CHAPTER 3

If one place wasn’t pretty much like another (except for abandoned buildings), then it followed as the night follows the day that there was no place like home. And even if he was wrong about that and everything else, Henry was absolutely sure there was no place like Buttermilk Sound in the Georgia estuaries.

Henry ambled down the long dock to the boathouse, careful as always to keep to the center of the weathered boards. Now that he was no longer with the agency, he was going to spend a lot more time enjoying the pleasures of living near water. At the moment, however, there was one last thing he had to do before the mission in Liège was well and truly over.

Inside the boathouse, he pulled the photo of Valery Dormov out of one pocket and a Zippo out of the other. The lighter gave Henry a flame as soon as he thumbed the wheel. He touched it to the photo, watching for a second as it consumed the Russian’s image before dropping the burning paper into a fishbowl on a shelf, where it joined the ashes of photos from previous missions.

And that was that. Now he was retired.

Henry turned to go back to the house and then paused. A goldfish bowl a little over half full of ashes. Was that really what his entire life’s work amounted to?

Somewhere, a retiring office drone was being presented with a gold watch—or more likely a gold-colored watch—to commemorate the decades he’d spent achieving inertia at his desk. He would take it home and have a heart attack in front of the TV, passing away from the world as if he had never passed into it. At least he would leave a watch behind, something functional; by contrast, the ashes in that goldfish bowl wouldn’t even make good confetti.

Henry shook his head as if to clear it. What was he thinking? Screw that—he had a watch and it was still running after a lifetime of use. And his watch wasn’t just counting off the hours until he died.

He went back up the dock to the house. Dammit; missing that shot had taken the shine off everything.

* * *

The bright daylight in the living room lifted Henry’s spirits and chased away much of the residual gloom from Liège. It was open and airy, with a lot more window space than solid wall. He liked being able to see so much of the outside from indoors; even more than that, he liked to let in as much daylight as possible, especially after a job. Unlike the mission in Liège, a lot of his work was done under cover of darkness and he knew all too well what a lack of daylight could do to a person.

This was the heart of the house, where he spent most of his time off the job, so it had a few unconventional features. Against the wall it shared with the kitchen, he had set up a cabinet with almost all of his tools, arranged in a way that appealed to his aesthetic sense while satisfying his need for order and efficiency. Screwdrivers, wrenches, wood chisels, reamers, pliers, sockets, screws, nails and everything else were arranged not only by size but for convenience, depending on frequency of use. He’d had an absolute blast organizing them, using the 20/80 rule—twenty percent of the tools were used eighty percent of the time, and vice versa. Maybe now that he’d retired from assassination, he could consider a new career designing displays of tools in hardware stores. He loved hardware stores, always had, even as a kid. Hardware stores followed the 100 rule—one hundred percent of the stock was useful for getting things done.

Nearby was the workbench with a large magnifier lamp. He had positioned it so he could see the TV easily and wouldn’t have to miss any Phillies games while getting things done. He had been keeping an eye on his beloved Phillies while he had been working on the birdhouse. He turned to look at it hanging outside the window behind him and his mood lightened even more.

He had built the birdhouse on a whim. Or maybe it was more like a private joke with himself, at least when he’d started out. Building a birdhouse was the kind of thing a nine-year-old would do to get a scout badge, not how a trained government sniper relaxed between assassinations. But to his surprise, Henry had found the act of construction—cutting the wood, gluing it together, sanding it, and applying weatherproofing and varnish—to be unexpectedly gratifying. When he was done, he felt as if he had discovered something new about himself. Who knew that a hitman could have that kind of experience in his fifties (very early fifties; barely into his fifties, and dammit, how had that happened?).

When Henry had finally hung the thing up, his sense of accomplishment had deepened. He had actually built a house with his own two hands. Yeah, okay, it was a little house, not a boathouse or even a garden shed—he had hired someone to build both those things. Still, he had created a shelter for living creatures that would settle in and make it their home, at least until they migrated. How many other snipers were that constructive when they were off the clock? Probably none.

He watched the birdhouse stirring a little in the breeze then frowned. Something wasn’t right. Maybe he was just having some residual bad feeling from Liège. After missing the shot, he had felt like the whole world was ten degrees out of true.

No, that wasn’t it. There really was something off.

It took another moment before he spotted the problem—two splinters sticking out from the upper left junction of the roof and wall. Henry knew most people wouldn’t have seen them, and even if they had it wouldn’t have bothered them much, if at all.

But they weren’t birds looking for a place to nest. On the birds’ level, those splinters must have looked like a couple of sharpened stakes. A prospective resident who got caught in a sudden gust of wind and didn’t stick the landing could get stuck. Maybe that was why it had remained empty since he had hung it up. The devil was always in the details, even for birds.

Henry went to the tool cabinet and opened the drawer where he kept small squares of sandpaper, organized in order of coarseness. He chose a square from the middle, then swapped it for the next finer grain and went out to repair the birdhouse.

He finished and looked around for prospective tenants—Okay, I fixed up the fixer-upper. Better move in fast before some nasty-ass kingfisher snaps it up and you have to raise your chicks in an open-air nest above a thorn bush, he announced silently. But instead of bird calls, he heard the alarm on his cell phone, telling him a car was approaching the house.

Henry knew who it was. He had been bracing himself for this visit, had actually expected it to have come sooner. Maybe traffic had been especially heavy. He started to walk around to the front of the house, then remembered the sandpaper and went back into the living room, ignoring the honking horn. If the entire company of archangels came to his door to tell him it was Judgment Day, his ass was grass, and the good Lord Himself was the lawnmower; they would have to wait till Henry put everything back where it belonged. There was a place for everything and he made damned sure everything was in its place before he did anything else. His house, his rules.

