It was both too easy to kill in this time and too easy to forget how to deal with monsters.
Too easy to forget who the monsters were.
One young man, an open shirt framing the lion tattoo on his chest, raised the hand without a weapon, holding the others in place. “This a revenge thing?” he asked. “One of ours take a shot at you?”
Henry glanced down. His coat hung open, and he’d forgotten about the red-brown stain covering his clothes. It had been years since he’d worn the stain so casually. “One of yours uses a skinning knife,” he said.
“Not one of ours, dude. That crazy fucker’s contract only. He the one who had a go at you?”
“Not at me.”
“Ah, at one of yours.”
“Yes.”
The speaker nodded, as though he understood. As though he had any idea of what it meant tohave a goat someone Henry had claimed. “You want him?”
“I do.” Two weapons remained pointed at him. The barrels of the other three sagged as the tension in the room began to ease.
“I don’t know where he is off the top, you know. But I can find out. If you ask nicely.”
Only a heavyset man who’d risen from a leather armchair reacted, his frown flicking from Henry to the speaker and back again. He knew, Henry noted. Both who and, more importantly, where.
The speaker smiled, a smile he probably considered dangerous, and the two sets of heartbeats approaching along the hall arrived at the door. Henry reached back as the door opened, grabbed a heavy jacket in each hand, and slammed the two men together in front of him. Blood sprayed from noses shattered in the impact, and he felt the man in his right hand die, bone shards shredding his brain.
Henry dropped them both, stepped over a twitching leg, and let the Darkness rise.
The only man who might have had a chance to stop him had died first. Four of the five who’d been lounging on expensive leather furniture drinking cheap beer died quickly. He broke the speaker’s neck and used the second man as a shield, bullets shattering ribs and shredding organs. In the pause when panicked fingers fumbled to reload, he went up and over the back of the sofa, drove thumb and forefinger through the third man’s eye sockets, and, holding him by the skull, used his gun to shoot the fourth. Then he broke the third’s neck and wiped the blood and brains off on his jeans.
“Who and where?” he whispered to the fifth man, drinking in his terror.
James Chin lived in a second-floor flat on Sixteenth Avenue West, an upper-middle-class residential neighborhood. The surrounding houses held children. And pets. And people who’d never suspect that on one of the lower mainland’s rare bright and sunny days, he’d skinned someone alive.
In spite of his name, he wasn’t Asian. He was a white man in his early thirties with a receding hairline and that ridiculous unshaven look favored by so many.
He wasn’t what Henry had expected. He’d expected a skinny man of indeterminate color wearing a stained T-shirt and grimy sweatpants that rose high above bony ankles, squatting ghoul-like in a filthy room in a crap hotel in the worst of the ungentrified parts of the Downtown Eastside. He’d expected a man wrapped in tics and twitches and slack-jawed manifestos. A man balanced precariously on the edge between sanity and madness. An edge Henry would have enjoyed pushing him over.
James Chin slept on his back, alone under a pale blue duvet in a medium blue bedroom in a pleasant apartment that smelled faintly of bleach. Although, Henry acknowledged, it might have been the lingering memory of a smell.
The dichotomy between expectation and reality stopped him at the foot of the queen-size bed.
And then he remembered that this man, this clean, well-fed, comfortably housed man, had taken and tortured Kevin Groves.
Henry reached out and closed his hand around the man’s ankle.
And moved so that when James Chin flailed awake, he was there to grab a handful of thick, white, fabric softener–scentedT-shirt and throw him to land half-reclining against the headboard.
“What…? Who…?” His eyes widened and picked Henry out of the shadows thrown by the streetlight. “What are you doing here? Hel…”
Henry closed a hand around his throat before the “p” could emerge. “Who hired you,” he growled, “to kill Kevin Groves?”
He felt James Chin’s Adam’s apple bob under his palm. Felt him breathe. Three fast and shallow. One long, released slowly. Felt the fingers clawing at his arm relax, the hands fall away. He saw, to his astonishment, the beginning of a smile.
“You’re him, aren’t you?” James Chin said gleefully, and Henry felt his rage slide off the other man’s total lack of concern. “The one the message was for? He said you’d come in the night, but I didn’t think he meanttonight. You got here a lot faster than I thought you would. You know, I usually don’t get to meet you guys—I get a contract, I fulfill the contract, life goes on. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to let me know how you found me? I mean, either way, I’m going to have to reemphasize the point of an NDA, but the details will save me some time.” His nose wrinkled. “You smell like blood. I’m going to have to crack a window and air the place out after you go and, in case you’ve forgotten, it’s December out there. Man, my heating bill will be vicious this month.”
Henry tightened his grip, feeling the steady beat of James Chin’s pulse against his palm.
“Hey! Loosen up, I’m cooperating here. There’s an envelope on the mantel under my TV that has all the information you’re looking for. You know, information about the guy who actuallysentthe message, because me, I’m just the messenger.”
