Loop.
The two of them were sitting on a curb, around the corner from the entrance to Saints and Sinners, sharing the spliff and a few hits off the flask Micky kept in his back pocket. They’d been sitting ever since Micky had gotten off work—almost an hour ago now, he realized.
And he had to be up in the morning tomorrow, on account of Mrs. Saint was having one of her lunches at the club. Which you know who had to valet for.
God, even the Jamaican’s herb couldn’t relax him these days.
Duka stood up.
“I gotta hit the hay, my friend.”
“Come on, Mick. Night’s still young.”
“But I ain’t.” Duka shook his head. “Thanks for bringin’ the spliff, Loop. I’ll see you around.”
“All right.” Loop waved the spliff at him. “See you around.”
Duka saluted his friend with the flask and walked off down the street.
Truth was, he wasn’t that old. It was this job. It really was killin’ him. All he did these days was “yes, sir,” and “no, sir”—there had to be some way he could ask out of it. How to do that without seeming ungrateful, that was the tricky part, because you did not want Howard Saint to think you were ungrateful.
Maybe he could ask for another job in the organization. Something that required a little more brainpower. A job a little farther up the ladder. Though even as he thought about that, Micky realized he wasn’t sure he wanted to go any farther up the ladder, because, after all, his old man had been about as high up that ladder as you could get, and look what happened to him.
He turned the corner toward his car, unbuttoning his jacket the rest of the way as he walked.
At least he could ask Saint’s permission to wear something a little more stylish on the job. This uniform . . .
“Why do I have to wear this?” he mumbled to himself, turning the bright red jacket over in his hand. “It’s so . . . undignified.”
All at once, headlights flared at his back.
Micky turned, raising a hand to shield his eyes from the glare, and saw a car had come down the street behind him. It was stopped now, in the middle of the road, blocking him in. A big old, rusted hunk of junk. He didn’t know anybody with a car like that.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Who’s that? Loopy?”
The driver’s side door opened. Footsteps sounded. A big man’s heavy, slow footsteps. Loopy, then, playing some kind of trick on him.
Except, he remembered, Loopy didn’t drive.
“Hey!” Micky yelled again. “Whoever that is, shut those lights, huh?”
There was no reply.
He was getting a little nervous. Not too nervous, because he worked for Howard Saint now, and there was one good thing about working for Howard Saint: Nobody fucked with you. Nobody who wanted to live, at least.
He squinted into the light and saw a man walking toward him, silhouetted in the light. A big man, just like he’d guessed. He couldn’t see his face.
“I don’t know who you’re lookin’ for,” Micky squeaked. “But I work for Howard Saint.”
The footsteps stopped.
“I know.”
Micky almost wet his pants. The man’s voice, whoever he was, was all raspy and thick, as if he had something coating his throat. As if he was using his voice for the first time in a long, long while.
“Well . . .” Micky squeaked again. “Then what’s the matter with you? Buzz off, unless you got a death wish.”
In response, the figure started forward again.
“Hey,” Micky began. “Didn’t you hear me? I said . . .”
His voice trailed off, then, as the man stepped in front of the headlights, and Micky, at last, saw his face.
“Oh, shit.”
“Death wish.” Frank Castle smiled. “That’s it, Micky. That’s it exactly.”
TWENTY
It was a bad thing he was doing, so, as he worked, he kept glancing over at the picture. He drew strength from it; it reminded him of the purpose, the rationale, behind his actions.
It was a picture of a woman and a boy, smiling faces, faces full of love. He remembered taking that picture. He had been smiling, too, then. He used to smile everytime he looked at it. Not now.
Nothing made him smile now. Certainly not the picture. Now when he looked at it, he heard screams. He saw blood, and bullets, and bodies, and death. His mother’s, his father’s, his wife’s, and his son’s . . .
Which was not a bad thing. It kept him focused.
He knew he had to use his time wisely, because he didn’t know how much more he had left. Every minute he had now was extra, a bonus beyond the hours allotted to him to walk this earth.
Because he had been dead, too; Frank Castle was sure of it. That moment in the water, when the darkness had clouded his vision . . .
Well. He had prayed for a miracle then. A second chance. And that miracle had come. Two miracles, in fact —the first in the form of that metal cylinder, which turned out to be Will’s scuba tank, the tank they’d left behind for his son’s dive around the point the next day, the dive that had never happened, that never would happen now.
But that tank had saved his life. He’d sucked life-sustaining oxygen from it until he judged John Saint and his thugs were gone, that it was safe to swim for the beach.
The second miracle had been Manuel Candelaria. The old man had found him on the shore that night, half dead, and had brought him back to his island, hidden him from the authorities, nursed him back to health. Without Candelaria, Castle would have died a second, definitely final, time.
That day when, at last, he’d been well enough to leave the old man’s hut and return to the compound where his world had ended, he’d almost wished he had.
Those first few minutes, stumbling through the bungalows, breaking through the police tape, wandering like a drunken man in search of a bottle of wine, had been like a waking nightmare.
Months had passed since the massacre. The bodies were all gone. The walls and floors were spotless. There was a FOR SALE sign on the yard outside, and a FOR AUCTION tag on almost every item inside—the artwork, the chairs, the carpets, even the toys his dad had bought for the littlest kids to play with. To anyone who happened by in search of a bargain, he had no doubt it looked like just another estate sale.
Not to Castle.
He looked at the manicured lawn, the repaired patio flagstones, the immaculately kept house, and he saw blood. He saw bodies. He saw his family die all over again.
“Hey!”
He swiveled in his chair.
On the other side of the room, lit by a single spot, Micky Duka hung upside down, stripped to the waist, hands tied behind his back.
“I swear to God,” Duka said, tears running down—or actually, up—his face. “I didn’t—”
“Shut up,” Castle growled. “I’m not ready for you yet.”
“Oh, God. Otto—”
“I said shut up.”
Duka shut up. Stopped talking at least, though his pathetic sniffling continued.
There. Castle finished attaching the smaller head to the blowtorch. He’d been working with metal all afternoon, getting the place and the car ready, but he didn’t need all that heat for what he planned next.
He looked over to the photo again, to strengthen his resolve. Maria. Will. Their smiling faces. The touch of his son’s hand, the smoothness of his wife’s cheek.
The cold, dead surface of their gravestones.
The cemetery in Arlington had been his second stop on returning to the mainland. The first, first only because
