“We’re hardly strangers. I see you more than I see my accountant.”
“I don’t even know your real name,” John argues, not appreciating the assassin’s sudden curiosity one bit.
“Julien.” The man holds out one elegant hand. “Julien Benoit. And you are?”
“John… Ambroz,” he says with some hesitation. This seems like a bad idea, but the assassin likely knows his identity already. People like him don’t take chances. They shake hands, and John directs his attention back to the body.
“On three. One… two… three.”
Together, they grab both ends of the bedsheet and heft the body onto the table. John is tempted to peel back the fabric to see if he recognizes them as one of Emile’s henchmen, but he doesn’t want to arouse Julien’s suspicion. It sometimes happens that a gangster will get killed in the line of duty, and their bodies must also be disposed of discreetly so that the police don’t ask questions. But the Hand’s elusive Nightingale is only brought in for jobs that require finesse.
John isn’t sure if the assassin reports directly to Matthieu or if he takes his orders from someone higher up in the food chain, nor does he ask. John chooses not to embroil himself in the Hand’s politics but stay as removed from the organization as possible.
“Care to join me for a smoke?” Julien asks.
“No, thanks.”
“Come now, John, I insist.”
John could refuse him, but some instinct tells him not to.
Back outside the shop, with an oily steam rising off the pavement and a sliver of moon high in the sky, Julien offers John a cigarette from his pack, then lights them both. John takes a deep inhale, instantly transported to long nights in the desert when he was on watch duty at the base, listening for the pop of gunfire or the chatter of insurgents interrupting the otherwise silent night. Oscillating from hypervigilance to boredom, John used to ration his cigarettes, one every two hours, as a reward for staying sharp despite the monotony of the job.
Julien takes a long, indulgent inhale before releasing it in a cloud of smoke, then says to John with a philosophical air, “I have someone special back home too.”
“Everyone has someone special,” John says, though that wasn’t true for him until recently.
“But not everyone’s someone special is in constant danger, their lives dependent on the ever-changing whims of some very bad people.”
John grunts. He doesn’t want to have anything in common with a man who kills for money, though he realizes the hypocrisy in that too. “Your point?”
“I have a plan for my special someone, in case I displease the bosses or some other circumstance causes me to fall out of favor with the organization.”
John has been trying to make an escape plan for Bayani, but every avenue he’s explored has been met with an insurmountable obstacle.
“He doesn’t have papers,” John says, which is perhaps his biggest roadblock. He doesn’t have the resources to smuggle Bayani back to the Philippines and traveling without any documentation leaves him vulnerable, not only to the Hand but to other human traffickers and the U.S. authorities too.
“That certainly complicates things, but I can help with that.”
John glances sideways at the assassin. “Why would you?”
Julien tilts his head and blows a plume of blue smoke from his crimson lips. “I believe in fostering goodwill.”
“You want me to owe you one?” John says.
“It never hurts to have a man with your particular skill set indebted to a man like me. I wouldn’t make any additional demands, other than asking for your discretion.”
“Discretion?”
“I may have a job sometime in the future that is, shall we say, unsanctioned.”
John shakes his head and spits on the ground. “This is a setup.”
“I assure you, it’s not.”
“Even if it weren’t, I’m not going to put a target on my back when it comes to the Hand.”
“There will be no target if you can keep a secret.”
