My bitter laugh fills my ears under my hood. “What friends? Guy like me doesn’t have friends.”
Not anymore.
“Business associates, then?”
I can’t help how my mind weighs every inflection of his tone, especially since I can’t see him. It’s automatic. I assess and process every incoming bit of information I have to formulate my reply.
“What kind of business do you think I’m in?” Let’s see how much he really knows about me. Knowing my name doesn’t mean he’s got my full jacket.
His chair softly creaks, like he sat back. I imagine I’m right that he’s not a huge man, or it’d be making a lot more noise. When he speaks, his voice hits my ears at a slightly different angle than before, so I’m certain I’m correct about his change of position.
“I think it’s awfully suspicious a man such as yourself has been implicated in helping a dangerous splinter group from Magzykstan get their hands on some pretty serious hardware. Surface-to-air missiles. Nuclear material, even.”
Shit.
His earlier questions didn’t mention my latest clients, so I thought he’d caught up with me through working his way up the grapevine that led me to that job in the first place. I’d already made the delivery, so I had assumed coincidentally bad timing, on my part.
Unfortunately, I also default to a coping mechanism I tend to fall back on at the worst possible time, and that’s get snarky.
“Everyone needs a hobby, you know.”
Instead of him punching me, which I would expect after a smart-assed answer like that, the man actually chuckles again.
Fuuuuuck.As hard and deep as the sound of it drills inside me, I’d almost prefer to feel his fists.
Not to mention, I thought the Magzykidiots were joking about the nuclear material. Had I known they were serious, I wouldn’t have gone near the deal in the first place. Once I took the deposit, however, I was sort of obligated to see it through. At least to give it my best effort. These aren’t the kind of people you jerk around like that. Not when they are closely connected to the son of a Russian oligarch hooked in with officials in the highest levels of the government.
Besides, do youhonestlythink I gave them radioactive material so they could make a dirty bomb? No, of course not. They ended up with chunks of iron a buddy of mine coated with some special paint that had enough trace amounts of plutonium in it to make a Geiger counter register.
I’m apparently suicidal, but I’m notstupid.
More soft sounds of the man working on his tablet. I don’t understand his methodology here. Unless he’s trying to knock me off-balance emotionally. If so, he’s already succeeding in that, even though he doesn’t know why.
The silence is preferable to his voice.
Or that chuckle.
Maybe my mind’s now fixated on those sounds because it senses I’m close to death. Regrets flow and maudlin memories assail me.
It’s a lot to process.
Doesn’t mean I’ll start begging for my life or anything that melodramatic. I have standards, you know. And like hell will I offer up my nest egg in exchange for my life.
Not worth that much, for starters.
My life, I mean. My nest egg would likely support a small third-world country for a couple of years. Which, I suppose that is proof positive I’m a dumbass with a death wish. I already had more than enough to comfortably support me for the rest of my life, and here I went and threw it all away.
Secondly, offering up my nest egg means he’d only keep me alive long enough to get a payday and then kill me. If he’s going to kill me anyway, likehellwill I pay him to do it.
I guess I’ve had a pretty good run throughout my years considering I started life as a throwaway kid who grew up to become a disposable soldier. Making it to fifty-one is an achievement I never dreamed possible when I left the foster care system and enlisted in the army at the age of eighteen.
That’s after my life almost ended in my twenties in an Afghani desert, too. It was luck and His love that saved my life.
Serves me right getting caught up in this. When a door slammed shut for good on that past chapter of my life just a few weeks ago, it’s like a switch inside me firmly flipped to “gives no fucks” mode. I’ve been living life like that ever since. Very dangerously, too, given my line of work.
Taking risks I normally avoid, like accepting this job in the first place when I damned well knew better. But it could have made me eight million dollars. Despite the slightly sketchy circumstances I normally would have refused to fuck with, I opted to go for it.
One lucrative final job, right? Then I could retire for real this time and decide what to do with the rest of my life and that very hefty payday.
