Work Done for Hire

1.

Kit never needed an alarm to get up early. I came half awake when she quietly got out of bed and dressed in the dark. I mumbled something and she gave me a sleepy kiss and slipped out the front door. Her car door didn’t slam; I remembered she was letting me use the car for the day tomorrow.

It could have been a minute later or an hour when the doorbell rang. Funny, I thought; she should have had a key.

I put on some pants and was grabbing a T-shirt when a car door did slam. The car squealed away from the parking lot and then squealed again as it tore out onto Second.

Not Kit. I opened the front door a crack and peered out, the car long gone.

A brown cardboard box more than a yard long lay on the doormat. I picked it up—heavy—and turned it over. No address or postage. I took it inside and put it on the dining room table and turned on the overhead. Low light for romance; I clapped it up twice.

The box was secured with a single piece of broad strapping tape. Too strong for my thumbnail, so I got a knife from the kitchen rack.

Inside, packed in crumpled paper and inflated plastic bags, was a gleaming new M2010AW-9, exactly the same rifle I’d used in the desert, though I’d never seen a new one.

I reached to pull it out but then stopped. What the hell was going on?

Under the sink there was a box of throwaway plastic gloves some previous tenant had left. I stripped off a pair and put them on clumsily, feeling melodramatic. This thing was going straight to the police, and if there were fingerprints on it, they wouldn’t be mine.

It had a good smell, gunmetal and walnut wood. I liked the wood stock, even though it was heavier than the more modern one, and some guys said it had harder recoil, without the spring. But it felt like a rifle.

I took it out and set it on the table. There was also a box of twenty-five rounds of match-quality .300 Magnum ammunition, with a round battery taped to the top. That would be for the scope, night use. A threaded chrome cylinder that must be a silencer; at least that’s what they looked like in movies. A plastic bag with a dozen paper targets.

It had a shorter magazine than we had used in combat. I thumbed the release and found that it held six rounds and a folded-up note. Plain bond paper, printed out in what appeared to be 20-point Courier:

Deficient in grammar, but intriguing. I got a small screwdriver and removed the butt plate. On top of the cleaning supplies, ten of the new $1,000 bills, neatly folded into thirds.

That was military. Bedding, uniforms, ponchos, all folded in thirds. The friendly sergeant we’d had in sniper school said by the time we got out of the army we’d be folded in thirds.

For a person with pretty bad spelling and grammar, he certainly had lots of money. I creased the bills so they would lie flat, and brought the desk lamp and magnifier over to study them.

Ten dead Kennedys. I’d never seen one before, except for pictures when they started circulating them a couple of years ago.

They didn’t show any wear, but then not many people would crumple one up and stuff it in a pocket. Rumor had it that they were manufactured with nanocircuitry that broadcast the location of each bill. The government denied that with just the right degree of “Who, us?”

If they were counterfeit, an amateur like me probably couldn’t tell. I took the magnifying glass and examined Kennedy’s right eye on each one, and they all looked the same. The paper had authentic-looking threads, but I’d seen how counterfeiters could bleach out a one-dollar bill and photoprint any denomination onto it.

The e-mail hoax. A few months after I got back, I got a bunch of e-mails that tried to hire me to kill the president. But that was a kid, Timmy something. He’d never confessed, but went to juvenile court and got a suspended sentence.

Could they be related? I ought to find out what became of young Timmy. Maybe he came into money.

I picked up the phone. Don’t use 9-1-1 unless it’s an emergency. I clicked on the directory. Call the Iowa City cops or the state troopers? Or Coralville or the Kampus Kops, for that matter. Or go straight to the FBI or Homeland Security?

Well, I didn’t especially like any of those organizations. Which one would cause me the least trouble?

I wished I still smoked. This would be the time to stoke up a pipe and emulate Sherlock Holmes. But I didn’t even have any tobacco, just a little marijuana and some rolling papers stashed away. That would be a real good idea.

Would I be breaking a law by inaction? I assumed so, but what would the law be?

Technically, I was in possession of an unregistered military weapon, but the selector switch only said SAFE and SEMI. If it didn’t shoot full auto, I assumed it was legal.

I could put the ten grand in the bank while I decided what to do. But no. At 3.5 percent it would earn less than a dollar a day. And it probably wouldn’t be in there a day, before the cops came knocking.

Was I accessory to a crime? A conspiracy to kill some unidentified bad guy. That might be a crime once the bad guy was identified, but right now you could argue that I just had a legal gun and a hypothetical use for it.

Plus ten dead Kennedys.

It couldn’t be real. Somebody was setting me up. But for what, a joke? A blackmail deal? It would be an expensive joke, not very funny, and if they blackmailed me they could get a three-figure check and a comic-book collection, which I’d have to collect from Mother’s attic.

I went to the computer and found that a new rifle like this, with a standard high-power scope, would run $2,600 out of the box. I ought to just take it down to Gun ’n’ Porn. But they probably wouldn’t take a weapon that didn’t have papers.

Or I could wait and see who they wanted dead. There were a couple of people I’d gladly kill for free; maybe I’d be lucky.

It occurred to me that that was a thing any guy might say casually. But it does mean something different if you once assassinated people for $1,300 a month and all the army chow you could eat.

Presumably most of the people I’d killed as a sniper were guys like me, ordinary people snared by chance or circumstance and turned into killers by their own government. I told myself that I could feel sorry that they were dead, without feeling guilty for being an instrument in the chain of events that led to our unfortunate meeting. I was drafted, and most of them were forced into uniform by poverty and politics.

