The Last Day

SEVENTY

Cupping his hands to keep light from leaking, Louis Gismano used his penlight to look at the picture of Gizmo one last time. “This is for you, little guy,” he told the picture. Placing the photo in his front pocket, Louis stood from his crouching position and raised his hands over his head to stretch his arms and loosen his tense shoulder muscles. He had just dragged a warm corpse, now lying at his feet, deep into the woods. Opening the dead man's cell phone, he broke it in half and, winding up like a major-league pitcher, threw it off into the woods, hearing it shatter against a tree trunk.

For the past twenty years Louis had exercised religiously, even doubling up on his repetitions since leaving the Army because if a man ever slows down, his reflexes rapidly go to shit. He'd seen it happen, and slowed reactions meant the difference between life and death-a bullet slamming home because you didn't move fast enough, or a sudden scraping of the tip of a blade nicking the inside of your spine as it sliced through your neck.

Someday no amount of exercise or vitamins would help maintain his speed, strength, or reflexes. Often he tried to look down the road at his life- to- be, but he could never see anything of it. Before Gizmo's death, he often pictured himself watching his son grow up, saw Gizmo joining the military to follow in his father's footsteps, driving a car to take his girlfriend on a date; he imagined Gizmo's bachelor party, and the grandchildren he would have bounced on his knee, taught to shoot a gun, use a knife. After Gizmo died, there had been nothing in the future.

Gizmo had been full of life and laughter. Louis's wife had been a good mother to the boy, except for that one lapse in judgment that had cost their son his life. Louis told himself that he cared that she had screwed Ross only because it had put their son in a position to be killed by some worthless punk. That had sealed her fate, more than the betrayal of their vows. That betrayal was something he understood. He'd slept with a lot of other women to satiate his needs, and what was a little sperm toss- and- catch between friends? He could have forgiven her, and allowed her to live, had it not been for what her actions had done to Gizmo. Everybody who had a part in his son's murder had to pay for that involvement, even the woman who had given birth to him.

This was just another war.

In war you fight and you win, or you die trying.

In war there are casualties.

In war there is justice.

In justice there is truth.

Louis moved rapidly around to the garage, unlocked the garage door electronically, and using his back silently raised the door two feet and rolled beneath. Before cutting the landline, he'd called the alarm company, posing as their local installer, to tell them the system would be offline from ten until around midnight. He had prepared for his mission, as a good soldier would. He pulled out his knife and, moving from car to car in the dark garage, stabbed each of the twelve tires, releasing the trapped air in a dull whoosh.

There were now three women and one man inside the house waiting for Todd Hartman to rush in and save the day. But Hartman was gone, and the only other person the people inside the house would ever see on this earth was Louis Gismano.

He was still crouching behind the BMW when the lights inside the garage suddenly came to life, so he froze, holding the knife at the ready.

Seconds later, when the garage lights went out, Louis moved to the kitchen door and stared through the glass into the house. He saw the golden pulsing glow from the candle in the den visible through the kitchen doorway. Knife in hand, he readied himself to move into the house and get on with the task at hand.