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“Heading to bed?”
“In a minute. I might stay up and read for a bit first.”
“Uh-huh.” He’s not listening, already distracted by whatever is on his phone. This is what I’ve been faced with for the last couple of years. Complete disregard. Sometimes, I feel invisible. I might as well be talking to a wall, and realizing this, I sigh and walk away, doubting he’ll even notice I’ve gone.
Six days. All I need is six more days.
Five
~Declan~
In five days, I have to kill a man. That should bother me, but it doesn’t. I’ve learned a lot about Glenn Overmeyer in the short time since taking on this case. He’s a balding, chubby little man who carries himself with extreme confidence around women. Following him to work this morning, I watched him chat up two women who were significantly younger than him, showing off an underbite of crooked teeth. He appeared approachable, easygoing, and just an all-around nice guy. That’s why the women weren’t creeped out. He knew how to approach them, just as any well-seasoned predator would.
I figure that’s the only reason these women are attracted to him. He must know all the right words to make them feel good, playing on their insecurities. But where they see confidence, I see this guy as insecure. Even more so than the women he targets. He needs their attention to make himself feel like a man, to validate himself.
He’s no man. He’s a predator.
A real man would be satisfied with one woman’s attention, and Glenn has a beautiful wife waiting for him at home. Sure, she may want him deader than a doornail, but I bet that wasn’t always the case. I’ve come across women like her before, and from what I can tell, they’ve just reached the end of their rope. Where they once showered their husband in love and affection, bending over backward to satisfy their every whim, they now stand jaded and filled with repressed anger and hurt because none of that effort was appreciated.
It makes my job one hundred percent easier. Even if I didn’t enjoy the job, I would still take satisfaction from knowing that I was ridding the world of these opportunistic ingrates. If I had a daughter, I would be even more dangerous than I am now, because my sole mission in life would be to rid the world of men like Glenn, just to make sure my daughter didn’t get her heart broken by one.
Oddly, that’s how I’ve been catching myself feeling about Brenda. Tuesday night, under the bridge, while she told me her life story, I was shocked to find myself sympathizing with her. It’s not something I normally do. Like a light switch, I shut off my emotions and get the job done. As I sat there beside her, though, I couldn’t seem to do it.
Brenda is sweet. She’s not like some of the cold and calculating people I’ve met in this line of work. She tries to carry herself that way, sure, but I can see her underlying gentle nature, a softness that’s all woman. I spent the night thinking about that and what it must be like to have a woman like her standing at your side, honest and loyal and loving.
Glenn is a fucking idiot to ruin that for a piece of tail that’ll stroke his ego for an hour. It’s an act that inflicts lifelong pain on the one person who never expected to be betrayed. Brenda is too good for him. He doesn’t deserve her.
Do I?
I don’t know why the question pops into my head, but I know the answer without even thinking about it. No, I don’t deserve her either. I’m a brutal man, a serial killer for hire. Money moves me, and the pleasure I take in it keeps me coming back for more.
I’m not a good match for anyone. Period. Which is why I wish she wouldn’t look at me the way she does, as if I’m her hero or something. Maybe I am, but that kind of attraction she’s kicking off is anything but good. She needs to steer clear of men like me, find herself someone who wears khakis and flannel and enjoys weekend barbeques in the backyard. I don’t know if I could ever settle down like that. I crave the rush of adrenaline that comes with a good stakeout, with the planning and plotting of the job. And the chase… Hell, there’s nothing better. And when the job is done? I feel like I’ve just come back from a week at a spa and had a total colon cleanse.
All the more reason I need to take off once I’m done with this one. I need distance from it all if I have any hope of quitting for good, like smoking. Once the habit is broken, living beyond it gets easier.
My cell rings while I wait for my mark to go inside the building, and I answer it as I pull away from my parking spot and head toward the nearby expressway on-ramp. I have seven hours to kill before I have to return.
“Speak to me,” I bark as the Bluetooth takes over and leaves me hands-free to concentrate on driving.
“Where are you at?”
I’d recognize Donny’s voice anywhere. It has a distinctly gruff sound to it, like a chain smoker, which he is. Plus, he drinks heavily, which I think only deepens his voice more. “Driving.” I’d ask what he wants, but he’s the boss’s brother, and I don’t like to get too cocky with the made men. That’s how you get yourself shot and buried in a shallow, unmarked grave.
“Head over. We have something to discuss.”
The line goes dead, and I pocket the phone. I have no idea what he wants to discuss or what it’s about. I should be nervous, but nerves and I never did get along too well. I’m just not the kind of person who gets moved by much.
I drive the thirty minutes it takes to reach the outskirts of the city where the neighboring township meets it, and I take the winding roads through the heart and around the neighborhoods until I reach the pizza shop with the chubby doughboy dressed in a red and white uniform that reminds me of the Big Boy franchise character. He’s twirling a sign on the sidewalk out front, and despite the creepy smiling mascot head, I know the kid inside the costume is bored to fucking tears.
Parking in one of the four angled slots in front of the building, I get out of the SUV and say, “Hey, Rudy, when are you gonna quit and get a real job?”
“Hey, Uncle Declan. Pops says I have to learn the business so I can take over when he dies,” comes the seventeen-year-old’s muffled voice.
I’m nobody’s uncle, but the kid calls everyone in the business that. It’s a matter of respect. Everyone who works for Tony is family, and they get treated as such, and even though they only employ me on a case-by-case basis, I still get the perks.
I pause beside him. “What about college?” Rudy told me on his sixteenth birthday celebration, right before he got a brand-new Porsche gifted to him, that he planned to study marine biology or some shit when he graduated.
“Pops said it’s either the business or becoming a lawyer, and I don’t have the brain for being a lawyer.”
