Nine Lives(36)

“Hold up, Linda, give me a moment,” Fischer said. Yes, he had a very good memory, but wasn’t sure he’d correctly memorize a license, along with all this other information. He trotted over to Suzie Maris, a mom who never missed one of her son’s games, and a woman who carried a purse the size of a Thanksgiving turkey. He was pretty sure she’d have a pen and a piece of paper somewhere in that purse.

She did, and he returned to where he’d been standing and took down the number.

“Ready for the good part?” Linda said.

“I’m always ready,” he said.

“Fifteen thousand wired direct into your account upon acceptance of the job. Thirty-five thousand upon completion. Not too shabby.”

“Not too shabby,” he said. “Any special instructions?”

“Yes, actually. One word. Painless.” She said it with a little lilt in her voice, as though she were telling him her cat’s name.

“Okay, got it,” he said. It wasn’t a concern. “Painless” was his specialty.

“Do you accept, or do you want some time to think about it?”

“What’s the timeline?”

“Oh, sorry. I forgot about that. ASAP is all it says. There’s not a definitive timeline besides that.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, you accept?”

“Sure,” Fischer said.

“Great,” Linda said, genuine happiness in her voice, even though Fischer had never not accepted a job before. “You have all the details?” she said.

“I have them all, Linda, thanks.”

That evening, after Valerie, his wife, had fallen asleep on the couch watching a home-decorating show, Fischer went down to his office in the finished basement. He booted up the computer he used for assignments and got a little bit of further information on Jessica Winslow, including a photograph of her on her LinkedIn page. He thought it was funny how quickly he came up with a picture of her, but he’d known many law enforcement officers and the one thing they all had in common was that they felt invincible. Looking at the photograph, he recognized, in a clinical way, that she was quite beautiful, not too physically dissimilar to his own wife. Same skin tone, high cheekbones, light brown eyes. It didn’t particularly make him feel anything except for possibly a little bit of interest. He wondered if she’d served in the military as both he and his wife had. She had that look. And he wondered if she had a family, kids maybe. He wondered these things in the same way he’d wonder about someone whose obituary he was reading. He was looking at a dead woman. She was dead the moment he’d accepted the assignment, and because of that fact, the safety, economic and otherwise, of his own family was improved. That was how it worked, how it had always worked.

Fischer found another photograph of Jessica, this one from a small-town newspaper in which she was named high school athlete of the year as a soccer player. She stood alone on a playing field, wearing a maroon uniform, her foot on a soccer ball. Looking at the photograph, memorizing her features, he thought some more about that equation between her death and his family’s safety, part of the ritual he went through every time he accepted an assignment. It wasn’t hard to understand. Resources on this planet were limited, even if humans weren’t always aware of that. And the world was a cruel and unforgiving place, another fact that Americans didn’t always recognize. It was them or you, because there wasn’t enough to go around, which meant, which had always meant, that your family needed protection. Money wasn’t the only thing that served as protection in this world, but it was the most important thing. Fischer was sure of that.

He knew what he did wasn’t moral, but what he’d been tasked to do in Afghanistan hadn’t been moral either. It was simply the way the world worked.

He sent a text to Steve, letting him know that he wouldn’t be around to help out at his garage for the next few days, and got an immediate text back, saying it wasn’t a problem. Then Fischer retrieved the key hidden behind his fuse box and went to open up his gun locker.





7





MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 10:46 P.M.


After catching Boyhood with his friend Meghan, Ethan had gone to a bar that she liked in North Austin. They’d talked about the movie, which she’d loved and Ethan had tolerated. Well, more than tolerated, he guessed. It’s just that the whole thing reminded him of his own childhood, and had left him feeling depressed and irritated. Meghan was drinking tequila, and he was drinking the three-dollar draft beer, and it was making him sleepy. When Meghan ran into a couple of friends she knew, he begged off and went home, even though it was early.

Caroline had texted him that afternoon that she was having dinner with colleagues, and he’d been strangely jealous. He’d told himself to not send her another text until the following day, but he couldn’t help himself, and after getting into his bed with John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, Ethan’s heavily annotated version, he shot her a quick text, asking her if she was home yet. Five minutes later, she texted back. Just got here. You?

Same, he wrote. Then, before he lost his nerve, he quickly wrote, Can I call you? They had never talked on the phone.

After about thirty very long seconds, she wrote back, Are you sure we’re ready for that step? Then sent an emoji, a laughing face, something she’d never done.