The Hardest Thing

minute—but they were getting precious now. If Kenny had a fit of post-swallowing remorse, he could have run back to town, raised the alarm— there’s queers in them thar hills!— and the posse could be lumbering up the mountain tracks with cops and guns and dogs.
    “No.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I’m no good. I’m a piece of shit.” Tears were running down his face, snot bubbling out of his nose.
    “Why?”
    “I’ve lied to you.”
    A cold little voice in my head said I told you so. “I know. About the hit man…”
    “Not just that. About the deal I did with Marshall.” He blew his nose, wiped his eyes. “After Trey Peters died, I didn’t hear from Marshall for a while—that was true. But it was him who called me into the office, and told me I had to get out of town to avoid a subpoena.”

    I whistled. “Who from?”
    “The State’s Attorney.”
    “That explains why we were sent up here, then. Out of state.”
    “Yeah. And I said I’d do it at a price.”
    “You tried to bargain with him, after what he’d done to Peters?”
    “I knew he was scared. I knew too much. I wasn’t just some dumb kid.”
    “And what did you ask for?”
    “Money and security. If I agreed to go out of town with a bodyguard to make sure that nobody could get to me—and to make sure that I didn’t sneak off and call the State’s Attorney—Marshall would set me up with a house and an income for life. He showed me the deed of the place he was going to give me. Upper West Side. Ferrari gave me the cover story to tell you, and he said that if you started asking too many questions I was to…distract you.”
    “By letting me fuck you?”
    “Yeah.”
    They’d done their homework, then. They knew all about me: my service record, and the reason why it ended. They chose their man well. “So you were supposed to stay out of the way, keeping me happy, until you went back to New York City to claim your prize. Is that it?”
    “Yeah.”
    “And you believed him?”
    “I thought I’d been clever.”
    “And now?”
    “I’m not so sure.”

    “You can say that again.”
    “Things didn’t work out the way I expected, did they? Someone tried to kill me. But before that…I’d already started to… You and me… Shit. It’s too late for that now, isn’t it?” [spr]
    I wanted to put my arms around him, to say it’s not too late, we still have a chance, we can make it…
    All the movie lines. But the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. Everything he’d told me so far was a lie; how much more would the story change? Stirling McMahon, Jody Miller—how many skins to this onion? Could I ever trust him, the way I’d trusted Will—with my life? Because that was the game we were in now—life or death. Deep in enemy territory, with hostile agents on our tail.
    “Clean yourself up,” I said, and my voice sounded gruff. “We’ve got to move on.”
    He washed and dressed himself like a man in a daze while I packed up our few belongings.

The Restroom 7
    The time for talk was over. We headed down the mountain as quickly as we could, carrying water and a few provisions, not enough to slow us down. I chose the western slope, the setting sun flashing between the treetops—that way we might slip away before the good burghers of Lincoln returned from their fruitless lynching mission, and we could pick up some kind of transport that would get us out of New Hampshire by nightfall. There was no point in heading for the Canadian border. If the local cops were in Marshall’s pocket, we didn’t have a chance; they’d be looking for us, even on the quiet, unpatrolled roads. Better to lose ourselves in the west and put as many miles between us and Lincoln as we could.
    Paranoid? Maybe. Fits the profile, right? Gay ex-marine, lived his whole life in the closet, went around the world killing people to order, got busted, grudge against the world, screw loose. I’d prefer to say I was being cautious. Julian Marshall had already arranged one death and made it look like an accident—and
perhaps Trey Peters was just one of many business associates who had stood in his way. If the State’s Attorney was investigating Marshall, he’d stop at nothing to silence Jody. And now I knew as much as Jody did; I was an equal threat. Perhaps there were other witnesses taking similar road trips to ours. How many would die before Marshall was stopped?
    The first attempt on our lives, so carefully set up with those convenient