This was completely different, except for the tool engaged. The target would probably not know he was a target, and presumably wouldn’t be shooting back.

And the person shooting him would not be a just-following-orders soldier. He’d be a hired assassin.

I should take the whole thing, money and all, down to the police station, and wash my hands of it. Any normal person would.

Instead, I stared at it and thought.

If I did have an immortal soul, it was already forfeit. So ponder the ponderable: first, could I do it and not get caught?

With no wind deflection and a clear shot, working from a stable platform, I could put a bullet into “the head zone,” head or neck, from two thousand meters, call it a mile and some change. One or two follow-up rounds into the thorax. A little less accurate with a silencer, I assumed; I’d never used one.

My first thought was that if it was a city situation, like Kennedy, King, or Semple, then no way. Of course those assassins hadn’t used silencers. Still, there would probably be witnesses and then a short chase.

With a silencer, though? From a mile away? It could be done. But could it be done by me?

I supposed it would depend on the target. If it was somebody I would kill for free, then sure, I’d do it for money. If it was some random stranger, then not. Maybe not.

The phone rang.

2.

It wasn’t Kit; she always called the cell. And not before dawn. I let it ring four times and picked it up. “Well?” I said.

A woman’s voice. “If it was the right person, would you do it?”

I should have said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and hung up. Instead, I said, “I don’t know enough. Who are you?”

“I can’t tell you that. I can tell you that we are not the government or enemies of the government; it’s not a political assassination.”

“Why should that be a plus? Being a gun for hire, with no principles involved, isn’t appealing.”

“You didn’t agree with the principles behind the war for which you killed sixteen people.”

“Apples and oranges. I didn’t have a choice.”

“You did, though. As you have said and written. If you had gone to jail for refusing the draft, it would have been less time out of your life. Less moral complication.”

“Yeah, happy hindsight.” Any way I could trace this call? I took the cell phone out of my shirt pocket.

“Put the cell down,” she said. “If you call anyone I’ll hang up.”

The blinds were closed. “You have a bug in this room?”

“There are other ways we can tell what you are doing. I need an answer.”

“Why me? I need that answered.”

“Expert marksman, unmarried, apolitical and agnostic, low-income disabled veteran against the war.”

“Okay, that must narrow it down to a thousand. Why me?”

“Because we can trust you to do the right thing. You wouldn’t want Kit to come down with a rare blood disease and die slowly. Would you?”

“What? Blood disease?”

“Timothy Unger. Google him. We’re serious.” The line went dead.

That was Timmy’s name, the e-mail ammunition boy. I looked him up and found that he was born in Iowa City twenty years ago and died last year of a heart attack.

Too young. There was an autopsy, the obit said, but no follow-up story except for funeral arrangements. But then I tried “rare blood disease” + “Iowa City” + “fatality” and his name came up, dead last year. It was supposedly myelofibrosis rapidly transformed into secondary acute myelogenous leukemia leading to massive cardiac failure. The doctors were “mystified” by the sudden onset of the disease.

Maybe there was some mysterious poison that mimicked myelofibrosis, whatever that was. Or maybe they just put a nickel in the Google machine and asked it for the name of someone local who had died of a rare disease last year.

No. That wouldn’t explain the e-mailings.

Anyhow, this was way beyond the possibility of a hoax, for any reason. Too complicated and expensive and incriminating.

I sat down by the rifle and rubbed its smooth stock. They’re giving me time to think this over, before they identify the victim. I have to kill X or they kill Kit. For what values of X would I refuse?

How had they found me; why had they chosen me? My slight prominence as a writer? Well, I did write about war and about being a sniper. I should’ve chosen Gothic romance.

The phone rang. I picked it up and got a recorded message—same female voice—that was repeated once: “Take the rifle and targets and ammunition right now and drive to the east end of the Coralville dump, where people go for shooting. When there’s enough light, sight in the rifle. Collect all your brass and your targets and leave. You will be watched.”

It was just starting to get light in the east. I zapped a big mug of water and stirred in enough instant coffee and cocoa to wake up the dead, and took it out to the car, and came back for the weapon and targets and ammunition. It felt odd, carrying a rifle without a sling, just walking out to the car like any garden-variety nutcase out to shoot a president or a classroom full of innocents. I knew the bad guys were watching me, but who else? Was one of my nutty neighbors calling the cops, and would they listen? He always acts funny and keeps to himself, says he’s some kinda writer. I always knew there was somethin’ wrong with him.

So if I zero in the rifle, am I complicit? Yes and no; I could still decide not to shoot or to miss the target.

No car was following me as I drove out to the Coralville dump. If they really would be watching me, as they said, they were already there. Or in orbit, for all I knew.

Tried to hatch a plan as I drove through the hazy dawn. There was one aspect I could control: I didn’t have to sight the rifle accurately. I could misalign the finderscope and send the bullet anywhere.

Sighting in a rifle-and-scope combination is simple if the equipment is good. This was all solid and new, the same combination I used in the desert, a red-dot Insight MRD on the M2010 sniper rifle. To sight it in you put a “dot” target—a spot on a piece of paper—a measured distance away, and fire carefully from a stable platform. Once you’re comfortable with the rifle, you try to get three-shot groups within about a one-inch circle—smaller circle for a real pro. Then you click the rifle sight for windage (left and right) and drop (up and down) until that group consistently appears where the scope’s crosshairs intersect, on the printed spot.

