safe side. Hell of a thing to come up empty-handed at the wrong moment, you know. Really, though, I just like to handle the stuff: hacksaw, mallet, boning blade, iodized salt, lighter fluid, matches, spray bottle of holy water, four pieces of wood pointed sharp on one end, half a dozen rosaries, all blessed, and two full place settings of silverware, not stainless, mind you, but real silver. And the shirts I don’t never put in the tub. What do they make of this at airport security? Not a fuckin thing. Ain’t no gun. Guns don’t work for this. Anyway, this bag’s always checked.
The flight is fine. It’s always fine because they always put me in first class and nobody next to me if possible. On the night flights, it’s generally possible and tonight, I have the whole first class section to myself, hot and cold running stews, who are (I can tell) forcing themselves to be nice to me. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t mind it, but it makes me wonder all the same: is it a smell, or just the way my eyes look? Villanueva told me once, it was just something about me gave everyone the creeps. I lean back, watch the flash-movies, don’t bother nobody, and everybody’s happy to see me go when the plane finally lands.
I get my car, nice midsize job with a phone, and head right into the city. I know this city real good, I been here before for them, but it ain’t the only one they send me to when they need to TCB.
Do an easy fifty-five into the city and go to the address on the paper. Midtown, two blocks east of dead center, medium-sized Victorian. I can see the area’s starting to get a watchamacallit, like a facelift, the rich ones coming in and fixing up the houses because the magazines and the TV told them it’s time to love old houses and fix them up.
I think about the other houses all up and down the street of the one I got to go to, what’s in them, what I could do. I sure feel like it, and it would be a lot less trouble, but I made me a deal of my own free will and I will stick to it as long as they do, Steener and Villanueva and the people behind them. But if they bust it up somehow, if they fuck me, that will be real different, and they will be real sorry.
I call the house; nobody home. That’s about right. I got to wait, which don’t bother me none, because there’s the flash-movies to watch. I can think on what I want to do after I get through what I have to do, and those things are not so different from each other. What Steener calls “the procedure” I just call a new way to play. Only not so new, because I thought of some of those things all on my own when I was watchamacallit, freelance so to say, and done some of them, kind of, which I guess is what made them take me on for this stuff, instead of letting me take a quick shot in a quiet room and no funeral after.
So, it gets to be four in the morning and here we come. Somehow, I know as soon as I see the figure coming up the sidewalk across the street that this is the one in the house. I can always tell them, and I don’t know what it is, except maybe it takes a human monster to know an inhuman monster. And I don’t feel nothing except a little nervous about getting into the house, which is always easier than you’d think it would be, but I get nervous on it anyway.
Figure comes into the light and I see it’s a man, and I see it’s not alone, and then I get pissed, because that fucking Steener, that fucking Villanueva, they didn’t say nothing about no kid. And then I settle some, because I can tell the kid is one, too. Ten, maybe twelve from the way he walks. I take the razor and I give myself a little one just inside my hairline, squeeze the blood out to get it running down my face, and then I get out of the car just as they put their feet on the first step up to the house.
“Please, you gotta help me,” I call, not