The first of them I caught up with on the way home from a drinking hole I heard about when I worked for the Civilian Construction Corps, a place called Flannery’s. It was a dingy, stinking bar made of two shipping containers with the center walls cut away by an acetylene torch, a foot-wide length of steel welded over the top joint to keep the rain out, and it had cheap grog, a tiny stage, and a few desultory strippers. It did a good turn of business.

I hung out in the place downing drinks that tasted like turpentine and nightmares and listened to the mark get rowdy with his friends. The description fit, and he lived in the part of town Dills said he did, but I needed the name to be sure. It did not take long to get it.

“Hey Ryan,” one of the roughnecks at his table said. “You got the next round or what?” He held up his empty glass and shook it.

The mark, Ryan, held up a hand. “Fine, fine, you thirsty fucker. Be right back.”

When he bellied up to the bar, I turned to him. “Your name Ryan?”

He eyed me suspiciously. “Who’s asking?”

“Dan Foley, out of Austin. Your last name Bromley?”

He shook his head. “No. Martin.”

I feigned a look of disappointment. “Dang. Sorry to bother you. You look like someone I knew from … before. When I heard your name was Ryan, I thought …” I looked down into my glass.

“Don’t sweat it,” Ryan Martin said. He patted my shoulder with genuine sympathy. “I got one of those faces. Hope you find your friend.”

The bartender brought him his drinks, and he went back to his table. I stayed in my stool, nursing grog and pretending to enjoy the gaunt, limp-breasted women gyrating on stage. At an hour before curfew, the bartender turned off the cell phone connected to a small speaker playing old hip-hop songs, plugged the phone into a solar trickle-charger that would do absolutely no good at all until morning, and announced the bar was closed. The last dancer picked up her tips—a collection of small but fairly valuable trade—and tiredly left the stage.

The few remaining patrons complained loudly, but finished their drinks quickly. Minutes later, Martin and his group got up and walked out. I paid my tab with four .308 cartridges and followed.

My hands were steady. The few drinks I’d had kept the shakes away, and probably would continue to do so for at least another hour. I had a pistol and a knife under my coat, but contrary to my normal operating procedure, the knife was primary and the pistol was backup. I wanted to do this quiet, but I would take it any way I could get it.

Martin’s two friends broke off from the pedestrian road at separate intervals, leaving the ex-soldier walking alone toward his corner of the refugee districts. I kept my distance until he turned down his street, then I sped up. If he had been less inebriated, he probably would have heard me coming and I would have had to resort to the pistol. As it was, I managed to sneak up behind him just as he was about to climb the ladder to his roof hatch.

At the last instant, he either heard me or sensed something was wrong, and half turned in my direction. There was an alarmed question on his lips, but he never got a chance to ask it. My feet were set, heels dug in, hips twisting, arm following through with the momentum of a right hook that clipped him squarely on the chin, my fist striking with only the first two knuckles to avoid breaking my hand. I put everything I had into that punch, and I am fairly certain it would have dropped a rhino.

Martin’s head clanged off a ladder rung as he went down. I glanced around to see if anyone had seen. The district was dark and quiet, the residents huddled next to their fireplaces or resting up for the long workday ahead. That is how you know you are in a working class neighborhood: the wood smoke is heavy, and people go to bed at a decent hour.

A quick search turned up his keys. I unlocked his front doors, dragged him inside, then closed and re-locked them. Seconds later, I climbed down through the roof hatch and locked it as well.

Martin was beginning to come around, moaning groggily on the floor. I did a quick search of the room with my tactical light and saw a gallon jug of water on a shelf. Perfect. I set it on the ground and put my tactical light next to it, bathing the room in dim white luminescence. That done, I drew my pistol, sat Martin up, and slapped him awake. When his eyes finally focused, they saw the pistol and widened in alarm.

“Look man, take whatever you want,” he said. “I don’t have much, but-”

“I’m not here to rob you.”

He blinked in confusion. “Then what do you want?”

I pulled Blake’s medallion from my jacket pocket.

“Recognize this?”

He looked at it blankly. I held it closer, but still nothing.

“I’ve never seen that before.”

“Ever been to Boise City, Oklahoma? Some people were ambushed there a while back. Lots of shooting and grenades. Ugly business.”

Now his face changed and all doubts drifted away like smoke on the wind. “Wait, man,” he said, hands upraised. “You don’t understand.”

“Oh, I understand perfectly. You and a bunch of other deserters thought we were there to find you. You thought we had been sent by the Army to root you out. So rather than, you know, ask us why we were there, you shot first and didn’t bother with questions.”

The fear now took on a shade of confusion. “How did you …”

“Tom Dills,” I said. “Or as you know him, Clayton Briggs. You two served together, right? He’s not doing so well right now. He’s chained to a wall in a cabin missing a few teeth and a few fingers. But that’s not your problem. In fact, you don’t have problems anymore.”

I drew back the hammer on the pistol. It was a .38 revolver I had taken from one of the men who tried to rob me a few days ago. Martin cringed and opened his mouth to scream for help, eyes pinned to the steel against his forehead. In his terror, he didn’t see what my other hand was doing.

At least, not until he felt the blade slide between his ribs and enter his heart.

He gasped, mouth opening and closing, going stiff with pain. I gripped him by his chin and said, “Consider yourself lucky. I can’t afford too much noise.”

His eyes dimmed, and with the last air in his lungs, he said, “Why?”

“My father. And a good man named Blake Smith. That’s why.”

And then he died.

*****

The next four were far less dramatic.

I realized I had been stupid. I had acted out of anger, out of a need to make the kill personal. It did not need to be that way. When I had followed Ryan Martin into that shitty bar, if someone had suggested I do the job from a rooftop a hundred yards away, I would have laughed in that person’s face. But after two nights of sleeping in the bed Sophia and I once shared, and seeing Martin’s face in my nightmares, and the regret in Martin’s eyes as he breathed his last, I knew there needed to be a distance. A disconnect. Look too deep into the abyss, and the abyss looks into you.

Like Dills and Martin, I exercised due diligence. I would not kill the wrong people. There is a difference between retribution and murder, although I doubt the law would agree with me on that. Maybe I was right, maybe I was wrong. I don’t know. I’m no philosopher. I just knew I could not stand the thought of Blake and Dad being dead and gone while their murderers lived free, unconcerned with punishment. Even if I went to the police, I could not prove anything. Not enough evidence. And they would want to know how I got my information, a question I could not answer.

Justice may wear a blindfold, but I do not.

I verified who they were. I drank just enough to keep myself steady without dulling my perceptions. My father’s lessons in tradecraft served me well. I followed them one by one, arranged meetings, determined their identities beyond doubt, then handled things the smart way.