Hunters often sight for seventy-five yards; in the desert we usually went out to four hundred. So I was to do half that.

There were no obvious witnesses at the Coralville dump. A lot of crows and a slightly pungent atmosphere. A hand-lettered sign saying SHOOTERS led me to the left.

The setup was simple. Two weathered picnic tables set up with sandbags, next to a plank platform for sighting in from a prone position. I would sit.

There were thick wooden supports about a yard square, spray-painted 100, 200, and 400. I went out to the 400-yard one and thumbtacked four targets there, and returned to the picnic tables.

I filled the magazine and slid it into place, seated the first round, and clicked off the safety. It was going to be loud. What would I say if a cop showed up? “Don’t bother me; I’m getting ready to shoot a bad person.” I put earplugs in deep, lined up the rifle, and peered through the scope.

It was so dim. Well, it was barely dawn. A long way from desert glare.

There was nobody around, but I said, “Ready on the firing line” in a loud voice. What did civilians say?

The first shot was pretty loud, even with the earplugs. Missed the target completely. They obviously had the wrong guy for this job.

I took a couple of deep breaths and did the zen thing, floating up there watching myself calm down. I quietly touched the hair-trigger and willed the bullet downrange. It did hit the target, about 11:00.

It had occurred to me that someday I might wind up being the target of this rifle, rather than the shooter. One way to protect myself would be to zero it off-center.

Upper left-hand quadrant, about 10:30, halfway from the crosshairs to the edge. So if anybody else used the rifle on you, the bullet would whish by harmlessly over your right shoulder.

And I didn’t plan to kill anybody with it anyway.

3.

Zeroing took less than an hour. No witnesses until I was packing up to leave. He nodded hello, unsmiling, and went to set up his equipment on the other picnic table. Checking on me? Not obviously. Old guy in an old car, local plates. I wrote down the plate number just in case, feeling a little foolish.

So I had taken the first step leading to a rewarding career in civilian assassination. Or the second step; I should have called the cops when I opened the box. Called the feds.

First I had to protect Kit. Get her way out of town before I went to the cops. The woman on the phone had been scarily specific.

I was going to meet Kit for lunch. She’d probably be safe at work. Better not call. Just pick her up and go to some random place.

Money. I could get $500 from the ATM. But the bank would be open in an hour. Empty out my accounts. Then have Kit do the same, and run like hell?

Maybe I was thinking too much like a storyteller. I should do the rational thing and go to the authorities.

Did I have enough evidence? A note that could be printed anywhere, a phone call I didn’t record, a rifle you could buy at Sears. And a story that sounds like something a storyteller would make up. A storyteller who wanted publicity, they would assume.

I should at least wait until I knew who the target was supposed to be. A recording of the next time they call wouldn’t hurt, either.

Did Kit still have a recorder in the glove compartment? I pulled over and found it, but it was the big high-fidelity one we’d used to interview Grand-dude. I’d want one I could carry in a pocket—surely the cops or spooks could extract the other side of a telephone conversation recorded from a couple of feet away.

If I went straight to the Radio Shack at the mall, it would be open in an hour. The rearview mirror showed a half mile of open road behind me; no one on my tail.

Do it. Get the small recorder… but also go to the savings bank and empty that account, then go to the checking bank and max out cash on AmEx and Visa. Then have Kit do the same?

Maybe I shouldn’t go home at all. They were watching. It wouldn’t be smart to rush in and start packing suitcases. But what would be smart?

My heart was hammering and my breath was short. Try to stop shaking. Try to think. Make a list.

1. Go to the police.

But then they would control whatever “2.” was going to be, and every number thereafter. My own main concern was protecting Kit, and then covering my own ass—or maybe it was the other way around, to be honest. Whatever came third was a distant third, though.

Would the police actually be protecting us? The mystery woman watching me would know when they showed up. How long would they stay interested if nothing else happened? Whoever was behind the rifle must have an agenda, but I didn’t even know whether they were left, right or orthogonal. Or how patient they might be.

If not the police, our only protection would be flight. No way we could hide in Iowa City.

I could pursue my writing career online; my agent could make credit transfers to a bank anywhere. I knew from research for my first book how to build a new identity, a bogus paper trail, without spending a fortune or breaking any serious laws.

I’d be asking Kit to throw away her past and future. But if we were going to stay together, we didn’t have much choice.

Well, we did have one, Plan A. Go to the police. This is not a TV show. Just go to the fucking cops.

My reverie was broken by the crunch of gravel behind me, and I looked in the rearview mirror… and saw that I didn’t have to go to the cops. They had come to me. State trooper.

A short muscular guy with a Smokey-the-Bear hat stepped out of the car. Sunglasses. I rolled down the window while he was writing my license number into his notebook.

“Good morning, sir,” he said, exhaling tobacco and Clorets. “Is there a problem?”

“No, sir, nothing.”

He looked into the backseat. “Nice rifle.”

“Yes, sir. I was just down at the dump—”

“We know. We got a call.”

My mouth went dry. But why should it? “I haven’t… have I broken some law?”

“No, not really. The dump isn’t open to the public till nine, but it’s not posted. Some sport stole the sign.” He studied the gun. “You had pulled over, and we thought you might need assistance.”

“No, um… I was going to make a call. I don’t like to use the cell while I’m driving.”

“That’s smart; that’s good.” He was still looking at the rifle. “New gun?”

