“Delete it,” Henry said again, growling.
“Okay, okay, I’ll delete it.” Monroe showed him the iPhone screen. Now there was a photo of a cat with a word balloon over its head asking ungrammatically for a misspelled cheeseburger. “There, it’s all gone. Happy now?”
Happy wasn’t the word Henry would have chosen—not even close—but knowing that Monroe wouldn’t be walking around with death porn on his cell phone didn’t make him unhappy. It was just too bad that he was about to bum the kid out completely. He didn’t want to but it couldn’t be helped. When you knew the truth, you knew it, and it was no good trying to deny it.
Henry stuck out his hand. Looking surprised, Monroe hesitated, then shook it. “Just want to say it was great working with you and good luck.” He turned to the backpack sitting beside the crate and zipped it closed as the beagle went from oh-boy-oh-boy-I’m-so-happy to confused apprehension.
“Wait a second,” Monroe said. “‘Good luck’? As in ‘bye’?”
Henry shouldered the backpack. “Yeah. I’m going out of business.”
For a second or two, Monroe was actually speechless. “But why?”
The mental image of Dormov slumped in his seat with a hole in his neck flashed through Henry’s mind. “’Cuz I was aiming for his head.”
Henry could practically feel Monroe’s dumbfounded stare on his back as he walked away. He had really hated doing that to the beagle but he’d had no choice. As soon as he’d pulled the trigger, he’d felt it in his bones that it had gone wrong and the revolting photo Monroe had showed him proved the feeling hadn’t been some kind of neurotic, I’m-getting-old brain fart. Way back in the beginning, he’d promised himself that the day he missed would be the day he quit and he could not, would not, break that promise. The next miss might not be close enough for government work.
But damn, he was going to miss that beagle something fierce.
CHAPTER 3
If one place wasn’t pretty much like another (except for abandoned buildings), then it followed as the night follows the day that there was no place like home. And even if he was wrong about that and everything else, Henry was absolutely sure there was no place like Buttermilk Sound in the Georgia estuaries.
Henry ambled down the long dock to the boathouse, careful as always to keep to the center of the weathered boards. Now that he was no longer with the agency, he was going to spend a lot more time enjoying the pleasures of living near water. At the moment, however, there was one last thing he had to do before the mission in Liège was well and truly over.
Inside the boathouse, he pulled the photo of Valery Dormov out of one pocket and a Zippo out of the other. The lighter gave Henry a flame as soon as he thumbed the wheel. He touched it to the photo, watching for a second as it consumed the Russian’s image before dropping the burning paper into a fishbowl on a shelf, where it joined the ashes of photos from previous missions.
And that was that. Now he was retired.
Henry turned to go back to the house and then paused. A goldfish bowl a little over half full of ashes. Was that really what his entire life’s work amounted to?
Somewhere, a retiring office drone was being presented with a gold watch—or more likely a gold-colored watch—to commemorate the decades he’d spent achieving inertia at his desk. He would take it home and have a heart attack in front of the TV, passing away from the world as if he had never passed into it. At least he would leave a watch behind, something functional; by contrast, the ashes in that goldfish bowl wouldn’t even make good confetti.
Henry shook his head as if to clear it. What was he thinking? Screw that—he had a watch and it was still running after a lifetime of use. And his watch wasn’t just counting off the hours until he died.
He went back up the dock to the house. Dammit; missing that shot had taken the shine off everything.
The bright daylight in the living room lifted Henry’s spirits and chased away much of the residual gloom from Liège. It was open and airy, with a lot more window space than solid wall. He liked being able to see so much of the outside from indoors; even more than that, he liked to let in as much daylight as possible, especially after a job. Unlike the mission in Liège, a lot of his work was done under cover of darkness and he knew all too well what a lack of daylight could do to a person.
This was the heart of the house, where he spent most of his time off the job, so it had a few unconventional features. Against the wall it shared with the kitchen, he had set up a cabinet with almost all of his tools, arranged in a way that appealed to his aesthetic sense while satisfying his need for order and efficiency. Screwdrivers, wrenches, wood chisels, reamers, pliers, sockets, screws, nails and everything else were arranged not only by size but for convenience, depending on frequency of use. He’d had an absolute blast organizing them, using the 20/80 rule—twenty percent of the tools were used eighty percent of the time, and vice versa. Maybe now that he’d retired from assassination, he could consider a new career designing displays of tools in hardware stores. He loved hardware stores, always had, even as a kid. Hardware stores followed the 100 rule—one hundred percent of the stock was useful for getting things done.
Nearby was the workbench with a large magnifier lamp. He had positioned it so he could see the TV easily and wouldn’t have to miss any Phillies games while getting things done. He had been keeping an eye on his beloved Phillies while he had been working on the birdhouse. He turned to look at it hanging outside the window behind him and his mood lightened even more.
He had built the birdhouse on a whim. Or maybe it was more like a private joke with himself, at least when he’d started out. Building a birdhouse was the kind of thing a nine-year-old would do to get a scout badge, not how a trained government sniper relaxed between assassinations. But to his surprise, Henry had found the act of construction—cutting the wood, gluing it together, sanding it, and applying weatherproofing and varnish—to be unexpectedly gratifying. When he was done, he felt as if he had discovered something new about himself. Who knew that a hitman could have that kind of experience in his fifties (very early fifties; barely into his fifties, and dammit, how had that happened?).
When Henry had finally hung the thing up, his sense of accomplishment had deepened. He had actually built a house with his own two hands. Yeah, okay, it was a little house, not a boathouse or even a garden shed—he had hired someone to build both those things. Still, he had created a shelter for living creatures that would settle in and make it their home, at least until they migrated. How many other snipers were that constructive when they were off the clock? Probably none.
He watched the birdhouse stirring a little in the breeze then frowned. Something wasn’t right. Maybe he was just having some residual bad feeling from Liège. After missing the shot, he had felt like the whole world was ten degrees out of true.
No, that wasn’t it. There really was something off.
It took another moment before he spotted the problem—two splinters sticking out from the upper left junction of the roof and wall. Henry knew most people wouldn’t have seen them, and even if they had it wouldn’t have bothered them much, if at all.
But they weren’t birds looking for a place to nest. On the birds’ level, those splinters must have looked like a couple of sharpened stakes. A prospective resident who got caught in a sudden gust of wind and didn’t stick the landing could get stuck. Maybe that was why it had remained empty since he had hung it up. The devil was always in the details, even for birds.