6

Five o’clock came and the two enemies rode in the Mustang headed for house number two. Lars wondered about the look of smug satisfaction the kid wore on his face when he picked him up, but he didn’t ask. To Lars, Trent reeked of self-satisfaction all the time.

They drove back to the suburban street listed on Trent’s handwritten info sheet. This time there was a car in the driveway.

“So what now?” asked Lars.

“We knock,” said Trent, adding a “duh” with the arch of his eyebrows.

“So, you knock on the door with your gun drawn and hope he’ll admit that he’s in witness protection?”

“We’ve got photos. We’ll know if it’s him or not. I’ll pretend to be selling Girl Scout cookies. You like that better?”

“Whatever you say, Shirley. This is your game now. You want me to wait on the bench?”

“Ha-ha. Come with me. I want to see the look on your face when you meet him after all this time.”

Trent tucked the 9-millimeter into his belt in the small of his back. Lars rolled his eyes. Not exactly where you want it in case of an emergency. It’s classic redneck to say that you don’t carry a loaded gun unless you plan to use it, and those good ’ol boys are right. There’s a damn good reason John Wayne never wore his six-shooter behind his back when he faced down the guy in the black hat.

Trent showed classic fake gangster moves lifted directly out of rap music videos. Millionaire badasses who own twenty guns but have never fired any of them. If shots ever did ring out, they’d all be reaching behind them into baggy pants and firing sideways with one hand. Lars could stand upright with a target on his chest, walk right through a champagne and caviar party at a Hamptons mansion and take out a dozen rappers before any of them got a shot close enough to part his hair.

Lars kept his gun, the silenced Beretta, down by his thigh, in his hand. Safety off.

Trent knocked.

A man answered. Balding, overweight, glasses. Mitch would have had to change quite a lot.

“Can I help you boys?” Southern accent. West Texas most likely. Mitch was born and raised in Philly.

Trent smiled. “Mitch, we’re here to share the good word. Have you welcomed Jesus Christ into your heart?”

Baldy crinkled his brow. “I’m a good Christian, but my name’s not Mitch. We already give at our church, boys.”

“Mitch, do you believe in the afterlife?”

Lars flipped the safety back on with his thumb.

The fat man grinned, trying to be hospitable. “Are you looking for someone specific? I don’t know any Mitch. I know you boys are doing God’s work, but . . .” He shrugged his shoulders.

Lars put a hand on Trent’s shoulder and gripped it hard. “Our mistake, brother. Jesus loves you.” He steered Trent away from the door, using his body to block the gun from Baldy’s view. The man who wasn’t Mitch stood confused in his doorway. From inside a woman called, “Roy? Who is it?” He ignored her.

Trent kept up his character. “Go with God, Roy.”

“You as well,” Roy said out of politeness more than understanding.

Lars blasted the Mustang out of there, the deep roar of the engine setting off alarms on minivans in driveways as they passed.

“So were you planning on taking him out just in case?” Lars accused.

“No. Not a bad idea though. If we take out all three of these guys, we don’t leave any doubt.”

“Oh, I’d have doubts about you. Why they brought you in on this one, for instance.”

Trent turned to Lars and ripped off his mirrored glasses like a cop on TV.

“I’m here because you couldn’t get the job done. I recently did a very high-profile job for Nikki. He knows I can get this asshole. And I can do it before I’m halfway dead like you.”

“Junior or Senior?”

“What?”

“Nikki Junior or Nikki Senior?”

“Junior. He runs things now. Or didn’t you even know that? Should I ask you who the president is? What year it is?”

“Just wanted to know who’s cutting my rope, that’s all.” Breathe in. Breathe out.

“You should be more worried about who’s tying your noose. The way I see it, they spent a lot of money to get this guy and you couldn’t fulfill. I think a refund is in order.”

“Is that right?” said Lars.

“Yeah.” Trent put his sunglasses back on, that certain smugness returning to his face.

“When I get back, I’ll see if that’s what they want to do. I’ll discuss it with Nikki. Senior. The man I take my orders from.”

To anyone driving alongside them it looked like a father-and-son argument. Probably over how loud to play the car stereo and what decade the tunes came from.

* * *

More silence. They were getting good at that part. Two cacti in the desert. Quiet and still, but don’t get too close.

House number three was routine. Neither one felt much like going through the motions. Trent began losing hope in his plan to do in twenty-four hours what Lars couldn’t do in seventeen years. This trip, with the proper outcome, could be the jump start his career needed. Kill Mitch, then kill Lars and return home the new cock on the block. Paychecks rolling in, respect from his peers, fear in their eyes.

Almost a thirty-minute drive. Out here where land is cheap, folks tend to spread out. This is the place where settlers first came to get the hell away from other people. The great land grab when homesteaders all raced their covered wagons west of the Mississippi for a free slice of the pie was all just people trying to get the fuck away from their neighbors in the thirteen colonies. Lars came to the conclusion years ago that the only reason this part of the world became populated at all was a steady stream of loners and misfits who colonized it in the 1800s. Even loners breed, though.

The Mustang slowed to a stop across the street and down two doors from a simple ranch-style house. Trent checked the house number against his list, wanted a cigarette, spun around his nose ring instead.

“Same routine?” Lars asked. He was turning over the reins. Only one week. If the kid didn’t want to learn anything, fine. Play out his time on the clock and go.

“Sure. Why break up the band?”

They didn’t need to. The front door opened, and a man stepped out and picked up a coil of green hose attached to a spigot in a flower bed beneath a bay window. He cranked the knob and began spraying the lawn. Now that the sun had moved below the tops of the distant mountain peaks, it was safe to turn on the hose and not burn your grass or waste water that would evaporate in seconds in the midday heat.

Lars carried pictures, twelve in all, for all these years. He studied them like snapshots of his own family. He sifted over and over them like memories saved from a fire. He knew that face. Pictured it with long hair, short hair, black hair, no hair. Pictured it with a beard, mustache, goatee. Pictured him with twenty extra pounds, fifty, a hundred. Knew what he would look like with colored contact lenses, caps on his teeth and lifts in his shoes.

Mitchell Kenney. Mitch the Bitch.

Trent reached for the door handle. Lars grabbed his arm.

“Don’t bother. That’s him.”