Better not say I think so. “Yes, sir.”

He nodded slowly. “You have papers on it?”

“Papers?” Oh, shit. “Do I need a permit for a rifle?”

“No. Not unless it’s full automatic. You got a bill of sale?”

“It was a gift.”

“Mind if I take a look?”

“Of course not.” Not a good time to rant about “search and seizure.” I started to open the door.

“Stay in the car. Sir.” He opened the back door and lifted the weapon out. He looked it over carefully and sniffed at the receiver.

“I just fired it,” I said helpfully.

“Hm… excuse me.” He carried it back to the squad car. He and the other cop sat there for a few minutes. I could hear the radio crackling but couldn’t understand what it was saying.

He came back without the rifle and asked for my driver’s license and registration. I gave him the license. “I don’t know where the registration is. It’s not my car.”

“No. You’re not Catherine Majors,” he said, deadpan. He walked back to the squad car and returned with the rifle. He put it in the back and closed the door with a quiet click.

“Thank you for your cooperation.” He gave the license back. “Please drive carefully.”

I looked at the batteries and recorder on the seat next to me and had a melancholy recollection: the last time I saw my grandfather before he died, just before I shipped for the desert. He and my dad and I had all had too much to drink. It was his eightieth birthday, and we had a recorder like this one going, while he talked about the past.

Grand-dude and I shared the bond of both having been drafted (Dad’s generation was spared), and we traded Basic Training memories. Then he started to talk about combat, which he never had done before.

He started to cry—not weeping, just his eyes leaking a little, dabbing, and he delivered a slurred soliloquy about how useless it all had been—how much less freedom we had after his war, Vietnam, than before; how the government used war to increase its control over its citizens, what a fucking waste it had all been. Dad got upset with him, me headed overseas in a couple of days.

But I said it wasn’t that different from what I heard in the barracks every night. Grand-dude said yeah, same-same. Soldiers aren’t fools.

But we go anyhow.

4.

Kit’s office was in the main administration building, a short walk from the cluster of student-oriented shops and restaurants downtown. It cost half as much as lunch to park anywhere nearby, so I found a place down in the student ghetto and walked the half mile through quiet streets, checking out every car that passed. This is where the bad guys would appear out of nowhere and tackle me and put a bag over my head and stuff me into the trunk of a car, and no one would notice.

In fact, every car seemed to be a student looking for a parking place. Perfect disguise.

I called Kit and suggested Hamburger Haven, not a ritzy place, but small enough so that no one could come in unobserved. I called her from the door, so I could just step inside to watch and wait.

There must have been something in my voice. She asked me what was wrong.

“Nothing. I just got pulled over by a cop,” I half lied. “No ticket, no problem.”

I sat down at the counter and ordered a cup of coffee, but then realized I was too fucking jumpy already, and changed it to a beer. “Breakfast of champions,” the waitress said, although it was after eleven. I guess I looked like someone who had just gotten up. And found an early Christmas present on the doormat.

I smiled at her and realized for the first time that I smelled like smokeless powder. Would anybody notice? With my current luck, I expected an off-duty cop to sit down next to me and say, “Been shootin’?”

Yeah, think I’ll go assassinate some stranger so the bad guys don’t give my girlfriend myelofibrosis. You ever have a day like that?

I finished the beer pretty fast, and the waitress was delivering my second as Kit walked through the door. She smiled. “Starting early?”

“You have no idea.” I picked up the beer. “Let’s sit in the back.”

The waitress trailed us with menus; we waved them off and ordered burgers. Kit sat down with a pleasant expectant smile. “How’s the bike?”

“Um, it’s good, good. We have a real problem.”

“We?”

“Not like you and me. I mean…” Where to start? “I’m in deep shit. And I’m afraid you are, too.”

“What’d you do? We?”

“Nothing! It’s just… right after you left this morning, the doorbell rang.”

“Before dawn?”

“Yeah.” I took a deep breath and told her about the rifle, the phone call, the rifle range, and the state trooper, talking low and fast. She listened silently, eyes widening.

“And you haven’t gone to the police?”

“They wouldn’t believe me! It’s too fantastic.”

“But you have proof. You have the rifle. The state trooper’s report will verify that you took it straight out to the dump and… well, yeah. That’s a problem.”

“Like why didn’t I tell any of this to the Smokey? I guess it was the timing. Like he was part of it, following me.” Our burgers came and I took a bite and struggled to swallow it. Drank some beer. “I should’ve called the cops first thing, right after I found the rifle and the woman called. Hell, I shouldn’t have picked up the phone when it rang.”

“Let me smell your hand.” She took my right hand in hers and sniffed it. “You still smell like gunpowder. If we went to the police right now, that would strengthen your case.”

I wasn’t sure. “It’d mean I’ve fired a gun recently. But that’s already on record.”

She frowned. “Guess so.”

“Am I just being paranoid? Maybe I should go straight to the cops. But the woman on the phone expressly told me not to, or they’d come after you. Like Timmy what’s-his-name.”

“Jesus.” She sat back and looked around. “‘Damned if you do and damned if you don’t,’ my father would say.”

I bit my lip but then said it: “I’ve thought about your father.”

“What about him?”

“People who might have a reason to do this.”

She frowned and shook her head slightly. “No way. He likes you.”

“So he says, but he’s not sanguine about my earning potential. And he’s a hunter; he does know all about guns.”

