope and possibly even some of Jim’s blood should have gotten on Dan’s hands to match the rope burn. When I was done with that, I put the gun back in Dan’s hand. I took the rope and placed it on Dan’s night-stand, near the incriminating, empty bottles of beer. Then I grabbed my things and ran out the back door.
Crystal Ponds didn’t afford much cover. The palm trees and low bushes wouldn’t have worked in a ten-year-old’s game of hide-and-seek. They surely didn’t provide cover for a full grown man. Instead, I slipped from house to house, hiding along the unlit outside walls of homes, trying not to walk past any windows. Eventually, I got out of the neighborhood and onto the highway. Next to the highway there was a long stretch of barren woodland. It would provide me with enough cover to get away from Crystal Ponds.
I was just hoping to make it downtown before it started to get light out. There I could find some shelter in the crowds. Maybe I could even find a place to stay and rest for a couple of hours. A couple of hours, then I wanted to get the hell out of Dodge. On my way downtown, I passed a brand new condo development. There were only a couple of finished units, but one of them had a sign out front labeling it an open house. I decided to see if there was any truth in advertising and was lucky enough to find that the sliding glass door in the back had been left unlocked. I slipped inside, thinking that I could lay low in there for a few hours while the heat died down. I’d attract a lot less attention walking around with my duffel bag in the daytime than I would at four in the morning.
The little model home was fully furnished. There were even some cookies and bottled water in the refrigerator. I drank two bottles and tossed the empties in the garbage under the sink. I didn’t turn on any lights or any of the appliances, but I did set the alarm clock in the bedroom for six-thirty. It was three o’clock in the morning when I climbed into the bed. Three hours of sleep would have done me well. Unfortunately, when I lay down, it was like uncorking a bottle. All the emotion that I had suppressed upon seeing Dan’s body slumped on the floor slowly came to me. I ached, but I don’t know if I was feeling anger or grief. I wanted to be mad at Dan, mad that he couldn’t have waited one more day and let me leave with a clear conscience. But what I felt was grief, grief for this poor old bastard who’d had every last thing in his life taken away from him. What had I done? First I had almost killed a civilian in Montreal and now this. I tried thinking of you, to see if it could clear my head, but the image of Dan’s body slumped on the floor, streams of his own blood trickling down the wall around him, kept returning. I thought about the pictures on Dan’s bookshelf, souvenirs of a life gone horribly wrong.
“I’m sorry, Dan,” I whispered into the darkness. I hoped somehow that he could hear me. I closed my eyes but didn’t sleep. I just lay there for three hours, wishing time away. I thought about Dan
’s first toast, when he took me out drinking, “To breaking the bastards’ backs before they break ours.” I guess the order didn’t really matter, did it, Dan? A broken back is still a broken back.
I got out of bed at six, a half hour before the alarm was set to go off. There was simply no sense in my lying in bed anymore. I searched the house for a phone. They had one phone set up, hanging on the wall near the kitchen. I picked it up and got a dial tone. I dialed the number for Intel. Jimmy Lane, Sharon Bench, Clifford Locklear. I was patched through to Allen.
“Don’t say anything to me unless the job is done,” Allen said as soon as he picked up the phone. So much for hellos.
“The job’s done, but there were complications,” I replied.
“You’re the fucking king of complications.” Allen was on a roll. “Is he dead?”
“My target?” I asked
“Yes,” Allen replied.
“Yeah, he’s dead.”
“Well, then, that doesn’t sound that complicated. That actually sounds pretty simple.” God, I hated him.
“He’s not the only person who’s dead. My host is dead too. He shot himself in the head.”
“Well, it serves your host right for fraternizing with the enemy.” Allen knew. The bastard knew. People knowing more than me was quickly becoming an unpleasant trend. “So how did you handle it?” Allen asked. It was a test.
“I planted the evidence of the murder on my host. I tried to make it look like a murder-suicide.” That’s what the papers would say, and the police, “murder-suicide.” In the end they’d be right; they’d just have the labels backward.