34.
The waitress came around and Harry ordered a second glass of Jack, neat. I was still nursing my first drink. Not that I didn’t want it—and two or three more chasing right behind the first—but I needed to keep my head on straight.
“See,” he told me, “when I realized how pathetically neutered you are, I said to myself, ‘he’s gotta go.’ It’s like putting down your pet dog when he gets too sick to walk. Has to be done, and after what you did for me back in the day, I wouldn’t want anyone else to do the job.”
“You’ve got a weird definition of ‘neutered.’”
“Do I? You didn’t get that knighthood because you’re tougher than anyone in Sitri’s court. You got it by sleeping your way to the top. And this ‘New Commission’ garbage? So, what, you sit behind a desk and send other people to commit crimes? What kind of bullshit is that? That’s no way for an outlaw to live. And don’t get me started about how your little friends come running every time the heat is on, all ready to bail you out.”
The casino vents gusted cool air across the backs of my hands. My fingers tightened, ever so slightly, on the leather arms of my chair. I felt like I was wearing a jacket of ice. Buried deep underneath, a serpentine vein of angry heat started to pulse. And grow. I took a slow, deep breath, keeping it under control.
“The party,” he said, “that was all the proof I needed. After I talked shit about you, your girl, and your entire court? A real man would have thrown hands right there on the spot. You’re weak.”
“Have you ever heard the phrase ‘when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail?’”
Harry squinted at me. “What about it?”
“You said you hit the road when you got out of the Wellness House. I’m guessing you didn’t have a family to go back to.”
“Not one I wanted to go back to. I stopped back a few months later, just for one night. Just long enough to thank my dad for all that ‘strong parental discipline’ he showed me for so many years, and my mom for letting it happen.”
The waitress swung around again with a fresh drink for my guest. I paid her. He waited, silent, until she retreated out of earshot.
“I made him watch while I cut her throat. Figured it’d hurt the old man more that way, watching her die before I took my time with him. Anger. Fear. I did it just the way you taught me.” He reached for his drink. “We are what the world made us. Fighting that’s a waste of time. Look at us. I embraced everything we endured, and I became an apex predator. And you? You’re a sad, washed-up pile of nothing.”
I wanted to get through to him. I needed to get through to him. I didn’t know how much of this was my responsibility, how much of this monster I’d created in the nightmare laboratory of the Wellness House—how much was me, how much was the other inmates, the abusive orderlies, his own father long before I even crossed Harry’s path—but some of it…some of it was on me. I had to make things right if I could.
“Look,” I said, “sure, we are what the world made us. We’re gladiators, predators, whatever messed-up metaphor you want to go with, it’s all the same. But we can change. My brother Teddy, he went through worse than we did. I went to the Wellness House, but he had to go back to our house, with our violently insane father, for years, all alone. Know what he does now? Private security. He makes his money by protecting people. He’s a good guy.”
“Yeah? If it’s so easy…why don’t you do it?”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
“Because you don’t want to,” Harry told me. “Because this life, this world we live in? You love it. You love the blood and the gunsmoke and the smell of somebody else’s money. Don’t even try to deny it.”
I thought about that. Then I sipped my drink, eyeing the ring of condensation it left behind on the napkin. He was right. I couldn’t take the high ground here, and I couldn’t show him the light when I didn’t live in it.
“When all you have is a hammer,” I said, “everything looks like a nail.”
“Second time you’ve said it, second time I don’t know why.”
I fixed him in my gaze, locking eyes over my glass. My jacket of ice became a suit of armor and I spoke very gently, very firmly. It was the voice I used when I explained why someone was going to give me what I wanted, when I wanted it, and the only threat I needed was in the tone of my voice.
“You see me as weak because you only know one way to be strong. You think it’s weak when I rely on my friends, because you don’t understand that we rely on each other. That I’d shed blood—mine or anybody else’s—for any of them without question. I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again, proudly, because they’re my family.”
He sneered at me over his glass. “A real tough guy doesn’t need a family.”
“And as for Caitlin? She’s my rock. My motivation to get my shit together and build a life, to build something real. When people are in love, when they’re partners—partners down to the bone—that’s not weakness. That’s a force multiplier. Together, we’re more than twice as strong as we are apart.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”
“Oh, I’m embarrassed, all right. By you.”
That got his attention. He sat up straight.
“The fuck did you say? I’m twice the man you are.”
“Right. Because you’re ‘tough.’ You want to know what being tough really means? It isn’t about being good in a fight. It’s about having something to fight for. You don’t stand for anything, Harry. You don’t fight for anyone but yourself, and that means you could win a hundred battles and it still wouldn’t mean a damn thing. But I can help you.”
“You think you can help me,” he said.
“Come work for me,” I told him. “Join the New Commission. Join my crew, and I’ll show you a different way of doing things. A better way.”
“Not happening.”
“I pay better than Naavarasi does.”