“And a fellow veteran. He wouldn’t do this—not to you, not to me.”

“Yeah, I know. Grasping at straws.”

“Grasp at a different one.” She touched both my hands. “Who else would do this?”

“No one, or anyone. You write a book and you sort of become a target.”

“Some of the characters in your first book were based on real people, weren’t they? Maybe somebody didn’t like what you said.”

I shrugged. “Not saying it couldn’t happen. But an e-mail would get the message across better… besides, it’s too oblique for that, and too expensive. You could scare me as much with a postcard, if you said the right thing.”

“‘I’m going to trash your book in the New York Times.’”

“That might work. But I sort of favor ‘I will get you when you least expect it.’”

“You’ve given it some thought.”

“Well, yeah. Trying to put myself in the head of someone who would do this.”

She chewed thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s not personal.”

“You’re the one they’re threatening to murder. That’s not personal?”

“What I mean is, think of it as a business proposition. They want you to do something illegal and probably dangerous. So they offer incentives, positive and negative. If the money isn’t enough, then maybe saving my life would be.”

I felt a tight squeezing in my chest. If it were just me being threatened, I’d have wiggle room; it would be hypothetical, and I could bargain with them—kill me and you won’t have anything. But I wouldn’t gamble with Kit’s life, and they knew that.

Kit took a paper notebook out of her purse and scribbled on a page. Tore it out and showed it to me: Assume we’re being watched and listened to. Pay the bill and follow me and don’t say anything about it.

“Yeah, sure.” I left a twenty on the table, nice tip, and followed her out the door. When we got to my car, she tugged on my sleeve and we kept walking. Her car was at the end of the block. I slid in on the passenger side. She got in and wrote another note: Could your clothes be bugged?

I shrugged and wrote possible.

She drove wordlessly to the Kmart on the outskirts of town. Parked in the fire lane and wrote, Get clothes and cash, change clothes. I’ll be back.

I’d already emptied out my cash card’s account, and maxed out advances on AmEx and Visa. Good thing Kmart takes cash.

I got some prewashed jeans and a plain shirt. On impulse I went back to the sporting goods section. They had plenty of firearms there, but I’d read about the new two-day waiting period.

So I couldn’t get a real gun, but there was a CO2-powered pellet gun that looked just like a service Glock, except for a bright orange nose, which I could spray-paint black.

I didn’t think these people would bluff too easily. But it was better than nothing.

There was no way I could just change clothes in the Kmart dressing room and walk out. So I paid for the jeans and shirt and took them to the adjoining McDonald’s. Broke a lifelong vow and bought a Coke there, and went into the men’s room. Changed into the new clothes and stuffed my old ones into the trash, must happen all the time. I got back to the Kmart entrance just as Kit pulled up. There was a big pink suitcase in the backseat, a red sock sticking out like a limp tongue.

She looked at me and smiled. “Okay. So let’s do a disappearing act.”

“What about your job?”

“I e-mailed him, death in the family, don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”

“Get some money?”

“Yes. I emptied out both accounts, about four grand.”

“Wow. I just had a little over a thousand.”

Her mouth made a small O and we stared at each other for a second, then it clicked. “Remember?” I said. “I don’t have the Hollywood money yet.”

“Shit, of course. I knew that and spaced it.” She faced forward and put the car in gear. “Left or right?”

“I-80, I guess. Put some miles between us and them.”

She hesitated. “Maybe back roads would be better.”

“Just a second. Let’s think.” She put it back into Park and looked at me with a forced expression of patience, or resignation.

“We leave my car in Iowa City, gun in the trunk, and head off to parts unknown. What happens to the car?”

“I think after two tickets they tow it away. Then wait for you to come bail it out. Auction it if you don’t show up.”

“But I don’t think so. Not in my case. They’ll run the license plate and find I was stopped by Smokies this morning. They’ll read about the gun and pop the trunk, and voilà, I’m a fleeing criminal.”

“But you aren’t a criminal.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“I mean really. They can’t search your car without a warrant. You didn’t break any law this morning—but even if you had, could they just pop your trunk and rummage around looking for nothing in particular? Don’t they have to have ‘probable cause’?”

“Hell, I don’t know. If a car’s impounded that means a law was broken. There’s probably another law that allows them to break into it and sell everything on eBay. I mean, who makes the laws?”

We sat for a few seconds, breathing hard, maybe thinking hard. “Wonder how far we could go,” she said, “on five thousand dollars. I don’t have a passport.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t even leave Iowa. Cross a state line and we’ve got the feds on our tail.” I said that last like a movie tough guy, but she didn’t smile.

“When do you expect the check?”

“Probably not till the end of the month. Let’s not even think about it. We’ve got five grand of our own money and ten of the bad guys’.”

“With fifteen thousand dollars,” she said carefully, “we could do like that guy in your book. Manufacture new identities. Or is that all fantasy?”

“No, you really could do it. But it takes some time and planning. And a lot more than fifteen grand; call it a hundred. Each.”

She laughed without any humor. “That much. Buying off officials?”

“No, just side-stepping computers. Like, his first step was taking the identity of someone in another state who was born the same time as him, but died an infant. That won’t work anymore. You’re in the federal system from womb to tomb, no matter how little time you spend in between.”

“That’s comforting.”

“Yeah, ‘Big Brother Is Watching You.’ We’ll be okay if we’re careful. Don’t use any credit cards or IDs, and don’t go anyplace where they scan faces, like the courthouse.”

