And no acknowledgments would be complete without a shout-out to Lilith Saintcrow. Lili, you took a bullet for me in Berlin and joked through the entire back-alley operation, my flask of bourbon your only anesthesia. As soon as the State Department closes the investigation and I get my passport back, I’m taking off for Panama to collect our bounty.

Barbara Nitke

JEFF SOMERS was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. After graduating from college, he wandered aimlessly for a while, but the peculiar siren call of New Jersey brought him back to his homeland. In 1995 Jeff began publishing his own magazine, The Inner Swine (www.innerswine.com). The Web site for The Electric Church can be found at www.the-electric-church.com.

My Russian frowned and pushed his hands back into his pockets. From below his collar a smudge of ink was visible- a star atop what I assumed was a crown, the symbol of high rank. I reached up and scratched my chest where my own prison tattoo still burned. Prison had been good for me. I didn’t like to think about it too much, about Michaleen and Bartlett and the others. It hadn’t been a good time, an enjoyable time, but it had been a necessary time for me. It boiled me down and I’d come out of it the better man.

He saw me looking and smiled. “You know what it means?” He suddenly jerked his sleeve up, revealing two and half of the blurry skull tats on his arm. “And these?”

“Prison work,” I said, keeping myself still, feeling the bodyguards’ eyes on me. “Where’d you get the art?”

“You know what it means, my friend?”

I smirked, figuring that would annoy him. “I know what it’s supposed to mean, Boris. Anyone can slap some ink on you.”

“My name is not Boris,” he complained. Maybe he wasn’t as smart as me after all. I wasn’t used to being the smartest guy in the room. “And where I come from, they kill you for false emblems like that. Buy you a drink somewhere and slit your throat, you fall back onto a plastic sheet, five minutes later it is like you were never there.”

“Yeah,” I said. “How many? Five? Ten? You think ten is a big number?” If I’d had a skull for every person I’d killed, I’d be a fucking shadow, I’d be nothing but ink.

“Numbers do not matter. You New York boys, always counting.” He peered at me. “You are sure you did not work the Brussels job? I heard your name, very clear.”

“Then someone is lying to you,” I said. I’d been sucked into Chengara Penitentiary and hadn’t made it too far away since getting out. “The last two times I made it to Europe, things didn’t go so well for me.” The two big boys behind me hadn’t moved, not even to loosen up their coats.

He nodded, crimping his lips as if to say, yeah, okay, whatever you say. “You know my people?” he said suddenly, voice soft and casual, like he was asking me if I liked his shirt. I didn’t. My own shirt was white and scratchy and a little tight around the neck, like it’d been made for a different man. “You know who I work for?”

“Sure,” I said, nodding. “You’re connected. You’re a high roller. You run this town- for your boss. You live in this fine suite in this ancient hotel, you go from an air-conditioned room to an air-conditioned mini-hover- it’s fucking cute, like a little toy- to an air-conditioned room every day and probably haven’t sweated in ten years.”

He chuckled, nodding and stepping around me. “Da,” he said jovially. “Da! And you were sent to kill me. It is funny. Now, if you will excuse me, I must have my dinner. Lyosha and Fedya will finish your conversation.”

I turned to watch him walk back into the restaurant, the door shutting behind him as if on a motor of some sort. I looked at one of the big guys, and then at the other. They were slightly different in the shape of their rounded heads and the angle that their mouths hung open, but were essentially the same person occupying different space. I wondered idly if there would be an explosion if they accidentally touched.

The one I was looking at- I thought he was Lyosha but wasn’t sure why I thought that- grinned. “You break my finger now?”

I sighed, feeling tired. “Sure, why not,” I said. I could do the math: two of them against one of me, alone in a back lot, their friends inside and everywhere, fuck, the whole damn city. They hadn’t frisked me or tried to take my own gun away. I chose not to be insulted. I reached up and took my crappy cigarette from between my lips and held it carefully between my thumb and forefinger.

Lyosha flicked his own cigarette into the air and exhaled briskly, shrugging his shoulders, getting loose. The butt fell limply to the ground as if the air was too thick to travel through, the coal bright on the dark, shadowed ground. For a moment we all stood there, hands hanging free, each of us waiting to see who would move first. First move was a losing move- it telegraphed your intentions, and when you had more than one person to deal with it, guaranteed at least one gun was going to find its way onto you and make some painful alterations. The air around us was completely still, like hot jelly, and I was reminded of the yard back at Chengara, where I’d gotten a free but excellent education on how to fight when outnumbered.

Rule number one was sometimes making the first move made sense.

I launched myself at the one I’d decided was Lyosha, tossing my cigarette into his face with my left hand as I pulled my gun with my right. He cursed in Russian, all consonants and fucking phlegm, waving his hands in front of his face and dancing back. As I crashed into him I brought my gun up and fired twice into his belly, falling down on top of him and rolling off to the side. I wasn’t worried about the noise; my Russian expected a few shots. A few more and he might send the waiter out to see if we needed anything, but not yet.

I came up into an unsteady crouch and fired three times, quick, where the other bodyguard had been a second before. He was still there, for a moment, and then toppled over, hitting his knees and then falling over face-first. I stayed low for a moment, listening to the sudden silence, feeling the heat on me, straining my senses.

Rule number two was to never assume. It wasn’t nice, but I turned and found Lyosha, put my gun against his head, and made sure he was dead. Then I stepped over to his buddy and did the same, warm blood spraying me lightly. You assumed people were dead, they had a habit of coming up behind you at the worst times. I’d learned that in Chengara, and it was a hard lesson to unlearn. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to unlearn it.

I turned and jogged back toward the door in a wide arc, approaching from an angle, taking soft, easy steps. I knew I didn’t need to worry about getting the door open- I had magic. By sheer force of will the door was going to pop open. After five steps it did just that, and a big, thick-necked woman with a goddamn shotgun held across her body, a streak of absolute darkness, stepped halfway out into the yard. She peered out into the lot, muttering to herself, not seeing me coming at her in the dim light on an angle. I just kept approaching, holding off; you couldn’t shoot someone in the back. I wasn’t a big believer in justice, but everyone deserved to at least see it coming.