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“Rude,” Quillan says.

Mathias’s expression doesn’t move.

Then Paulie groans from the chair, bringing the room back into focus. The sound comes out wet and broken, and he drags one split knuckle against the armrest like he’s trying to wipe something off it.

Quillan turns toward him with renewed interest.

Apparently whatever is running through his bloodstream has left him in that particular state where standing still is impossible, and violence feels like recreation. He bounces on his heels twice, rolls his neck until it cracks, then stalks over to where Paulie sits.

Paulie hears the movement and weakly pulls against the restraints. The plastic bites into his wrists, and he makes another sound, smaller than the groan, but just as pained.

I sigh. “If you’re going to kill him anyway, why are you still beating the shit out of him?”

Quillan pauses.

He looks honestly confused by the question. He even tilts his head at me, blinking those huge dark pupils under the swinging light. “Because this is more fun.”

I glance at Mathias again, brow quirked.

“He’ll come down eventually,” Mathias says. He checks his watch with a flick of his wrist, then goes back to watching us both with no more urgency than a man waiting on a bus.

“You say that like he’s a fucking Labrador you took to the park.”

“My methods have worked so far.” He shrugs.

“Have they?”

Quillan punches Paulie in the stomach. I hear the air leave him all at once, like the burst of air leaving a punctured tire. Paulie folds forward as far as the restraints allow, coughing and wheezing while Quillan steps back and flexes his fingers. Blood drips off Quillan’s knuckles onto the concrete between them, and he doesn’t wipe it away.

Mathias watches with the detached patience of somebody waiting for a pot to boil, and says to me, “He was practically bouncing off the walls before we started, so I believe there’s been progress.”

“Whatever works, I guess.”

I move farther into the room and take out my phone.

Killing people has never been the complicated part of my job.

People assume fixer is simply polite language for hired killer, mostly because killing is the portion outsiders understand. Somebody creates a problem; Mathias sends me; the person causing the problem stops breathing. End of story.

Except death is rarely the end of anything.

Usually, it’s where the difficult work starts.

People have routines.

They have families, lovers, landlords, employers, debts, subscriptions, doctors, drinking buddies, neighbors who notice when a car hasn’t moved for three days.

They leave conversations unfinished and appointments scheduled. They promise to show up somewhere on Friday. They order shit online that arrives Monday. They have mothers who call every Sunday morning and girlfriends who know exactly how long it takes them to answer a text.

A man can die easily.

Making his disappearance appear unrelated to us is what Mathias pays me for.

By the time anyone realizes Paulie is missing, I want the Grecos to be one possibility among a hundred, preferably somewhere near the bottom of the list. Better still, I want nobody asking the question at all. I want the people in Paulie’s life looking backward and finding enough instability that his absence seems like the inevitable conclusion of choices he’d already been making.

Fortunately, Paulie has spent years making bad ones.

I open the file Quillan sent me while I was driving over.