i.

I slept till noon. Even after a shower, and then several cups of black coffee at the Diner, I still felt sluggish and sleepy. The medication does that. It runs in cycles along the body’s circadian rhythms. Sometimes I’m just fine, other times I’m sluggish. The coffee helped me get clear most of the time, though Doctor Marks didn’t want me drinking caffeine, as it pulls the medication out of the blood stream too quickly.

After I read the paper, I went home. The lunchtime crowd in the Diner annoyed me. There were two messages on my answering machine. I sat down with a pen and pad and punched the play button. The first message was silence. There was background street noise, and the distinctive crackle of a poor cellular connection. Then a hang up. The time stamp on the message was six a.m. I’d slept through it, which was easy to do since I turned the ringer down as low as it could go. The second message was from Wayne Goddard, a part-time hunting guide in Heron, Montana. His full time job was team leader of the Super Cell I worked with.

He had a distinctive Boston accent. “Hey Frank. Wayne here. Just checking in. We’ve got some things brewing that may come to a head soon. I’ll call you back around eighteen hundred your time. Stand by for the call, all right? Talk to you then.”

That was five hours from now. I felt too sluggish to go out again with the flyers. It was a good time to stay home and mind the phone and catch up on my reading. I slouched in my recliner, a stack of books beside me, and stared into space as I sorted out the muddled impressions my dreams had left. After a while, time seemed to spin past faster and faster. I would look away from the clock, and then back, and a half hour would have passed. I kept looking at the phone as though it were about to ring.

Strange.

That’s how I felt today. Strange. The blond man and his partner from the bus station had set me on edge. The violence I lived with and kept carefully banked away had boiled up for a moment, and in that moment I had seriously considering killing the two men.

How easy that would be.

I had to be careful with that. Marcos had seen it, commented on it, and he would remember it. I wondered why I hadn’t heard from him.

Time passed in a fluid reverie. I flipped through my books, lingered over a chilling short story by Joyce Carol Oates in the Best American Short Stories collection, then set the book down.

The phone rang.

I picked it up and said, “Hello?”

There were street sounds and the crackle of a poor connection.

“Hello?” I said again.

The phone disconnected.

I spun my Caller ID unit around so I could see it. private caller. They’d blocked the number. I didn’t like that. I waited. They didn’t call back.

After a while, the mail came, and I killed time flipping through the bills, the ads, an Outside Magazine. I looked at the clock and it was almost five. I hadn’t eaten all day. I went into the kitchen to make a sandwich, but the bread had gone stale. I went across the street and got an eggplant sandwich on sourdough to go, brought it back to the house and ate it in my chair. Then I sat there, my fingers drumming on the overstuffed arms, till six o’clock.

The phone rang.

“Hey Frank,” Wayne Goddard said. “How you doing?”

“I’m good, brother.”

“Living the good life?”

“You bet.”

“You should come to Montana. I’ll show you what the good life is all about.”

“We should do that,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to go to Glacier National Park.”

“Glacier is good. My part of the country is just as good.”

“So what’s on?”

“Old Frank. Always to business.”

“It’s a character flaw I’ve grown to accept.”

“We may have a little job over in the Sandbox. There’s a someone in Saudi giving our boss some worries. It’s a small gig, calls for your expertise.”

“When is that going to happen?”

“Timing is still up in the air. You know how it is.”

“Let me know as soon as you can. I’ve got some personal things I need to clear.”

“What does she look like?”
I laughed. “I’ll never tell.”

“I’ll let you know as soon as I know. Consider this a warning order.”

“Will do, Wayne. Who else is going?”

“Haven’t decided yet. Probably the whole crew. But you’re first on the list.”

“I’ll wait for your call.”

“Okay, Frank. Later.”

I held the phone and listened till he hung up, then replaced it in the charging cradle. I stared at the phone, willing it to ring, and it did. The number was blocked.

“Hello?”

“Lovelady? This is Joe Spenser. I need you to come down to Hennepin County Hospital, the emergency room.”

“What happened?”

“Marcos is down here. A couple of guys beat the shit out of him. I heard the call on the radio and met the ambulance down here. He was conscious and he said to get you. So get down here.”

“I’ll be right there,” I said. “Do you know what happened?”

“We’ll talk, Lovelady.” Spenser hung up.

I went into my study and unlocked the closet there. Taking up most of the closet was a Remington gun safe. I ran my fingers over the electronic key pad and unlocked it, then swung open the heavy steel door and looked in at the tools of my trade. Most of my operational equipment was kept in a safe house in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, outside Washington D.C., where we gathered for our briefings and prepared for our assignments. But like all killers, I had my favorite tools, and I like to keep some of them close at hand. There were my blades: a selection of commercial knives, folders like the Spyderco Military-Police and the Emerson Commander, fixed blades like the SOG Pentagon and Recon, small neck knives like the Perrin La Griffe and the new one from Spyderco. I kept a handful of surgical scalpels honed to an edge so keen you’d only feel a sting while the blade cut to the bone. I liked them for hits. They were concealable and disposable, easily replaced, and nearly invisible when cupped in a palm on the approach. I kept pistols and revolvers and concealment leather for all of them. In the Cells, we were issued a variety of authentic law enforcement credentials that would let us carry weapons anywhere, even on board airplanes. I had FBI, U.S. Marshal and even Federal Air Marshal credentials and badges. They were useful in the States. There were a few long guns, of the sort that would raise eyebrows: a silenced submachine gun, the H&K MP-5SD, a fully automatic M-4 carbine with a Trijicon Reflex CQB scope, a carefully worked M-70 sniper rifle with my favorite Leopold scope on it.

I stood there and thought for a moment.

I couldn’t take any of them with me. Not at this juncture. But a noisy little person in my head said I needed a weapon, because when I carried a weapon I changed my mindset, and it was time to quit fucking around and put my game face on.

I took out a well worn Spyderco Military-Police and flicked it open. The blade was honed to razor sharpness. The black finish on the blade was fading from time and use. I carried that blade as a back up to a concealed handgun for years. It felt good to clip it into the front pocket of my jeans.

Now I was ready.

I locked the safe and went to my car.