The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

completely.”
    “But you can.”
    “No. You lied to me.”
    “I didn’t lie! You never asked!”
    “You lied to him and you will lie to me. I’ll never be able to trust you.”
    “Jesus, Tod. Why don’t you just shoot me and then you’ll have trust!”
    Silence. She steps on the gas, I step on the gun. The one inside my shoe. We both look ahead. Through the foggy rain you can make out the red-lighted butt of a white Nissan Pathfinder driving ahead of us. The wipers work the windshield, going from my side to her side, from her side to my side.
    “I’m pregnant.”
    Obviously, that’s her talking. And I can only repeat after her, like the first imbecile member of mankind did, when he found out his wife was knocked up.
    “Pregnant?”
    “Yes.”
    “Wow. When did you find out?”
    “This morning.”
    “And…?”
    “And…?”
    “Is it mine?”
    “YES, OF COURSE IT’S YOURS! WHAT DO YOU THINK I AM! IT’S FUCKING YOURS! I’M HAVING YOUR FUCKING BABY!!!”
    She starts crying. Tears outside, tears inside. Difficult driving conditions. She pulls over at the next gas station. I try to tell her how sorry I am. How wonderful it is that she’s having my child. MY CHILD! It must be the best news I’ve heard since Suker sacked the Germans in France ’98. I offer her my arms, and she unfastens her seatbelt before falling into my lap. She cries for a while. I guess half of it comes from the fact that she’s pregnant. Munita once told me pregnant women cry a lot. It’s something about water building up in the womb and adding to the water supply, causing overflow at times. I stare out the windshield. The brand new gas station also houses a fast food joint. I watch a young father pass under the bright red Kentucky Fried sign, holding the hand of his small son. She cries a bit longer. My crotch is getting wet. It’s precipitation returning to the source. Cycle of life.
    Our emotional outbursts put steam on the windows, turning the car into some kind of a cocoon. She then finally rises with a tear-torn face. I repeat my sorries.
    “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you upset. I’m very happy about it.”
    “You are?”
    “Yes. Of course. I’m thrilled.”
    “So you think you can like, trust me?”
    “Can you trust me?”
    I feel the gun’s texture with my foot.
    “Yes.”
    “But you know who I am, Gunnhildur. You know what I’ve done. I don’t get it. How can you trust me? How can you start a family with someone like me?”
    “I love you.”
    “Me…me, too.”
    It might not be grammatically perfect, but she gets the meaning and we kiss. I’ve come a pretty long way. I’ve come all the way from pulling a gun out of a guy’s rectum in a forty-fifth-floor hotel room in midtown Manhattan, to embracing a butter-blonde girl in a Red Cross–red Škoda at some shitty suburban gas station in Iceland and telling her I love her. And I’m not lying. I guess.
    Feels fucking good.
    To put things in the most absolute perspective, the radio DJ decides that this is the perfect moment to play Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” Quite incredible really. Back in NYC it used to be “my song” of course. The boys would tease me with it. I kind of liked it, actually, and even ended up buying the bloody CD and used to play it, loud, on my way to a gun-job. It made me powerful, got me into the mood for a good killing. Hearing it now can only appeal to the old self that the new one has swallowed up, the former small as a bullet, the latter big as love.
    I’m detoxed.
    Gunnhildur doesn’t notice the song, and after a prolonged moment of hardcore happiness, we drive on. The two-lane highway takes us through a tunnel, down a slope and up another, then under a flyover. Fancy SUVs speed past us, stirring up “dust” made of water. She makes the turn into Garðabær, the sleepy town where her parents live. Then, out of the blue, she says:
    “So you want to live in Iceland, then?”
    “Yeah. But only while you’re alive. As soon as you’re dead, I’m off.”
    “So you’ll probably kill me?”
    “Not if you marry me.”
    “Is that a proposal?”
    “No, it’s a threat.”
    She looks at me with a grin I could kill for. Sorry, no. With a grin I could let myself be killed for.
    We’re two happy hamsters expecting the third as we pull up in front of her parents’ house. I give her a quick and serious look, asking:
    “Should we also tell them about the baby?”
    Her face is almost back to normal, though her