Seldom Seen in August

Gun held low, he kicked in the door so hard the jamb splintered and sent daggers of wood flying. Bringing his weapon up to draw a bead on the kid sitting on the lid of the toilet, he expected screaming, crying, pleading. What he got was silence. The kid, pale and hollow-eyed and stripped to the waist, didn’t even look at him. He just sat with his head down, looking at the straight razor he held in one hand, his chest rising and falling rapidly, the breath hissing in and out of his nose.

“Okay,” Wade said. “Nice and easy now…”

In response, the kid made a strangled noise, then thrust his head back until it was resting against the wall and his green eyes were focused on the scabrous patches of mildew on the bathroom ceiling. His Adam’s apple looked like a small fist pushing through white plastic as the kid stamped one bare foot against the floor and whined.

I know him, Wade thought, and felt his skin go cold.

It was a ridiculous notion and he shook his head to deny it. If the kid looked even remotely familiar it was because he lived in the same city. It was entirely likely Wade had seen him making his way to school one day, or hanging around outside one of the shadier clubs where grownups who had forsaken the thankless monotony of blue-collar life engaged in riskier but more lucrative pursuits. At such venues, Wade had once been a regular, and he’d often seen the children of gangsters hanging around outside, looking sullen that they’d been excluded from the proceedings, their eyes shining with ambition. A million years ago Wade himself had been one of them, had stood outside a warehouse that had appeared abandoned to anyone not affiliated with the people who owned it. But Wade knew what went on in there, and dreamed of the day he’d been enlisted to help one of the men on a job. That day had come, and it had helped to carve from shapeless useless clay the man he had become.

The kid began to weep.

Yes, Wade decided. That’s how I know him. But he didn’t believe a word of it.

“Listen,” he said, “I want you to put that blade away, ok?”

The boy kept his head back, his eyes staring upward. Then he brought the ivory-handled razor up in front of his chest, the blade facing Wade.

Wade aimed for the head. “Put it away, kid. I’m not going to tell you again.”

The blade hovered, reflecting both the harsh light and Wade’s likeness back at him. He trembled for a moment in the boy’s slender fingers. Then the razor carried on and up, stopping before his exposed throat.

“Hey…”

“Sorry,” the boy replied in the smallest of whispers, tears trickling down his gaunt face. The blade danced, and when the dance was over, there was a wide yawning smile just above his Adam’s apple. Unlike Wade, the blood seemed almost hesitant to run.

“What the fuck?”

The boy continued to stare at the ceiling, at nothing. His hand fell away, the razor clattering off the bathtub, spattering the white surface with red periods before it hit the floor.

Wade let out a slow breath and lowered the gun. In some distant part of his brain, it registered that this development was a positive one—it had saved him an ugly job and —but so unexpected and sudden had it been that he wasn’t entirely sure how to react. Why had the kid killed himself? Because of him? As obvious a solution as that was, he didn’t believe it. Over the years he’d become something of an expert in the human response to fear, to the threat he represented, and never before had he seen anything like this. Then there was the question of the straight razor. It hadn’t been in the bathroom when Wade had checked it. He knew because it had been a nice one, and if it had been there, he’d have taken it as a souvenir, and possibly as an unpleasant how- do-you-do for the first cop who tried to cuff him. Of course, it could have been stashed in a drawer or something…

He ran a hand through his hair, scratched his eyebrow with the still cocked hammer of the gun and closed his eyes. A few moments of indecision later, he back stepped out of the bathroom and closed the door behind him.

You need to get out of here, he told himself.

As if the thought had been a cue, his cell phone buzzed. Glad of the distraction, he snatched it from his pocket. Cartwright again. Another text message. Wade hit the button. His partner’s response was a single word, damning in its implications:

TALKED

So they’d caught him.

And the motherfucker had sung like a canary.

Wade felt such a surge of anger he grimaced in actual pain that burrowed up from his balls and twisted through him until it snagged in his throat and burst into flame. Face crimson, he started to tremble. A roar trapped behind his teeth, he aimed the gun at the floor, the walls, the closed doors at the end of the landing, his finger itching to squeeze off a few rounds to see if the clamor of the shots could compete with his own expression of rage.

“Fuck!” he yelled, for the moment uncaring about who did or didn’t hear him. His muscles felt like ropes twisted to breaking, his blood like acid coursing through his veins. “Goddamn cocksucker!” Spittle flew from his lips as he spun on a heel back to the bathroom. In here was a pinata for all that violent anger, and hell, the kid wouldn’t even mind, the little split-throat shit. He was beyond feeling anything anymore. But right now, Wade felt too much and he needed to hit something, needed to imagine the corpse in there had a different face, namely the pinched face of his backstabbing rat-bastard partner.

Cartwright, you’re a dead man.

He shouldered open the door, a sneer on his lips.

The body was gone.

CHAPTER FOUR

Phone in hand, Wade paced the landing. The sooner he was gone from this place the better, but every now and then he’d hear the distant squawk or the whoop-whoop of sirens as cruisers pulled to a halt, and it would remind him why he needed to be patient. Problem was, there was now a prankster running around out there covered in fake blood just dying to tell the cops about the guy he’d fooled. Oh, and Officer, did I mention he broke in and had a gun?

Wade cursed himself. What the hell was wrong with him? Had eleven years in the pen made him rusty or what? There was a time when he could have sniffed out a ruse without even being in the same building as the guy pulling it. But not only had he fallen for the kid’s prank, he hadn’t even realized the kid was in the house to begin with. He was getting old, that’s what it was. Old and rusty, kept going by his addiction to vices and the consequential need to compensate for them with cash he didn’t have. And that, he suspected, would never change.

“Hell with it,” he said, and scrolled through the names in his cell phone’s memory until he found one that read simply: “CUJ” which was an abbreviation for “Clean-Up Job”, itself a code name for a man named Alex Eye, which no doubt was an alias but it was better than a series of stupid letters. Alex had proven useful, if ridiculously expensive, in the past when things hadn’t exactly gone the way they’d been supposed to. Alex was six-foot six, black, and didn’t speak a word. He just showed up, did what he’d been hired to do, then charged you up the ass and back down again for it. But he could untie the knot in almost any situation, thinking up clever escape plans where there didn’t appear to be any. As a matter of pride, Wade had never used Alex’s services. But he needed them now.

He made the call. Listened to the dial tone buzzing in his ear.

Paced.

Stopped when a phone in one of the rooms he was facing began to ring. He frowned, hung up on his call