He didn’t look at me. “You’re mad. I would be, too—”
“I’m not mad,” I said evenly. “I just want them dead.”
He froze in place, his beer halfway to his mouth. “Yeah. That’s kinda what I figured.” He took a breath, holding the beer in place. “How do you figure to fit me into your plans?”
“You don’t want them dead?” I asked him.
“I don’t want to die,” Hannegan answered, putting the beer back down. “That’s the only answer I care about, and me up against them is suicide, so I don’t ask myself any of the other questions I might want to.”
“I don’t care if I die so long as they do, too,” I said. There was not even a hint of reaction from him. “But I’m kinda in a rough spot here, because I’m out in the cold—”
“Everyone’s in the cold with Winter.”
“You know what I mean. I don’t know his plans.” My eyes narrowed at him. “Did you know?”
He looked at me sidelong for a second then went back to his beer, but I caught the hint of nerves. “What the hell kind of question is that? You think I’d be sitting in this bar from daybreak to closing every day if I knew this was coming—for you or … “ he looked around, as though someone were listening, “ … him?”
“I dunno, Kurt,” I said, and let the ice leak into my voice, “a week ago, a guy I would have said I trusted with my life ordered his flunkies to hold me down while they used my body to kill the only man I’ve ever loved. Not exactly feeling the trust flowing for anyone at the moment.” I spun on the stool to face him. “Do you want Zack avenged or not?”
He took a long breath and pulled the cigar out of his mouth. “I got no loyalty to Winter.” He gestured toward the door. “He offered me some work, to help guard him for a few weeks, and I told him to go f—” He let himself get carried away, but caught himself just in time. “Well, you know.”
“Can you find out where he is?” I leaned in closer to him.
“Probably,” Hannegan said, and looked me over. “But it’s not gonna do you any good. M-Squad is still watching his back. They will pull you apart limb by limb before you get within a hundred feet of him. Which I don’t think is gonna do Zack or you any damned good.”
I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper, a small one, and laid it on the bar. “Let me worry about that. I just need to know … “ I let my finger trace along the paper, “ … details. Everything you can get me. There’s no way their security is flawless. All I need is some help finding the holes in it.”
“It’s not a piece of Swiss cheese.” He glanced at the paper, then stared, almost slack-jawed, before slowly turning back to me with a faint nod of acknowledgment. “You’re pulling out all the stops.”
“I owe them,” I said and stood up, slapping a roll of hundred dollar bills down on the bar—some of my savings from my year of working for Old Man Winter. Blood money, all of it. “I want to pay.”
Kurt looked at me as he put the unlit cigar back in his mouth. “Don’t you mean you want them to pay?”
“That’s going to happen, too—I guarantee it.” I stretched, my back still slightly stiff from the box I had left only an hour or so earlier. “And it’ll be fun. And satisfying.” I eyed him, the big man on the stool, and he suddenly seemed incredibly small. “But you don’t get anything for free. No, I’ll pay.” I gave him a slight smile as I turned to walk away, one that I actually felt; cold, brutal, mean. “But every one of them is going to pay first.”
4.
It was night, and my stomach growled at me as I crawled through a patch of wet dirt outside Hastings, Minnesota. The ground had thawed after a day of sun, a day in which I didn’t know what to do with myself because it followed the night I had met Kurt in the bar. It was muddy now, as muddy as I’d ever seen it, and my elbows and hands were covered in it, thick mud that stank a little of sulfur. I kept myself low as I approached the farmhouse; I had belly-crawled through the grass all the way from the highway. I would have preferred to do what I was going to do from a distance, with a rifle, but I didn’t have one of those. I felt the weight of my gun and holster pushing against my ribcage, angrily poking at me as it brushed the ground. Kurt had gotten it for me, and like so many things the big man had introduced into my life, it brought some pain with it.