Stephen opened his book bag again, counted out $5,000. “Here’s the money.”

Jodie was transfixed by the cash. His eyes flipped back and forth between the bills and Stephen’s face. The thin hand reached out, shaking, and took the five thousand carefully, as if it might crumble if he gripped it too hard.

As he took the bills Jodie’s hand touched Stephen’s. Even through the glove the killer felt a huge jolt – like the time he’d been stabbed in the gut with a razor knife – stunning but painless. Stephen let go of the money and, looking away, said, “If you’ll help me again I’ll pay you another ten.”

The man’s red, puffy face broke into a cautious smile. He took a deep breath and poked through one of his coffee cans. “I get… I don’t know… nervous, sort of.” He found a pill, swallowed it. “It’s a blue devil. Makes you feel nice. Makes you feel all comfy. Want one?”

“Uhm…”

Soldier, do men take a drink occasionally?

Sir, I don’t know, sir.

Well, they do. Here, have one.

I don’t think I -

Take a drink, Soldier. That’s an order.

Well, sir -

You’re not a pussy girl, are you, Soldier? You have titties?

I… Sir, I do not, sir.

Then drink, Soldier.

Sir, yes sir.

Jodie repeated, “You want one?”

“No,” Stephen whispered.

Jodie closed his eyes and lay back. “Ten… thousand…” After a moment he asked, “You killed him, didn’t you?”

“Who?” Stephen asked.

“Back there, that cop? Hey, you want some orange juice?”

“That agent in the basement? Maybe I killed him. I don’t know. That wasn’t the point.”

“Was it hard to do? Like, I don’t mean anything, I’m just curious. Orange juice? I drink a lot of it. Pills make you thirsty. Your mouth gets all dry.”

“No.” The can looked dirty. Maybe worms had crawled on it. Maybe crawled inside. You could drink a worm and never know it… He shivered. “Do you have running water here?”

“No. But I have some bottles. Poland Spring. I stole a case from A &P.”

Cringey.

“I need to wash my hands.”

“You do?”

“To get the blood off them. It soaked through the gloves.”

“Oh. It’s right there. Why do you wear gloves all the time? Fingerprints?”

“That’s right.”

“You were in the army, right? I knew it.”

Stephen was about to lie, changed his mind suddenly. He said, “No. I was almost in the army. Well, the marines. I was going to join. My stepfather was a marine and I was going in like him.”

“Semper Fi.”

“Right.”

There was silence and Jodie was looking at him expectantly. “What happened?”

“I tried to enlist but they wouldn’t let me in.”

“That’s stupid. Wouldn’t let you? You’d make a great soldier.” Jodie was looking Stephen up and down, nodding. “You’re strong. Great muscles. I” – he laughed – “I don’t hardly get any exercise, ’cept running from niggers or kids want to mug me. And they always catch me anyway. You’re handsome too. Like soldiers ought to be. Like the soldiers in movies.”

Stephen felt the wormy feeling going away and, my God, he started blushing. He stared at the floor. “Well, I don’t know about that.”

“Come on. Your girlfriend thinks you’re handsome, bet.”

Little cringey here. Worms starting to move.

“Well, I -”

“Don’t you have a girlfriend?”

Stephen asked, “You got that water?”

Jodie pointed to the box of Poland Spring. Stephen opened two bottles and began washing his hands. Normally he hated people watching him do this. When people watched him wash he kept being cringey and the worms never went away. But for some reason he didn’t mind Jodie watching.

“No girlfriend, huh?”

“Not right now,” Stephen explained carefully. “It’s not like I’m a homo or anything, if you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t.”

“I don’t believe in that cult. Now, I don’t think my stepfather was right – that AIDS is God’s way of getting rid of homosexual people. Because if that’s what God wanted to do he’d be smart and just get rid of them, the faggots, I mean. Not make there be a risk that normal people might get sick too.”

“That makes sense,” Jodie said from his hazy plateau. “I don’t have one either, a girlfriend.” He laughed bitterly. “Well, how could I? Right? What’ve I got? I’m not good-looking like you, I don’t have any money… I’m just a fucking junkie is all.”

Stephen felt his face burn hot and he washed harder.

Scrub that skin, yes, yes, yes…

Worms, worms, go away…

Looking at his hands Stephen continued. “The fact is I’ve been in a situation lately where I haven’t really… where I haven’t been as interested in women as most men are. But it’s just a temporary condition.”

“Temporary,” Jodie repeated.

Eyes watching the bar of soap, as if it were a prisoner trying to escape.

“Temporary. Owing to my necessary vigilance. In my work, I mean.”

“Sure. Your vigilance.”

Scrub, scrub, the soap lathered like thunderheads.

“Have you ever killed a faggot?” Jodie asked, curious.

“I don’t know. I’ll tell you I’ve never killed anybody because he’s a homosexual. That would make no sense.” Stephen’s hands tingled and buzzed. He scrubbed harder, not looking at Jodie. He suddenly felt swollen with an odd feeling – of talking to someone who might just understand him. “See, I don’t kill people just to kill them.”

“Okay,” Jodie said. “But what if some drunk came up to you on the street and pushed you around and called you, I don’t know, a motherfucking faggot? You’d kill him, right? Say you could get away with it.”

“But… well, a faggot wouldn’t want to have sex with his mother now, would he?”

Jodie blinked then laughed. “That’s pretty good.”

Did I just make a joke? Stephen wondered. He smiled, pleased that Jodie’d been impressed.

Jodie continued, “Okay, let’s say he just called you a motherfucker.”

“Of course I wouldn’t kill him. And I’ll tell you this, if you’re talking about faggots let’s talk about Negroes and Jewish people too. I wouldn’t kill a Negro unless I’d been hired to kill somebody who happened to be a Negro. There are probably reasons why Negroes shouldn’t live, or at least shouldn’t live here in this country. My stepfather had a lot of reasons for that. I’m pretty much in accord with him. He felt the same about Jewish people but there I disagree. Jewish people make very good soldiers. I respect them.”

He continued. “See, killing’s a business, that’s all it is. Look at Kent State. I was just a kid then but my stepfather told me about it. You know Kent State? Those students got shot by the National Guard?”

“Sure. I know.”

“Now, come on, nobody really cared that those students died, right? But to me it was stupid shooting them. Because what purpose did it serve? None. If you wanted to stop the movement, or whatever it was, you should’ve targeted the leaders and taken them out. It would’ve been so easy. Infiltrate, evaluate, delegate, isolate, eliminate.”

“That’s how you kill people?”

“You infiltrate the area. Evaluate the difficulty of the kill and the defenses. You delegate the job of diverting everyone’s attention from the victim – make it look like you’re coming at them from one way but it turns out that it’s just a delivery boy or shoe-shine boy or something, and meanwhile you’ve come up behind the victim. Then you isolate him, and eliminate him.”

Jodie sipped his orange juice. There were dozens of empty orange juice cans piled in the corner. It seemed to be all he lived on. “You know,” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, “you think professional killers’d be crazy. But you don’t seem crazy.”

“I don’t think I’m crazy,” Stephen said matter-of-factly.

“The people you kill, are they bad? Like crooks and Mafia people and things?”

“Well, they’ve done something bad to people who pay me to kill them.”

“Which means they’re bad?”