I wipe my prints from the gun and toss it in the sewer grate. I already filed off the serial number when I bought it off a dealer, so there will be no trace. Angelo waits in the car, face grim. Carlito sits beside him. He’s thinner now. He’s been hitting drugs. He won’t admit it to us, but it’s painfully obvious. He’s always got the shakes and he’s getting thinner by the day, but I can hardly blame him. The life we’ve been living isn’t a life I’d wish on anyone. We live on the run, moving from hotel to hotel, always looking over our shoulders. The Morettis want our blood, and they haven’t stopped sending crews after us since Angelo killed Nico so many years back.

I tried to get away from the violence and forge a new life for myself, and now look at me. I’m still on the run, still up to my elbows in blood. Still missing her.

I pull open the car door and Angelo tosses me a rag.

“On your neck,” he says.

I check the rearview and see a light dusting of blood. I’ve gotten better about placing the bullet just right to avoid splatter, but he flinched. I pour water from a bottle and scrub the blood from my skin. I look at my hands and see the dark crusted red under my fingernails that never seems to fully wash out. No matter how much I seem to try, there’s always blood on my hands.

“We good?” asks Carlito. “I need to stop by Lakewood and grab something from a friend.”

Angelo and I exchange a wary look. A while back I would’ve said something. I would’ve put my foot down and told him to stop being so stupid with the drugs, but now I can’t bring myself to care. We live our lives at night and sleep when the sun is out. We move in the shadows and we have to kill or be killed. All that’s left is the violence and the desire to make them suffer more than they make us suffer, to take from them more than they can take from us. But haven’t they already taken everything from me? Haven’t they taken Julia?

Not everything. I punch Angelo on the shoulder and he smirks back at me. My little bro. He may be a fuckup and he may have a temper like a Chihuahua, but I’d kill for him. History can attest to that.

Still, she has never left my mind. At first, I thought I’d be past her in a few weeks, then it was a few months, then it was next year. I think about her every day. When women throw themselves at me now, I can’t bring myself to care. I brush them off because I can’t be bothered. I know without even trying that they won’t be like her. They won’t be like my Julia. No one ever will, and I don’t want to dilute the memory of fucking her by being with anyone else, even if I have to die celibate. I don’t care.

I drive past the place we’re staying to Lakewood, where shitty, crumbling apartments line the road, leaning ominously like they could fall over at any moment. Carlito must really not give a shit anymore if he’s asking us to drive him to a place like this. At least before he had the courtesy to be sneaky about it. He directs me to a place near the end of a street with no lights and asks me to park. I raise my eyebrows at him and he frowns.

“It’s cool man. Don’t worry about it. I know these guys.”

We wait as Carlito shuffles out of the car and heads into the building. One of the windows turns yellow with light. What the fuck were the people in there doing, sitting in the dark? Carlito is out of sight just long enough to make me wonder if Angelo and I are going to have to go kill some junkies, and then he emerges, shoving something into his jacket. I notice dark shapes moving around the car as Carlito approaches. I nudge Angelo and he nods back at me, hand already on his pistol.

Carlito sits in the car, hugging the drugs inside his jacket to his body and twirling his other finger. “Let’s go, man.”

Metal clicks on my window. A sickly thin man with tattoos is pointing a .22 caliber at me. I see another on Angelo’s side of the car as well. Without needing to give each other any kind of sign, we both slam our doors open at the same time. The junkies are knocked back, guns pushed aside long enough for us to squeeze off two or three rounds in them.

Gunshots tear through the silent street, making my ears ring and my hand tingle from the recoil. The scent of hot smoke and blood reaches my nose, smells I wish weren’t so familiar to me.

It’s over in seconds. Lives ended as easily and carelessly as if we had just stomped on a few ants.

I look at the body, feeling disgusted. Killing the Moretti guys who come after us is one thing. Those are professionals, guys who know what they signed up for and are out to get us first. This feels lower, cheaper. I wonder, not for the first time, what the end-game is for me now.

I holster my gun, glancing toward the house to make sure no one is planning to take pot shots at us from the windows. I doubt it though. People like this don’t rob because they are violent or capable, they do it because they are desperate and they don’t expect resistance. Whoever’s inside is probably just hoping these dead fuckers have some drugs on them to steal. I get in the car, gripping the steering wheel and twisting.

“You happy?” I ask Carlito without looking to the back seat.

“S-shit, man. I didn’t know they would try that. But you guys handled it, so no big deal, right?”

“No big deal,” says Angelo as he settles back in his seat.

Yeah, I think, starting the car up and driving away from the two fucking bodies on the street that wouldn’t be there if Carlito didn’t need drugs. No big fucking deal.