Killing Rain

I looked in his eyes . . .”
    “Whoa, why’d you look in his eyes, man?”
    I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
    “Shoot, man, when I look through the scope, I never look in the eyes. Or if I do, I just look at one of them, and then all I see is a bull’s-eye, you know what I mean? I never see a man. Only a target.” He looked at me, then added, “If you see a man, you might . . . hesitate.”
    I thought of several things to say, but none of them came out.
    He took a sip of iced coffee and looked upward as though contemplating something. Then he said, “Well, each of us hasonly so much courage in the well. You draw from it too many times, eventually you come up dry. I’ve seen it before. I guess one day it’ll happen to me, too.” He paused, then smiled and added, “Although probably not.”
    “That’s not what happened,” I said.
    “Then what?”
    I looked at the wall, images flickering against it as though it were a screen. “It was something about the boy. Seeing him with his family . . . I don’t know.”
    There was a pause. He said, “Sounds like you spent a little too much time watching them this week, man.”
    “Yeah, maybe.”
    “Well, that happens. It can make it hard, it’s true.”
    I felt like an idiot. What was wrong with me? Why had I frozen? Why couldn’t I explain to a man I’d fought alongside, a man I trusted?
    Trust, I thought. The word felt slippery in my mind, dangerous.
    “That’s not it,” I said. “Or, it’s not the only thing.”
    “What else?”
    I shook my head and exhaled hard. “I haven’t had a partner in a long time.”
    “Hang on now, this is my fault?”
    I shook my head again. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just . . . I didn’t trust you before, when you first came for me in Rio.”
    “Yeah, I got that feeling.”
    “But then, after what you did at Kwai Chung . . . I saw that I’d been wrong. That’s hard for me.”
    “Guess I should’ve just shot you and taken the money for myself. At least that way you’d have been right not to trust me.”
    “Did you think about it?”
    He laughed. “Jesus, man, you almost sound hopeful.”
    “Did you?”
    He shook his head. “Not even for a minute.”

    “Goddamnit. I knew it.”
    “You want an apology?”
    I shook my head. “No.”
    “You don’t owe me anything. Like I said at the time, I know you’d have done the same for me. Wait, don’t respond to that, it’ll spoil my reverie.”
    The waiter came by and cleared away our plates. We ordered mango and sticky rice for dessert. I watched the man leave.
    There was something I wanted to ask Dox, something I’d been thinking about, on various levels, for a long time, and particularly after Manila. It wasn’t something I’d ever said out loud before, and I found myself reluctant to bring it up. Partly because doing so might make it feel more real; partly because it would probably all seem so silly to Dox. But I’d told him a lot already. I wanted to finish it.
    “I’ve got a question for you, too,” I said, looking at him.
    He pushed his chair away, leaned back, and laced his fingers together across his belly. “Sure.”
    “You ever . . . you ever bothered by what we do?”
    He smiled. “Only when I’m not paid promptly.”
    “I’m serious.”
    He shrugged. “Not usually, no.”
    “You don’t ever feel like . . .” I chuckled. “You know, like God is watching?”
    “Oh, sure he’s watching. He just doesn’t care.”
    “You think?”
    He shrugged again. “I figure he’s the one who made the rules. I’m just playing by ’em. If he doesn’t like the way things have turned out down here on planet Earth, he ought to speak his mind. I would if I were him.”
    “Maybe he is speaking his mind, and no one’s listening.”
    “He ought to speak a little more clearly, then.” He looked up and added, “If you don’t mind my saying so.”

    I studied my hands for a moment. “It bothered me, thinking about that boy losing his father.”
    “ ’Course it did. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t be the good man you are. That’s why it’s best not to get too close to the target. ‘If it inhabits your mind, it can inhibit your trigger finger,’ as one of my instructors once told me.”
    “Yeah, that’s the truth.”
    “The thing is, you can’t make the decisions and also carry them out, you know what I mean? The judge and the executioner, they’re different roles. The judge does what he does, and then the executioner