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Twenty thousand dollars.
“Hey. This should be an easy one.” I hand the burner phone I use to access the job posting board to my brother, Evan. My partner in our little business. “Twenty-year-old kid? Against the two of us? We’d make it to the bar in time for last call.”
Not that we go to the bar after completing a job. It’s as much of a joke as my brother and I have—there isn’t a ton of laughter in our world unless one of us is laughing at the other. The first time we pulled a job, we made sure to get out of there early enough to get to the corner bar in time for last call. The idea was to be seen by the regulars there, people who recognized us. An alibi, in other words.
We were so fucking green back then.
We were also pulling robberies. Small-time shit we don’t even bother with anymore. We’ve moved up in the world—or down, depending on how you look at it.
Evan frowns, scanning the screen. “Twenty years old. Somebody’s kid, and we’re taking him out a few days before Christmas? That’s cold.”
That makes me snort. “It’s gonna be Christmas for us with a fat paycheck under the tree. Besides, how many jobs did you pull by that age?”
“Good point.” He scrubs a hand over his short black hair. Like nearly everything else about us, mine is the same. We could be twins if it wasn’t for the two years between us and the thin scar running from Evan’s temple to his jaw. “But that’s us. Not everybody had to do the shit we did when we were that age.”
“He must have done something to piss someone off enough to call a hit for twenty grand. I doubt this guy is a saint. It doesn’t matter, either way. Are we in or not?” I take the phone back, brows lifted as I wait for an answer. “Twenty thousand for a quick in-and-out job. We’ve done a lot worse.”
“Yeah, sure.” He shrugs it off. I click the button indicating we’ll take the job. It’s as easy as that. The job will be easy, too. Killing a twenty-year-old kid. Maybe he had a future ahead of him, maybe not. All I know is, somebody with money wants him dead.
Usually, we get people involved with the wrong crowd—owing someone money, losing a bet, even the occasional revenge kill. Also hot on the hit list are disgruntled business partners, who usually live in nicer houses or apartments. Sometimes it’s a cheating husband whose wife got sick of his bullshit. Sometimes it’s the husband who wants the wife dead—or a girlfriend who refuses to keep her mouth shut.
That part, we usually find out while doing reconnaissance before going in for the hit. But there aren’t any bells and whistles to this one. Nothing to indicate this is somebody important, with ties to the underworld or in a house with a complex security system. No warnings whatsoever. I wish they were all this easy.
101 15thStreet. Shitty neighborhood. No chance of a security system there. What could they have to protect? This is looking better all the time. Good thing I happened to check the new job listings when I did, or somebody else could be getting ready to take advantage.
On the way into town, I can’t help but wonder about Frankie Barrymore. Who is he? Who’d he piss off? Living in a dump like the one now coming into view, either he’s a lowlife wannabe criminal or a dumb kid who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I shouldn’t think about him at all, really—no sense humanizing somebody who’s only going to breathe air for the next twenty minutes or so—but a part of me always wonders. What does a person have to do to get his name listed on those boards? Does he have any idea we’re coming for him?
I hope he’s sleeping well and having good dreams. Maybe he’ll get lucky, and we’ll embed a couple of bullets in his brain while he’s dreaming. Maybe he’ll stay wherever he is and never know he’s dead.
My brain’s all fucked tonight. Evan notices, too, grunting in my general direction as he turns onto 15th. “What’s with you? You’d think we were on our way to a funeral.”
I only roll my eyes, focusing my attention on the corner apartment building. It’s amazing the thing’s still standing. I guess rat turds are stronger than they look since the foundation must be built on them.
Evan parks half a block down. No worries about whether we’ll be noticed since the streetlights are broken. The city must not see fit to come out and replace them. Works for me. A handful of random people lurk in those shadows, hanging out in doorways and sleeping in alleys. We’re night people, like they are. They know better than to pay attention to what happens out here, and so do we. There’s no threat from them.
The night air is cold as my brother and I walk quickly from the car, a beat-up old rust bucket we use for jobs like this, to the corner building. One of the apartment windows holds blinking Christmas lights, reminding me the holiday is tomorrow. Something about those lights strikes me as sad. Like whoever put them up has hope even though they live here.
The apartment is on the third floor. The hall smells just as much like piss and despair as I figured. Evan’s nose wrinkles in disgust when we come to a stop at the door, where he looks over his shoulder before checking his Glock. I do the same while listening for sounds of life coming from inside the apartment. There’s no light visible under the door. No sound, either.
And the lock’s a joke. If I lived somewhere like this, you’d better believe I’d have more than a doorknob lock. All it takes is a credit card, and I’m inside the dark, silent shoebox of a home.
In and out. That’s all we need. And if he’s not home yet, we can stick around until he shows up. I hope he doesn’t take long since I don’t love being here. A baby wails from a couple of doors down, and somewhere else, a woman weeps. I drown both sounds out. It reminds me too much of my childhood.
Evan leads the way down a narrow hall, past a tiny living room and a kitchen that looks like it hasn’t been updated in a few decades. A faint light shines from inside the room at the end of the hall, where the door’s partly open.
No need to check in with each other before moving forward. We’ve been through this too many times before. Evan takes the lead with me right behind him. It strikes me that Frankie may not be alone—well, that’s a shame for whoever she is, hooking up with a guy who has a price on his head.
The door opens silently when Evan lifts it slightly on its hinges. I don’t know what I expected to find in the bedroom. A kid lying on a bare mattress, alone or otherwise? Something as bleak as the rest of the apartment, the rest of the building?
Instead, the bed is draped in pink. Pillows, duvet, the whole nine yards. The light I saw coming from under the door is courtesy of the blinking Christmas lights in the window behind a gauzy curtain.
Son of a bitch.
It’s a little girl’s bedroom.
Only the person in the bed is no little girl. She’s a full-grown woman with shiny dark hair spread over the pillow like a fan. She sleeps with a hand on the pillow next to her face. What a face, too. Gorgeous, peaceful, glowing.
Fuck, we’re in the wrong apartment. One look at Evan shows me he’s just as stunned as me. This never happens. People don’t give us the wrong address when they want someone dead. This is not a pizza delivery. It’s a death sentence.
