Vin waited for the three men to emerge from the workroom. As required, they had stripped before they walked into the room as naked as the day they were born. Inside the room, his boss supplied everything they needed: the bunny suits, the gloves, the breathing masks. As well as the hammers, the gaudy necklaces, the scales, the packaging.
Even with the masks, when they were done they would still stagger out of the room with pupils so wide they looked like those Japanese cartoon characters that he thought were called anime. Then he would search them, put his own gloved hands on their sweating, trembling bodies to make sure they hadn’t hidden any of the precious commodity in an orifice.
From inside the room the rhythmic tap, tap, tap still echoed. Each of the men gently striking one of the huge necklaces shaped like hearts and covered with rhinestones. The necklaces that had been chosen not for any sense of beauty, but solely for how much they could hold.
There was a cracking sound as one of the necklaces finally yielded. Revealing its own white, powdery heart.
Then his phone rang.
In the old days everyone knew if you wanted something done right, you went to Vin. A bank robbery that happened minutes after the casino made a deposit? He was your man. Did you want someone dead but no one to be suspicious? Let Vin take care of it, and no one would even guess it was a hit. He had been responsible for five “accidents,” two missing persons, and one businessman who was believed to have run off with his mistress.
The key to being successful, to keeping out of prison, was to plan everything in advance. Before you did any kind of job, whether it was a hit or a robbery, you began by familiarizing yourself with the routine you planned to disrupt.
You figured out one quick escape route, but you also had another, longer one, in case some Joe Citizen looking for a merit badge decided to follow you and you had to shake him loose. You mapped and timed both primary and secondary routes. You stole license plates from parked cars. You stole parked cars. You rented garages to park the stolen cars with the new stolen plates.
When you did a job, you never carried anything that if dropped could later be traced back to you. No cell phones. No scraps of paper with your girlfriend’s phone number. No nothing, up to and including your wallet. And you never touched anything with your bare hands.
The last time he had done a job in haste, it had gone wrong. Terribly wrong. Nineteen years of prison wrong. He had gone in a strong man, a man in the prime of life, a man who could scare people just by looking at them, and had come out an old man.
But it wasn’t like he had a pension plan. He was going to have to work until he was dead.
Now all Vin’s rules, produced by years of careful study and thought, kept being broken. Not because of anything he did, but because of his new boss. Oleg was unpredictable. Oleg made messes. Oleg was jovial, until very suddenly he wasn’t.
Vin was just Oleg’s errand boy. Sixty-two years old and this was what he had been reduced to. Shakedowns, threats, bribes. Low-level muscle. Sometimes even playing the part of a driver, dressed in a black suit that was too tight across the shoulders. He was also the guy who pulled on vinyl gloves and did cavity searches. And, very rarely, there was the termination that called for his special skills. Planning Scott Quinn’s murder, making sure it looked like an accident, had been the most interesting thing he had done all year.
Now what Oleg was demanding of him was hasty, pulled together far too fast for Vin’s taste. It was too haphazard to even be called a plan. He didn’t like the sound of it at all. It was one thing to be sicced on someone who should have known what they were getting into, but civilians were a different matter. They had their world, and he had his. He didn’t like overlap.
Of course there were people who tried to straddle both sides. Like that Scott Quinn. Letting himself be eased from one thing to the next until one day he woke up and had second thoughts a little too late. Tax evasion was one thing, he had actually told Oleg, but cocaine was another.
In the last few seconds of his life, as Vin took a baseball bat to his head, maybe he had realized they weren’t that far apart.