The car horn honked again. He went out to see Del Patterson finish parking his land yacht (badly, as usual) before he leaped out of the driver’s seat and rushed at Henry brandishing the resignation letter he’d sent the day before.

“You can’t do this!” Patterson said by way of hello.

“Yeah, good to see you, too, Del,” Henry replied. “Come on in, sit down, make yourself at home while I get you something to drink.”

Moments later, Patterson was perched on the edge of the sofa in the living room. The cheerful daylight was lost on him. He was still clutching the letter when Henry came in from the kitchen with a beer and a Coke.

“I have to quit,” Henry said. “In almost any other line of work, you can lose a step. Not this one.”

“You’re still the best we’ve got—the best anyone’s got,” Patterson said. “And believe me, I keep track.”

Henry put the Coke on the coffee table in front of him. Patterson glared up at him with the expression of a man who had been pushed to his absolute limit and wasn’t taking any more shit. The black-framed glasses would have made another man seem bookish, like an absentminded professor; they gave Patterson the look of a no-nonsense authority whose decisions were final.

“Not a soda. Not today.” Patterson crumpled the letter into a ball, dropped it on the table, then batted it away.

Henry’s eyebrows went up. “You sure?”

“Are you really retiring?” Patterson said evenly. Henry nodded. “Then I’m sure.”

Henry moved the Coke aside and gave him the beer. When he had first met Patterson, it had been obvious the man was fond of a drink and as time went on, he had grown even fonder. For a while, it had looked as if Patterson was going to take up drinking as a lifestyle. And then one day, without fanfare, explanation, or apology, his drink of choice had become Coca-Cola.

Everyone including Henry had wondered how long it would last, waited for Patterson to say something about it, but no one wanted to come right out and ask him. An agent who had suffered with the same problem inquired as to whether he was now a friend of Bill W., and reported that Patterson seemed genuinely mystified by the question.

Henry finally decided he had to know; his life could depend on it. Patterson told him that his job required him to be on call 24/7. Therefore, he had to stay clean and sober for the sake of his agents. And that was all he was ever going to say about it, Patterson added; talk was cheap, actions spoke louder than words, and the subject was now closed.

Henry had been satisfied. Everybody had their own reasons for doing whatever they did. If this was how Patterson managed to avoid going down a very dark path to destruction, then it was what it was and Henry was glad he didn’t have to think about it any more.

Now Patterson would probably claim he had driven him to drink, Henry thought. He sat down next to him on the sofa, refusing to flinch from the other man’s death-ray glare.

“Lots of guys can shoot,” Henry said. “Marine STAs, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs—”

“They aren’t you.” Patterson made it an accusation, as if this was yet another way in which Henry had failed him. “They don’t have the history you do.”

“Yeah, I think the history might be the problem,” said Henry. “I’ve got too much of it. We both know shooters don’t get better with age, they just get older.”

“Then who’s going to finish training Monroe?” Patterson demanded, his expression pained. “Guy’s called me three times already asking me to talk you back in.”

Henry sighed and shook his head again. “I wish he hadn’t done that.”

Patterson sat forward, his face urgent. “Henry, we’ve been through a lot together, you and me. We made the world safer. If we hadn’t done the things we did, good people would have suffered and bad ones would have profited, good things would have gone bad and bad shit would have gotten worse. What we do is important—it matters. But I can’t do anything unless I’m working with someone I trust and I’m not going to trust a new guy the way I trust you.”

Henry shook his head again, more emphatically this time. “I’m telling you, Del, something felt different on this one. That’s why the shot was off—even the ground beneath me didn’t feel right.”

Patterson looked around as if there might be something in the room to support his counter-arguments, then spotted the birdhouse outside the window.

“So, what now—you’re just going to build birdhouses?” he asked Henry.

Del. There was a kid right next to him. If I’m off by six inches, she’s dead,” Henry said, talking over him. “I’m done.

Patterson’s expression said he had finally heard him and he was devastated. Henry had known this wasn’t going to be an easy conversation. In their line of work, there was no wiggle room, no time or space for socializing. Your focus had to be on the job, the whole job, and nothing but the job, not the people on your team. You had to be able to take it for granted everyone would be in the right place at the right time doing the right thing. It was all planning, nothing left to chance, no wasted movement, no nonsense, no slip-ups, so that nobody died who wasn’t supposed to. Every time Henry thought about how it was only by virtue of sheer luck that he hadn’t killed a child—a child—he felt shaky inside.

“You know, when I started in the Corps, it all made sense all the time,” Henry went on. “My job was to take out bad guys. Art of the Kill—whatever worked. But in Liège—” he shook his head. “The truth is, in Liège, there was no Art of the Kill. I just got lucky. I didn’t feel the shot, not like I should have.” He paused, took a breath.

Patterson was starting to look more resigned than hurt. He was a pro; he understood.

“It’s more than being older. I’ve made seventy-two kills,” Henry said. “That many, it messes with you deep down. It’s like my soul hurts. I think I’ve reached my limit of lives to take. Now I just want peace.

Patterson gave a heavy sigh. “So what do I do now?”

The question threw Henry completely. Patterson was the handler—he made the plans and called the shots. Patterson was supposed to tell him what to do, not the other way around.

Henry spread his hands and shrugged. “Wish me well?”

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