“Don’t leave any fingerprints on corpses.” She had read my first book, all right.

“I’ll wear gloves if we kill anybody. So you’re the driver. Where to?”

“I asked you first.” She rubbed her face. “Damn. I was thinking get lost in a big city, Chicago. But as you say, face scanners. Liquor stores have them, banks. I guess convenience stores in high-crime areas.”

“So we go to a small town?”

“I’d say so. Stay in Iowa,” she said.

“The Amana Colonies? We’d eat well.”

“Not a tourist place, not too close to Iowa City. Sioux City? Is Davenport too big?”

“Davenport. We could hop on a riverboat and escape to New Orleans. Except I think they’re all permanently anchored.”

“It’s an idea, though,” she said. “It’s one place in Iowa where you could get a G-note changed without drawing a lot of attention.”

“The casino, that’s good. Find some mom-and-pop place out in the country, dash into the casino to change the bills, then move on.”

“No, wait. I’m sure they scan faces on the way into the casino. If anywhere. But they may not be looking for you.”

“Yeah. It’s not as if there was a warrant out for me.” It still felt shaky. “Are there casinos on the Illinois side of the river?”

“Don’t know.” She took the iPak out of her purse, shook it, and asked it, “Search. Riverboat. Casino. Illinois.” It came back with “Harrah’s” and an address.

“Worth the extra couple of miles. That was a state trooper, and I don’t imagine Iowa and Illinois share data down to that level. Not even a parking ticket,” I said optimistically. Just a murder weapon on the backseat.

We picked up bad coffee and a couple of McDeathburgers, compromising culinary standards for speed, and headed straight for I-80. Unlike mine, her two-year-old car had Supercruise, so once we got on the superhighway, she went all the way to the left, shifted it to Traction, and asked it for a Davenport warning. “Finish my coffee if you want,” she said, and cranked her seat back and closed her eyes.

I’d never had Supercruise, and it still made me a little nervous. But it really was safer than driving manually, especially at high speed, so I just watched the pastures and cows blur by and tried to think of something that wouldn’t make me nervous. I closed my eyes and recalled about ten of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I’d memorized all of them when I was sixteen, with a little help from Merck’s Forget-me-not™, but that mostly evaporated after a few months. I could still bore people with the famous ones, and my favorite obscurity, “Oh truant muse / what shall be thy amends…” My muse was kind of truant, running for its life.

When the car chimed her awake, she stretched and took over, drifting slowly through three lanes of sub-cruise traffic to cross the Mississippi bridge in the slow lane and take the first Illinois exit. There was a big blinking billboard directing you to Harrah’s Showboat West. “You want to go straight there?” she asked.

“Sure, let’s do it. Run the money through and get back on the road. Be in Indiana by nightfall. Kentucky.” Panic and caffeine overdose, a real recipe for casino success. Take a couple of deep breaths.

The parking lot was huge, serving both the casino and a miniature Disneyworld that didn’t have any Disney characters. We parked at Tombstone A-5 and discussed strategy.

Kit had been to Vegas with her parents, and knew how to play blackjack conservatively. I could do the same with side bets on the craps table, though it took more concentration, and the ambience at craps was loud and testosterone-soaked. So we’d stick to blackjack and not play at the same tables.

We’d move around, playing for a couple of hours, cashing the G-notes at different tables. There were $100-minimum games where the big bills wouldn’t be uncommon. I was hoping that if we cashed them at the tables rather than at the cashier, the serial numbers wouldn’t be scanned immediately.

This was the overall plan: lose steadily but not spectacularly. Quit when we still had 80 or 90 percent of our stake, converted into somewhat used C-notes and fifties.

We quizzed each other on betting strategy for half an hour, using the iPak to deal out of a four-deck shoe, which is what Google said they used here. Then we got on the slidewalk a few minutes apart, agreeing to meet at the main entrance at 5:00.

The entrance foyer was ice-cold and not too loud, a good distance from the muted clang of slot machines and susurrus of crowd noise. As I approached it, it was like walking toward crashing surf.

Trying to look casual, half expecting some cop to appear out of nowhere, I strolled into the slots area and sacrificed a few tens and twenties, keeping track. I put in $210 and got back two hundred. A little slow, and the machine wouldn’t take anything bigger than a fifty. It paid back in metal-and-plastic medallions, of course, and dollar coins. They weighed down my left pocket as I walked toward the table games.

Kit had a small stack of gold and silver chips in front of her. We waved, as prearranged—there were cameras all over the place, and they probably had our names and Social Security numbers locked in before we bought a chip. The probability that the casino’s computer knew we had come in the same car was high enough that ignoring each other might be suspicious. We didn’t want to play at the same table, though, two people who knew each other flashing G-notes together.

I went on to a smoking table, since it had a couple of empty chairs and I could stand the smoke for a little while. It would also be a good cover if I wanted to leave early, coughing.

“Hundreds,” I said, and set down two bills. The dealer didn’t blink and slid over two short stacks of silver chips. The G-notes went straight into a slot without being scanned, good.

We had agreed that the best strategy would be the least conspicuous, simply “by the book.” I knew that a lot of high-rollers played with dramatic sloppiness, either not knowing better or demonstrating how little money meant to them, or for some peculiar thrill, but most of them knew the basic algorithm and won or lost more slowly. Hit sixteen unless the dealer shows less than seven; stand on seventeen or more, always. Split any pair under nines, and nines if the dealer has between three and eight. Double down on eleven, or on ten if the dealer has shit.

