The Blonde

1:50 a.m.

Little Pete’s Restaurant, Seventeenth Street

The all-night diner was called Little Pete’s. It lived up to its name. It was a tiny rectangular wedge on the first floor of a seven-story garage complex. Just enough room for a row of six booths, a breakfast counter, a compact cashier’s station, and a stainless-steel kitchen in back. It was a greasy spoon as imagined by Fisher-Price. But it was the only thing open this time of night in this part of town. And that’s where his handler had told him to go.

Good news was, the night was almost over for him. Sure, it’d had its bumps, but four hours of work wasn’t too hideous. He could get some sleep and resume his personal mission the next evening.

Kowalski had called his handler once he was safely away from the scene of his most recent crimes. One headless burned guy (not his fault!) in a burned-out shell of a house, one dead woman in a shallow creek, one strangled asshole in his own living room. He’d taken the asshole’s Audi—an awfully nice car for a young college professor. Maybe the guy—Robert Lankford, according to his ID—had had a sideline going. Stay up all night, hoping that armed robbers would wander by his backyard. Take a cut of the loot, buy some flashy wheels to impress the barely dressed undergrad criminal justice majors.

His handler’d had a rare bit of good news for him: “No need to travel. We’re sending someone to recover the bag from you.”

She’d given him the address of a diner two blocks from Ritten-house Square.

And here he was, Ed’s head stashed between his feet on the floor, plate of bacon, bowl of cottage cheese, bowl of mixed fruit, and a cup of chocolate skim milk on the table before him. Usually, he waited until after an assignment, but the running and killing and planning had left him ravenous. An infusion of protein would help.

He’d wanted to talk to his handler.

Maybe say, We should talk.

Or: I need to explain a few things to you.

Or even the classic: This is not what it looks like.

But how could it not?

Let’s say you’re her.

A handler in an ultrasecretive government agency. Your boyfriend—also your number-one field agent—disappears on a long-term op, only to emerge with a pregnant fiancée. How’s it supposed to look?

Never mind that the fiancée is dead. That doesn’t help things at all. Not in your eyes.

Her eyes.

Kowalski couldn’t even bring himself to think of his handler by name. Her lovely name.

They’d worked together for years, anonymous to each other, the passion growing. By the time they’d broken down together in Warsaw, in that violent thunderstorm, and she revealed her true first name, it was like bearing her naked body to him for the first time. It was the most intimate thing about her.

And now that he thought about it, that was supremely fucked up.

He used his butter knife to slice a strip of bacon in half. Surprisingly good bacon—not many globules of fat, not too burned.

Want some, Ed?

He could put the bag on the table, unzip it, unhinge Ed’s jaw and give him a little taste. Least he could do, after all he’d been through. Kowalski decided he’d been a little harsh previously. What was Ed’s crime? Flirting with a pretty blonde on a plane ride to Philadelphia?

Meanwhile, Kowalski had a stack of mafiosi bodies piling up this summer—an Italian holocaust. And he was the guy enjoying the bacon.

The worst thing was, he’d lost count of how many goombahs he’d snipered since ID’ing Katie’s body at the morgue. The local paper had it somewhere around thirteen, according to the last news brief he’d read. Speculation was that it was intermob warfare, a bunch of bargain-basement capos capping one another over worthless bits of turf left behind by the Russian mob. And he’d only read that brief because they had printed the anonymous tip he’d phoned in: “Yeah, somebody’s out there. He’s pissed. And he’s a good shot, too. They call him Mr. K.”

The reporter ran with that, verbatim. They didn’t check a damn thing. It was amazing. The media would print anything.

But Ed, I did it for a reason. I wanted them to know why they were dying. That I was coming after them. All of them.

You understand, right, Ed?