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The kid nods, so even though I know Brian would be pissed, I stop at a food cart and get him a corn dog and a soda. I get one for myself as well. Then I give him ten dollars. I don’t know why, but he might want an ice cream or something. Or a sparkler.
I get down to his eye level while he bites into the corn dog and say, “Do you see that fireman over there?” I point, because the last thing I want to do is direct him to police.
He nods.
“Finish your corn dog, and then go tell him you’re lost, and he’ll help you get back home to your mom.”
“I don’t have a mom,” he says with his mouth full.
My chest tightens at this. My God, what have we done to this child?
“Who do you live with?”
“My daddy.”
Fuck.
“The fireman will help you. Just tell him what you told me, okay?”
“O-okay.”
And there it is, that brave face again where he’s trying not to cry. It takes everything I have in me to turn and walk away, to push through the crowd and walk the few blocks to the waiting car. Brian already has the engine started, when I get there.
To his credit, he doesn’t say anything about the corn dog. He just takes a sip of my drink and backs the car out of our parking spot.
“Everything go okay?”
I just nod, and he pulls out on the road to take us back to the house.
13
BRIAN
The drive is quiet and tense, and I know I’m the worst kind of monster. But she needed to see the truth. From the moment that bomb and that boy were in the same building, his future was gone.
Fate had decided.
You can’t go half ass on a kill. You have to plan it down to the last detail. It’s not like the illusion of movies where everything magically just comes together. And it’s not like all the fantasies in your head. The way you stay alive is by knowing your limits and following a well-laid out plan. And having contingencies. I didn’t think we needed a lot of contingencies for this. A kill at a distance has far fewer things to account for.
I never could have seen that boy coming. But still, I should have been prepared for things to go sideways, especially bringing a partner to the kill.
We were beyond lucky tonight.
“Mina, you need to think long and hard about if this is the life you want.”
“What does that mean?” She’s been crying in the passenger side since she got in the car, and I’ve mostly ignored it. It’s one thing to be hard enough to be a killer. It’s another to be hard enough to accept collateral damage like this.
I get that she’s got darkness, but she still isn’t quite the same as me. She’s still got a soul, a conscience. The inky dark didn’t slip into her too soon, building its dirty tightly woven nest inside her heart, blocking out all the light that might otherwise get inside. She was already formed with morals and a sense of right and wrong. Guilt. Shame. She’s not a homegrown sociopath like me. It doesn’t mean she can’t be great at this, but she needs to really think about what she will become. And what she will lose in the process.
I’m so selfish. I want her to be like me, the mirror I look into to see a person staring back, but if this is going to destroy her, it’s best to stop now—before she crosses too many lines she can’t uncross. It was one thing to come after Matsumoto’s son to save me and get some lateral personal revenge. It’s quite another to enter this seedy world of killing random people you have no actual personal vendetta against.
It takes either a hollow soul or a whole different sort of rationalizing to make that kind of thing okay.
“It means, if you want to keep going on jobs with me, you have to understand what that could mean. What could happen, and what you might be a part of.”
“You’re still going to let me go on jobs?”
I know she’s looking at me. I can feel her eyes burning a hole in me, but I keep my gaze on the road. “I already made my choice. Now you have to make yours.”