There were about a dozen exceptions to those rules, but we weren’t playing to win. We wanted to appear mildly interested for a short while and then leave with a handful of high-denomination chips.

The casino was quite happy with people who played this way, bleeding customers by transfusion rather than amputation. Some places even handed out business cards with the strategy printed on the back, which is how I learned it as a kid, a souvenir that Dad brought back from Mississippi.

Even careful players presented less of a gamble for the house than putting money in a savings account. A bank can fail, but hope is constantly reborn—not to mention greed.

I was down three hundred when the dealer played out the shoe and shuffled. Feigning impatience, I tossed out three more notes. “Gold, please,” I said, and he gave me twelve chips. They did have platinum thousand-dollar chips, but I didn’t want to hemorrhage all over the table.

With the fresh shoe I had a disconcerting run of luck betting the gold chips, but then bet heavily and lost three times in a row. Just a little behind, I said I wanted to take a walk, and went to the cashier window and cashed in all my chips. So I’d gotten rid of five of the G-notes, and still had $4,900 in a thick roll in my pocket, mostly hundreds. Headed for Kit, I took a detour through the slot area and turned ten of the C-notes into twenties, a separate roll in the other pocket.

I panicked a moment when Kit wasn’t at her place at the table, but then she came up behind me: “Hey, sailor! New in town?”

I turned and asked her sotto voce how she was doing.

“I could leave,” she said with a broad grin. “Have you cashed in?”

“A hundred behind.”

“My hero.” She took my arm. “Let’s not go straight out to the car.” She steered me into a bar area, and ordered two Heinekens. We sat at the bar.

“You’re drinking beer?”

“Oh, yeah.” She touched the back of my hand with her little finger and opened her palm for a second. On it she’d written with eyeliner: WATCHED PICK U UP EXACT 5:17. “What time you have?”

I checked. “Quarter to five.”

“Good.” She launched into a long anecdote about her Aunt Betty going to Vegas, which I’d just heard. I made appropriate responses, ignoring my watch until she said she had to go to the “little girls’ room,” a phrase she never used.

I finished my beer and left a good tip and carried her bottle out with me. Sat and played poker machines until 5:11. Wandered toward the entrance, stopped to take a leak, and stepped out into the wall of dry heat at exactly 5:17. She pulled up and I got into the car and we rolled away.

I exhaled heavily. “So you were being watched?”

“Who knows. Probably just a casino cop; maybe they check you out when you flash a thousand-dollar bill. Maybe he was a gigolo, about to make a move. Or I might just be paranoid.”

“Paranoid is good.”

“I changed tables twice and he followed me like a shadow, not even trying to be subtle. Smiled at me all the time.”

“Maybe he was just interested in rich beautiful women.”

“Oh, stop it. If he wasn’t trying to scare me, he would have made some small talk. Not just stalking.”

“Think you got rid of him?”

“Went in the ladies’ room and straight out the other door, then out the exit and walked halfway around the building. He didn’t follow me out through the parking lot, for whatever that’s worth.” She checked her mirrors.

“Yeah, he could—”

“Hold on!” She crossed three lanes without signaling, gunned through a left-turn light as it turned red, and spun the car in a fast U-turn and accelerated through another yellow light, then braked sharply and pulled into a side road and parked.

I was still clinging to the seat. “That… that should do it.”

She mopped her face with a balled-up tissue. “Whatever ‘it’ is.” She turned on the radio and tapped the search bar until she got some classical music, and turned it up to maximum volume.

She leaned against my shoulder and whispered in my ear: “What now?”

I turned on the car’s dash map and tapped it till it showed all of Illinois and part of Indiana. I touched the border town Oak Grove and raised eyebrows at her. She nodded and put it into gear.

I took a page out of her paper notebook and printed big capital letters as she drove along.

WORST CASE: THERE’S A NANODEVICE IN OUR CLOTHES OR ON OUR SKIN OR HAIR. MY CLOTHES ARE NEW AND RANDOM. ARE YOURS? She shook her head.

Another page. ASSUME THE CAR IS BUGGED. WE’LL LEAVE IT AT A MOTEL W/A NOTE TO THE OWNER & SOME CASH. Another page. WALK TO THE BUS STATION & GET A TICKET TO NOWHERE. Another page. LIE LOW FOR A YEAR & WATCH THE NEWS.

Meanwhile, we talked about music, art, and science. She liked Mozart, Monet, and math. I was more like Van Halen, Vermeer, and voodoo. But we already knew all that about each other.

For some reason—perhaps not to avoid the obvious—she asked me about the desert, about being a sniper. “You said it bothered you less when you were actually doing it.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “Partly it’s tit for tat; they’re shooting at you, so you shoot back.

“But it wasn’t like an even exchange. I was only seriously shot at twice before the one that got me. I mean, they sometimes mortared us at night and all, but that’s just weather. Most of the first six months I was there, the death rate was higher for troops stateside, like drunk driving. I was a mile away from the people I was shooting at, and they usually had Marines fucking with them a lot closer.

“It was like that woman said in the book about killing. Without the scope, you could hardly see the targets at all. You squeeze the trigger, bang, the guy falls over three seconds later. If you get your sight picture back you might see him go down.”

“You had a spotter watching with a more powerful telescope?”

“Usually. Sometimes we just did targets of opportunity, fuck with them long-distance. Even if you miss, it’s not by much. ’Course they do it back. That’s how I got hit, I think.”

