A Killing in the Hills - By Julia Keller Page 0,18

that. They kept records, kept everything neat and precise. Tidy. ‘It’s a multipart job. You received half up front. The other half comes after. We went over this. Do you need everything repeated twice, Charles?’

Chill didn’t bother to correct him again on his name. No point to it. The boss didn’t care for nicknames, Chill had figured out, any more than he liked slang or untucked shirttails or loose ends of any kind. The boss hated anything sloppy or second rate. Everything was rigid with the boss. Well planned. He wasn’t like anybody Chill had ever known.

He stuck the phone between his shoulder and his tilted head. He needed his hands in order to zip up his pants.

‘So tell me,’ Chill said, ‘what’s next.’

‘I don’t know the details yet.’

‘How long till you do? I ain’t got all day, you know.’

Chill was feeling jaunty, sure of himself. His whole body felt as if it were humming. Not shaking, not trembling – humming. There was a big difference. He felt alive. He felt like one of those power lines that gets knocked down in a bad storm and that jerks and twists and twitches in the road, with sparks jumping out of it in a fizzy spray. Nobody dares to get too close to it, not even the people from the power company. They have to wait, just like everybody else, until it settles down.

That was why he was challenging the man on the other end of the call. He was feeling untouchable. Normally, of course, Chill didn’t argue with the boss; he was afraid of him. He’d seen what happened to people who asked too many questions or who demanded more money or who – God help ’em – tried to back out.

But right now, Chill was flying high. He felt like he did after sex: nerved up, wound tight, polished to a high gloss. Some men got sleepy. Not Chill. He got antsy.

He’d just killed three people. And gotten away clean. He’d walked calmly into a Salty Dawg and he’d shot three old men in the head – quick and neat, no fuss, no muss – and then he’d walked out again and gotten back in his car and he’d driven away. And nobody touched him. Nobody ever would.

It was, he decided, better than sex. Because it was all him, all Chill Sowards. He didn’t need anybody else to help him get this feeling.

‘Just want,’ Chill said, ‘to wrap things up. Get my money. Move on. Get the hell out.’

‘I’m sure you do.’

Chill hadn’t really expected early payment. He was probing. Pushing. Seeing how much bullshit he could get by with. It was a game, right? You had to keep yourself amused. That was the key. Until today, he’d been bored; the only thing he’d done for fun in a long, long time was to crash a few parties with high school kids. Pass around some samples. Try to expand the customer base. Maybe recruit a few new employees, too.

‘Also,’ Chill added, ‘I need a better car. One I got’s a piece of shit. What’s it built for, midgets?’

No response.

Time to back off. The boss had a limit. You could push to a certain point, but you had to know when to quit.

Chill knew.

‘Okay,’ Chill said. He sat down on the unmade bed, wondering where he’d left the hard pack of Camels. This was a nonsmoking room, which made smoking even more fun. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘keep me posted. Don’t want to hang out here too long.’

‘You won’t have to. Oh – there’s one more thing.’

‘Yeah?’

The man’s voice suddenly changed. It came in low and slick and fast, slashing like a razor across a piece of tender pink skin: ‘Listen, you goddamned shit-for-brains – you ever talk to me like that again, you make demands on me, you cause any trouble for me, I’ll rip your fucking head off and spit in the neckhole. Got it?’

Chill shouldn’t have been startled – he knew what he was dealing with – but he was, anyway. The boss didn’t usually talk that way. When the boss was stressed, worried, it was like he reverted back. Back to something that came before all the smoothness, all the tidiness. That lived with him but stayed hidden, like an animal kept under the porch.

‘Got it,’ Chill said. His voice was small. He was the kid who’d taken too many cookies and gotten his hand smacked.

No wonder the boss was in a bad mood these days. They