I watched his face, hoping for a sign. A flicker of recognition, the momentary fear that I knew more than I was supposed to. Anything at all.
“Never heard of him,” Harry said, his poker face unbreakable.
I’d done my best. I’d appealed to his heart, I’d made a sales pitch, and it had all bounced right off. He wanted this one way and one way only.
“I guess I’m going to have to teach you something else, then,” I told him.
“I’m all ears.”
“How to be a professional.” I contemplated my glass, barely looking at him now. “You talk, Harry. You talk, and you talk. That car bomb would have killed me if you could have stopped yapping long enough to set it off on time. It’s important to you, isn’t it? You want your victims to see you coming. You like the fear too much. You get off on it. I bet you have a little speech you like to give before you pull the trigger.”
“Something wrong with that?”
“It’s sloppy and it’s stupid,” I said. “A real professional doesn’t talk. Save the quips for the movies. You get in, you do your job, and you get out. And that’s what I’m going to teach you.”
For the first time since he sat down and started drinking on my dime, I saw a flicker of uncertainty in his eyes.
“How are you going to do that?” he asked.
“When I kill you,” I said, “I won’t say a word. No speeches, no drama, no one-liners. You’ll be alive, then suddenly you won’t be. You won’t even see it coming.”
His heavy-lidded gaze slid up and down my body. Patting me down with his eyes and trying to guess what I was carrying.
“How about we get this over with?” he said.
“My thoughts exactly. I know a place.”
“Yeah?”
“The parking garage on Lamb Boulevard,” I said. “Only one security guard, the upper deck is clear, and we can dance there. We can dance all night long. Meet me there. Two hours.”
“Better be there, Faust. If you run, I’ll find you.”
He stood, stretched, and downed his second drink. He tossed the empty glass onto the table between us and let it rattle.
“That little speech I like to give, before I pull the trigger?” He pointed a finger-gun at me. “Can’t wait for you to hear it.”
I watched him go; then I took out my phone.
“Nicky,” I said, “you know that favor you’re going to owe me, for helping out in Reno? I need to cash it in early.”
* * *
I didn’t go to the Lamb Boulevard parking garage. Caitlin drove me two blocks south, to a condo tower under heavy construction. Taped windows looked in on dark and empty homes. Seven stories up, the tower became a fleshless skeleton of bare girders and flapping, ghost-white tarp.
“You’re sure about this?” she asked me. The Audi’s engine purred as we idled at the curb.
“On the off chance he survives, I need someone at the garage and in position to follow him. We can’t let this guy slip away. If he does, we’ll be fighting on his terms again and waiting around for him to take his next shot. We’ve got the advantage tonight. Let’s make the most of it.”
She grabbed my shirt collar and yanked me close, pulling me into the kind of kiss I wished would never end. Foolish hope. Eventually, all kisses did; that’s how you knew it was time to go to work.
The lobby door had been left unlocked for me. So had the stairs. I climbed up to the fifth floor, one long slog up granite steps painted in yellow lines, by the light of my phone. An industrial light sconce and a stenciled number marked every turn, but there were no bulbs in the sconces and no juice to power them.
The fifth floor was finished and model-home ready. All they needed was light, furniture, and to clear out the painters’ tarps still taped over half the walls. The stairwell opened up onto a long corridor tiled in ivory and lined with open doors. Brand-new apartments waited over every threshold, with shag carpet and floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the Vegas lights. The air smelled like fresh paint.
“Down here!” Juliette called, waving to me from the door of apartment 503. She grabbed my wrist and pulled me inside, bouncing with a sugar-high buzz. A cold breeze rippled through the empty apartment and ruffled the tarps. It came in from one of the windows, where her sister had cut out a ring of glass the size of a manhole cover.
“Hey, Danny.” Justine sauntered over with a military-grade range finder, twirling the olive plastic box on her finger by a lanyard strap. “Nicky says you want to play with our toys.”
Juliette’s hands closed over my shoulders from behind, nails digging in like ten black-painted needles. She leaned close and whispered, “Sure you wouldn’t rather be one?”
“Ladies,” I said.
“We’re just saying,” Justine added as she trailed a finger down my chest, “we could teach you some new games.”
“We’ve got games for days,” Juliette whispered. She blew a puff of hot breath across my earlobe.
“As…enticing as that invitation is,” I said, “I have work to do. Did you bring what I needed?”
“Ugh.” Juliette’s hands suddenly gave me a shove, pushing me deeper into the apartment. “Party pooper. You never want to have any fun.”
Her sister sighed and pointed with a melodramatic flourish.
“If you insist on being boring, fine. There you go.”
They’d gone above and beyond the call of duty. There was the ring of glass, sliced away with laser precision and opening up the night. Beside it, a three-legged stool and a long, low table set up with a folding tripod. And perched in delicate balance, with its elongated barrel aimed out across the city, a sniper rifle.