Revenant

Chapter 6

The next day I was back at my bar, sitting in my chair, drinking a diet cola and getting angry.

Blowing a job is never a good feeling. I mean, sure, my contract was probably safe . . . this sort of stuff did happen from time to time, and usually it worked itself out okay. Sometimes, even the most careful and thorough assassin could end up the victim of plain, dumb luck.

I remember this one job I'd heard about - guy was hired to do this other guy's wife, make it look like an amateur kidnapping. Snatching her off the street, he drugged her rather thoroughly and then drove her to a car storage unit. He'd taken care of all the details ahead of time, too. A couple of cases of beer, lots of empties, a full ashtray, newspapers, a notepad with a bunch of names, numbers, and nervous doodles on it . . . the works. Did everything he could to cover his tracks, leaving behind the sort of fake evidence that would eat up lots of investigative time, throw out a bunch of false leads, and give the police's forensic team nightmares for about a month or so.

Once he was done putting everything in place, he simply tied her to a chair, propped her head back, shot her in the temple at point-blank range, dropped the gun, locked up, and left.

He never thought to check and see if she was actually dead.

Apparently, according to forensic documents, the gun was both close enough to her head and was held at just the right angle to create the kind of one-in-a-million shot you hear about in folk tales. The hollow-point bullet pierced the skin of her temple, right near her orbital socket, found a thick groove in the bone of her skull, and did what most expanding ammunition does - it mushroomed and went to pieces.

None of the pieces, however, ended up actually penetrating her skull.

A few fragments even managed to burrow under her skin, around her skull, and come out the other side. Looked gory as hell, spraying some blood onto the corrugated metal wall behind her and making it appear as though she'd been shot. Well, actually, I guess she had been shot, true . . . but I mean that she appeared to be fatally shot. Of course, being heavily drugged, she didn't cry out or anything else that might have betrayed her less-than-dead condition.

And so the hitter left, figuring it was done. He phoned in an anonymous tip in to the police, and then read about it all in the paper the next day. The press called it a 'miracle'. He probably called it a bunch of other names.

The point is that a botched job isn't the end of the world. Stuff happens, after all. It had certainly happened last night. That by itself was no reason to get upset.

I was getting upset for different reasons.

The evening was slowly piecing itself together in my mind, and the conclusion I was coming to was inescapable. This guy - the joker with the nice gun and the threadbare homeless ensemble - wasn't mere muscle for some two-bit tough like Sack. He didn't just happen to be there, either. He'd staked out the place incognito, found a nice, cozy dumpster to wait by, and had spent a couple of hours playing up his 'drunk' routine in the hopes that the mark would arrive. And his mark had been my mark. What that meant was that he'd spent time researching the junkie, like I had. He'd figured out the most likely place Stevie would show up, and went there to do the job. My job.

He'd also managed to snag my picture from his car, perhaps figuring he'd identify me later somehow. 'Professional Killer' is a pretty rarified field, and most of the people in the business know about one another, if only to keep out of each other's way. We left each other alone, as a rule, and when our paths crossed, it was usually quite tense. Often times it wasn't pretty. It seemed that I'd definitely be crossing paths with this guy, if only to track down and wipe the picture he took. That had me a little annoyed.