The Silver Bear

come in, where they go out. I want you to write down every detail you can think of about that house and all the people in it.”

“Fuck. You’re the guy. The hired gun.” He looked up at me in awe, like I had just pulled the greatest magic trick of all time right in front of him.

I let my eyes go hard in answer. “Start writing.”

IT was about an hour to daylight when Ponts and I started walking up the front porch of Levine’s house. I knew cameras were covering us, but I had a gun in his ribs and my ball cap pulled down tight over my head. Knowing where the cameras were positioned helped me keep my face off the security screens. And I knew we were coming about twenty minutes before the guards changed shifts. There is no man who isn’t tired at 5:30 A.M., especially when he knows he’s heading to a warm bed after a long, boring, rainy night.

We arrived at the front door, and Ponts rang the bell. An intercom affixed to a support column on the patio barked to life.

“What you doin’ here, Ponts?”

“I got a favor to ask of Dick.”

“Come back after breakfast.”

“This can’t wait, Ernie. This is my sister’s kid I got with me. He works first shift on the docks, but he’s looking for some fries on the side. I already told Dick about it; I know he’s up reading the Daily Racing Form . . . come on, we’ll be in and out.”

“Levine knows you’re coming?”

“I mentioned it to him a couple weeks ago. He said he’d work it in ’cause it was me.”

Despite the fact that I had told him he would live through this if he just played his part to the end, the last sound Ponts ever heard was the door clicking open. He had served his purpose, and I didn’t want to put off shooting him.

THE whole thing took eight minutes. I pulled the trigger on Ponts and kicked the door back at the same time, smashing it into the first guard who was coming to frisk me. As he fell backwards, I shot him in the head, sending the back of his skull into a potted begonia in the foyer. The silencer attached to the pistol’s muzzle kept the report from sounding like anything more than a small cough.

I didn’t care about the dining room to the right, so I stepped left and shot the two guards seated around the kitchen table before they could even get their guns up. Two chest shots, and their blood poured into their blue starched shirts, a pair of purple ovals where their front pockets used to be.

Without breaking stride, I moved up the back stairwell, my legs like pistons as I attacked each step, moving quickly now, reloading my pistols as I went. First, I shot the guard sitting sleepy-eyed on a stool at the top of the staircase reading his USA Today, a face shot, so that all of his features became an indistinguishable red mask. Another guard emerged from a bathroom, a fat guy, an extra guy, the one Ponts hadn’t told me about. I figured there would be some sort of play Ponts would try to make, a last piece of information he would hold for himself, so he could wait and use it when I would be surprised, vulnerable. But Ponts was dead and this poor player had the misfortune of taking his end-of-shift shit right as I was coming up the stairs. He didn’t have time to exhale before I shot him in the heart.

The last guy left was Richard Levine, the one-time numbers runner and current bookmaking heavy of Boston, Massachusetts. And I hated him. Not because of his operation, or his business, or the evil I could imagine he must have harnessed to rise to the level he had.

No, I hated him because of what this assignment meant, what it uncovered, what it cost me. Vespucci was right all along. I couldn’t go back to Jake, not now, not ever again. If I couldn’t account for her whereabouts at all times, if I couldn’t keep her behind locked doors, if I couldn’t protect her from my world, then she would always be in play, always be a factor, always be involved in a race she didn’t know she was running. And for all that, I loathed Richard Levine with every living cell in my body.

When I entered his bedroom, he was seated on a back patio, drinking orange juice and reading the Daily Racing Form. He turned his head and his eyes met mine and he instantly knew my purpose, why I was there, what I was going to do with the weapon in my hand. For a moment, just a moment, his eyes dropped, like he was resigned this day would come, the race he was running had reached the finish line. And then as quickly as it was there, it was gone again, replaced by the steel and spit and resolve that had driven him the last twenty years. He leapt for the nearest chair cushion, knocking the table up and out of the way, sending his breakfast dishes flying in what he hoped was the distraction he needed to reach the gun tucked underneath the nearest wicker chair.

My first bullet caught him just below his arm, breaking his ribs and sapping the fight out of him the way a strong body blow can shut down even the toughest of heavyweights. It spun him, so that he wheeled into the overturned table and dropped into the mess of food and juice and shattered glass on the floor. The chair he was trying to reach spilled over in his fall, and the gun it harbored tumbled out just a few feet from where his body came to rest. He looked at the gun the way a covetous man looks at his neighbor’s wife, so close, yet a mile away. I’m sure he was thinking, “If only I’d been a little faster.”

My second bullet stopped him from thinking, permanently.

CHAPTER 8

I am watching Abe Mann at a rally in downtown Indianapolis. He is standing on a podium, with a hundred fidgeting children on risers behind him, talking about building a foundation of learning in this country, talking about accountability and responsibility and private school credits and tax breaks for working families. Empty words told by rote with little feeling, like he’s starting to sag under the weight of a hundred campaign speeches to a hundred sleepy-eyed crowds, with no end in sight.

I am one of those sleepy-eyed crowd members, though my half-closed lids are an act, a mask, a shield I can hide behind while my eyes seek out and record every detail of the event. There are four teachers on either side of the risers, wearing green and gold James A. Garfield Elementary School T-shirts, two black women and two white males. The men are so obviously members of the Secret Service their presence is more warning than undercover work; they are dressed that way so the pictures in tomorrow’s Indianapolis Star will not project a leader who needs constant protection.

A row of photographers stands at the front of the crowd in a small section marked by steel dividers. There are several goateed men, most with ponytails, and only a few women, snapping pictures between yawns, just doing their jobs. Any one of them could kill Abe Mann rather easily and at close range, but getting away would pose a problem. The kill is only half of the assignment; disappearing after the body drops is how an assassin earns his fee.

I would guess the crowd stands about five hundred strong, and I am dressed like most of the young men here: gray business suit, dark tie, black shoes, and black belt. Normally, I would have worn sunglasses, but the sky is overcast, and I do not want to draw any unnecessary attention my way. As I’ve said, there is a way of standing, of dressing, of combing your hair, of holding a blank expression on your face, of folding your hands, of yawning when someone looks your way that renders you all but invisible in a crowd, a room, even tight quarters, like a hallway.

I count eight Secret Service men mingling in the audience, conspicuous by the slight bulges under their arms that shoulder holsters make in clothing, and by the number of times they look around the crowd instead of keeping their eyes on the speaker. I can guess their ranks will swell as we move further west and closer to the convention. How many of them I will eventually have to negotiate is still to be discovered.

I wait until the speech is over and the audience disperses en masse. Although dozens of supporters trickled away before the event reached its conclusion, I find I can be more inconspicuous if I remain a sheep in the flock instead of a straggler. I catch one last glimpse of candidate Mann as he clasps hands with various attendees while leaving the podium. His face is fatigued, and although he is grinning, there is melancholy in his eyes.