HE WENT BY VICTOR

I go bounding up the macaroni curve of an on-ramp in soiled underpants. Traffic is heavy. A fife-and-drum rally has just let out at the Arcadium. The bleating horns of astonished onlookers wash over me as I drop to my belly in the breakdown lane, shouldering a long-range rifle. The scope confuses me. I keep eyeing it, then pulling away, eyeing it, then pulling away, until finally I train the crosshair first on the proper building, then the proper floor, then what I hope is the proper window, which, according to my intel, the mark is scheduled to pass in 28 seconds, right after locking up the MacGuffin in its laser-guarded vault.

The night is a black motorcycle helmet, the city a radiated coral reef, and that MacGuffin belongs to the people. I can’t exactly keep checking my watch, though, and hold steady at the same time, so I elect to shoot the first person I see. Time will tell me how I fared.

I bid you bon voyage. I tell you I love you. I fluff the trigger and hear you sizzle from the chamber, and I imagine what the world looks like to you, right now, on your way to the 19th floor of Milwaukee Chase, your hyperspace vantage point, your roller-coaster spiral, your thick entry into a flock of brains.

I hide under a pre-arranged traffic cone until the chaos blows over. Detectives and crime scene investigators shuffle within feet of me. One says he’s getting too old for this shit. Another says the gua sha stripes on his back excite his wife. “Like she’s peggin’ a tiger.” A beam of light through the orange rubber aperture illuminates my newspaper. I try not to crinkle the pages, but it’s necessary to refresh. News travels quickly. Our hit was a success.

Our hit. That’s why you like working with me. I’m happy to share the credit. Most killers are selfish. I’d share the pay with you as well, gladly, but what use would you have for it?

Once you’re excised from the body, you’re run through a database, then told you’re free to go. You tell me over dinner and drinks that the coroner copped a feel. I ask, “Of you or the stiff?” You say, “When it happened, we were still one.”

When I drive you to the armory, I say, “Would it be so terrible if I came inside?”

Inside, I buy a whole banana clip, knowing you’re not the jealous type, knowing you know you’re the only one, baby, when it matters, when it counts. This is frivolous fun, but also catharsis. I’m a man on the lam, and being wanted makes me anxious, and being anxious makes me trigger-happy. I slip on a nickel jacket for protection. You never know where some of these rounds have been, in whose spleens, hearts, and livers, in whose plexuses and cortices. They want to tell me their grandmothers knew Lee Harvey. They want to tell me the schematics of Kennedy’s brain, how they were like a Ritz-Carlton, MLK’s more like a Lyceum, and Lennon’s like a Tesco that’s all spice aisles. This is dirty talk to them. In your world, lore is an aphrodisiac. Maybe in my world, too. Everyone came over on the Mayflower. Everyone’s a distant relation of some historic mass murderer, some pillaging rapist. To the victor go the spoils. To the victor go the stories.

I keep my mustache on for much of the orgy, but it’s well-known what sweat does to glue. When I’m tracked down in the morning, chewed up by machine gun fire outside a soup kitchen, it’s flapping halfway off my lip. You are excised and run through a database, then told you’re free to go.