"Do you have a daughter?"
"Naw, man." He says it almost boastfully, like the idea is ridiculous.
I sip my beer and shake my head. "Then you wouldn't understand."
He stares for another few seconds, finally blinks, shrugs. "Whatever." He backs towards the door, keeping an eye on me, like I might lunge for the bag.
"Hey."
The kid pauses, nervous.
"Give this back to her, will you?" I hold out my hand. The locket dangles.
His features war with themselves, the sneer faltering. He's young, doesn't know how to handle his emotions yet. It's easy to see that he doesn't understand why I'm letting him walk out with that money. It just doesn't compute to him.
Not yet, at least.
For a long moment he just stares at the locket swinging back and forth. Finally, he steps forward, and I let the chain unspool from my fingers.
After he leaves, I think of following, letting him lead me to Jess. The daughter I haven't seen in seven years, who calls every couple of months to say she hates me. My baby. Instead, I pull a pint of Bud and drink it slow. I top off a regular's beer. I wash some glasses in preparation for the evening rush. Then I lean on the bar and light a cigarette and watch the snow fall.
I think about the guy I hit with the bat, and whether or not I killed him. I wonder how long it will be until Lester White runs down the list of people that knew about the back door of his stash house, until he puts that together with me asking for a loan. I wonder if it's true what they say about his pit bulls, and I think it probably is.
I wonder if, maybe, just maybe, my phone will ring one more time before I find out.
Around 2006, before my first novel The Blade Itself had been published, I was talking to a friend of mine, the author J.A. Konrath. Joe mentioned he was editing a collection of short stories about hitmen entitled These Guns for Hire, and that it would include tales from legends like David Morrell, P.J. Parrish, Jeff Abbott, Ken Bruen, and Lawrence Block. In other words, a list of people I had no right to be among.
But I figured what the hell, and I asked if I could submit a story. His answer was classic Konrath: "If it's under 3,000 words and doesn't suck."
I threw myself into the work, and the result was the following. This was the first story where I played with a format that has become one of my standards for short stories: brief blocks of text that leap around in time and setting, each contributing to the larger tale.
It also afforded me the opportunity to write the line "Snap the blood off your hands, go finish your eggs Benedict, and wait for the screaming to start."
I love my job.
As Breathing
With forty stories of empty air swimming beneath your feet, the constellations are close and cold.
I had a steady grip and the wet sound of Sammy's exhales in my ear. I had a ladybug crawling on my fingers and the taste of copper in my mouth.
A mile south, a radio tower rose from the Atlanta skyline. Its red beacon, dying and reborn in slow pulses, reminded me of Sherry, the easy rhythm of her breathing, breasts rising and falling in a beam of dusty sunlight. She'd slept against me as though the world was without fear, each inhale carrying the certainty of the next, and I'd stared with my neck craned sideways and never wanted to turn away.
The ladybug moved off my fingers onto the railing, and I looked at it, and at the balcony that only my heels touched.
"Go," Sammy said, his voice through the earpiece thin and sharp as broken glass, and I stepped off the ledge into the stars.
#
We'd been shooting pool in a midtown dive on the second floor of a strip mall, afternoon heat warping the world outside the windows, Cuervo warping the one within. With his head for angles, Sammy should have been a good player, but wasn't. I'd been in that automatic zone where I let my body do the work, nerves and reflexes functioning unencumbered, cue sliding smooth and sure, dropping ball after ball. Forty bucks a game and I was up two hundred, but Sammy never did know when to quit.
"I don't like it," I said, and kissed the two into the corner.
He held his tequila to the sunlight like he was checking purity.
"An apartment that swank, the guards will have experience. Could be ex-cops." I lined up on the six. "Cameras. Keycards."
Sammy shrugged in that way he does, and poured the drink back. "Why not meet with her anyway, see what she's got to say?"
The trick was not to think. The cue moves, the ball drops. Natural as breathing. "Guy like Vincennes, he'll have security of his own. Bodyguards inside, bodyguards in the hallway."
"Nothing you can't handle." Sammy set his glass on the table upside-down.
"I don't do that anymore." I popped in the eight, and straightened.