“You told me they never got the guy.”

“No, shit, he was in some dunes in the middle of nowhere. We’d used up all the drones, the rubber-band guys, and he had ten minutes to get lost before we had air support.”

“And before you were medivaced.”

“More like fifteen. But our medic was cool. Some superglue spray kept the lung from deflating, pneumothorax. But the hand, that was bad.”

“Yeah.” She knew that one; they’d bound my hand up tight to stop the bleeding, and hadn’t seen that the little finger was only hanging on with a little skin. By the time they got around to it, it might as well have been blown off and lost. Rather lose a finger than a lung, though.

“It was brave of you to relearn the guitar, the new fingerings.”

“Not much else to do in rehab.” Actually, after a year, I was playing better than I ever had with all my fingers. A thousand hours of compulsive repetition.

Losing that finger didn’t affect my writing because I could never type worth a shit anyhow.

“You’d sit and think,” she said.

“Yeah, too much of that.” That was when the PTSD first crawled into bed with me, and I started to get the high-octane drugs. I try to remember what that felt like and I can’t, quite. Just a fog and a memory of a memory of nightmares. While the guitar sort of learned how to play itself.

I dozed for a while. “Over the state line,” she said, waking me. “How does the Oak Grove Motel sound?”

“Sounds like Indiana. Or is it Kentucky?”

It was Indiana; Hoosiers not horses. The eponymous grove only had one tree, but it was an oak—a pin oak, the only leaf I remembered from freshman botany. It has a pin on the end. Like a grenade.

While Kit was showering (definitely a one-person stall) I went down the road for a six-pack and a bag of ice, and on impulse snagged a homemade bag of red-hot pork rinds. She ate a bite of one and made a face. I scarfed down most of a bag, leaving a little room for dinner. Can’t get them in Iowa.

We went back across the state line to a pizza place that had a 2-for-1 special and a rear parking lot, where the car couldn’t be spotted from the road. The second pizza we’d keep for breakfast.

It wasn’t exactly a relaxing place, all bright primary colors and loud music. But the benches were comfortable and the guy turned the music down to a whisper when I asked him to. He also politely wiped the crumbs off the table, onto the floor.

I asked for wine and got a half carafe of ice-cold Chianti. Kit unfolded a large-scale roadmap and studied it.

“We want to go south,” she said.

“Down to the Gulf? And over to Florida.”

“I don’t know. We’re not exactly on vacation.”

“Nothing wrong with Florida.”

“Except that it’s an obvious destination. If the bad guys know we’re headed south.”

“Maybe so,” I said. “But if they go looking for us in Florida, they have to find us in the middle of a million tourists. If we’re in Pigsty, Arkansas, we’ll stand out.”

“That’s ‘Piggott.’ Didn’t Hemingway write there?”

“Another reason to go somewhere else. I’d start doing short declarative sentences.”

She smiled and lowered her voice. “My instinct is to look for run-down small places that might not be on the Net. Once the car’s registered somewhere, we’re vulnerable.”

“Well, we don’t really need a motel. We could just pull over on a back road and catch some Zs, then move on.”

“No way.” She laughed. “I read that book. Some homicidal alien’ll cut us up and eat the pieces.”

“I bet he made that up.” A cockroach came out of a crack in the wall and skipped toward the pizza. I slapped at it and it scuttled back. “Yuck. Kind of glad I missed.” More than an inch long.

“They’re bigger in Florida,” she said.

“Maybe slower, too. Pity I left the gun behind.”

She was staring at the crack. “Maybe we should get one.”

“What?”

“Just a thought. Stupid, I guess.”

It had crossed my mind, too, of course. “Not stupid. But not a rifle. I can’t imagine any scenario where that would work. Maybe a concealable pistol, like a Derringer, if we get cornered.”

“But you can’t just buy one in a store, can you? Without showing ID? The guy in your book, Steve, he had a permit and everything.”

“Yeah, he needed a concealed-weapon permit, which was true down in Florida… but when I went down there as a kid, my uncle kept a handgun in his tackle box, and it wasn’t a big deal that he didn’t have a permit; he joked about it with my dad. But I remember he hadn’t bought the gun; it was an old thing he got from his own father.”

“So the trick is to choose your grandparents wisely?”

“Always. There used to be a used-gun section in the want ads. I remember when they stopped doing that, ran a sanctimonious notice for weeks.”

“So it will have to be a back-alley deal,” she said.

“Yeah, and Oak Grove doesn’t even have any front alleys.” I snagged her a glass from the counter and we finished the last of the wine.

It had gotten dark, crickets chirping. Maybe one car a minute went by outside. A quarter moon shone down.

“Glad to be off the road,” she said. “Quiet here.”

She looked good, girlish, just-washed hair back in a ponytail. The neon sign in the window made her skin look warm.

“We could go make some noise.”

It took her a second to react. If she blushed, I couldn’t tell. “Sure. I’d like that.”

We got back to the motel in about two minutes, breaking two states’ speed limits. We parked in the back, where we’d been before, and rushed around to the door, my arm around her waist.

While she was wiggling the key in the lock, I started to get a bad feeling.

The key had worked fine earlier.

Had we left a light on?

She pushed the door open and suddenly gasped. “Oh, shit.”

In the center of the bed, the long cardboard box with my name and address on it. Beside it, a fresh box of ammunition.

The phone rang.