Zane had countered, "But that's reality. And reality's complicated."

And he'd answered, "If that's reality you can have it. I want simplicity."

What he meant was that there was a weird kind of ethics at work here. Haarte really believed this. Someone paid him money and he did the job. Or he couldn't do it. In which case he gave the money back or he tried again. Simplicity. Either someone was dead or not.

But this hit wasn't simple anymore. There were too many loose ends. Too many questions. Too many directions it might take. He was at risk, Zane was at risk. And of course the people who'd hired them were at risk too.

The man in St. Louis didn't know exactly what was going on but if he found out he'd be enraged.

And that made Haarte all the angrier.

He wanted to do something. Yet he couldn't decide what. There was the witness in the hospital… There was the weird girl, the one in the video store… He needed to snip some of those loose ends. But, as he sipped his morning espresso, he couldn't decide exactly how to handle it. There are many ways to stop people who're a risk to you. You can kill them, of course. Which is the most efficient way in some cases. And sometimes killing witnesses and meddlers makes the case so much more difficult to investigate that the police put the matter low on their list of priorities. But sometimes killing people does the opposite. It gets the press involved. It galvanizes cops to work even harder.

Killing's one way. But you can also hurt people. Scare them. It doesn't take much physical pain at all to put somebody out of commission for a long, long time. Lose a limb or your eyesight… Often they get the message and develop amnesia about what they saw or what they know. And the cops can't even get you for murder.

You can also hurt or kill someone close to the person you want to stop, their friends or lovers. This works very well, he'd found.

What to do?

Haarte stood up and stretched. He looked at his expensive watch. He walked into his kitchen to make another cup of espresso. The thick coffee made Zane agitated. But Haarte found it calmed him, cleared his head.

Sipping the powerful brew.

Thinking: What was supposed to be simple had become complicated.

Thinking: Time to do something about that.

There she was, up ahead.

Haarte had waited for her there, an alley, for a half hour.

Walking down the street in her own little world.

He wondered about her. Haarte often wondered about the people he killed. And he wondered what there was about him that could study people carefully and learn about them for the sole purpose of ending their lives. This fact or that fact, which somebody might find interesting or cute or charming, could in fact be the linchpin of the entire job. A simple fact. Shopping at this store, driving this route to work, fucking this secretary, fishing in this lake.

A half-block away she paused and looked in a storefront window. Clothes. Did women always stop and look at clothes? Haarte himself was a good dresser and liked clothes. But when he went shopping it was because a suit had worn out or a shirt had ripped, not because he wanted to amuse himself by looking at a bunch of cloth hanging on racks in a stuffy store.

But this was a fact about her that he noted. She liked to shop-window-shop at least-and it was going to work out for the best. Because farther up the street, a block away from the store she was examining, he noticed a construction site.

He crossed the street and jogged past her. She didn't notice him. He looked over the site. The contractor had rigged a scaffolding around a five-story building that was about to be demolished. There were workmen in the building but they were on the other block and couldn't even see this street. Haarte walked underneath the scaffold and stepped into the open doorway. He looked at the jungle of wires and beams inside the chill, open area of what had been the lobby. The floor was littered with glass, conduit, nails, beer cans.

Not great but it would do.

He glanced up the street and saw the girl disappear into the clothing store.

Good.

He pulled latex gloves out of his pocket and found a piece of rope, cut a 20-foot length with the razor knife he always kept with him. Then he went to work with the rope and several lengths of pipe. Five minutes later, he was finished. He returned to the entryway of the building and hid in the shadows.

Long to wait? he wondered.

But, no, it turned out. Only four minutes.

Strolling down the street, happy with her new purchase, whatever it was, the girl was paying no attention to anything except the spring morning as she strolled along the sidewalk.

Twenty feet away, fifteen, ten…

She started under the scaffolding and when she was directly opposite him he said, "Oh, hey, miss!"

She stopped, gasped in fright. Took a deep breath. "Like, you scared me," she said angrily.

"Just wanted to say. Be careful where you're walking. It's dangerous 'round here."

He said nothing else. She squinted, wondering if she'd seen him before. Then she looked from his face to the rope he held in his hand. Her eyes followed the rope out the doorway along the sidewalk. To the Lally column she stood beside.

And she realized what was about to happen. "No! Please!"

But he did. Haarte yanked the rope hard, pulling the column out from underneath the first layer of scaffolding. He'd loosened the other columns and removed the wood blocks from under them. The one that the rope was tied to was the only column supporting the tons of steel and two-by-eights that rose for twenty feet above the girl.

As she cried in fear her hands went up, fingers splayed. But it was just an automatic gesture, pure animal reflex-as if she could ward off the terrible weight that now came crashing down on her. The commotion was so loud that Haarte never even heard her scream as the wood and metal-like huge spears-tumbled over her, sending huge clouds of dust into the air.

In ten seconds, the settling was over. Haarte ran to the column and undid the rope. He tossed it into a Dumpster. Then he pulled off the latex gloves and left the construction site, careful to avoid the spreading pool of blood migrating outward from the mound of debris in the center of the sidewalk.

The man stood at the top of the stairs, turning three hundred sixty degrees around the girl's loft.

Any notes? Any diaries? Any witnesses?

He was wearing a jacket with a name stitched on it, Hank. Below the name he himself had stenciled Dept. of Public Works. Meter Reading Service.

The Meter Man turned back to the loft. Walked along the bookshelves, pulled out several books, and flipped through them.

There had to be something here. She'd looked like a scavenger. The sort who doesn't throw anything away. And, fuck, it looked like she hadn't.

He got to work: Looking through all the books, papers, all the shit. Stuffed animals, scraps of notes, diaries… Shit, she wasn't the least bit organized. This was gonna take forever. His urge was to fling everything around the room, rip open the suitcases, cut open mattresses. But he didn't. He worked slowly, methodically. This was against his nature. If you're in a hurry, do it slowly. Somebody told him that and he always remembered it. One of the guys he worked for, a guy now dead-dead not because he got careless but dead because they were in a business where you sometimes got dead and that was all there was to it.

You're in a hurry, do it slowly.

Carefully looking through the cushions, boxes, bookcases.