The Khmer Kill: A Dox Short Story (Kindle Single)

the second thing?”
    “The second thing is, even if you were someone special? I still wouldn’t care.”
    He eased the trigger gently back. The SR-25 recoiled smooth and hard into his shoulder. He heard the soft crack. Almost simultaneously, a small hole blossomed in Gant’s forehead. He jerked, dropped his phone, and slid to the ground. On his face was an expression of utter surprise.
    Dox headed back toward the bike, sighting down the barrel through the night vision as he moved. This time he approached from the opposite direction. The changeup was just a precaution—he didn’t expect any more opposition after the three he’d dropped. So he was surprised to see another Khmer, this one barely a teenager from the look of him, squatting in the dark at the side of the dirt road. In one hand he held a cell phone, in the other, a knife.
    Dox’s finger started to ease back on the trigger. But good lord, he was just a kid. A kid.
    He circled silently behind the boy, walking toe-heel, the soles of his sneakers soundless in the dirt. When he was directly behind him, he raised a leg and kicked him hard in the back of the head. The boy sprawled facedown, the knife and the phone hitting the deck alongside him. Dox kicked them out of the way. The boy cried out and tried to rise. Dox planted a foot between his shoulder blades and drove him back into the dirt.
    He scanned through the night vision and detected no problems. He looked down at the boy. “What the fuck are you doing out here, son?”
    The boy moaned and coughed, then spat out something in Khmer. It didn’t sound like
Pleased to meet you
.
    “I don’t speak Khmer. You know any English?”
    “You fuck your mommy!”
    Dox snorted. “Well, I don’t know if that’s a maximally useful phrase to travel the world with. You might do better with, ‘I’ll have a beer, please,’ or ‘Pardon me, I’m looking for the restroom.’ Now I asked you what you’re doing here.”
    “I watch for big American. He come, I call.”
    So a lookout on the more obvious approach to the bike. Either they couldn’t find anyone older, or they recruited this kid as cut-rate labor. “What’d they pay you?”
    “Five dollar.”
    “How much if you kill me?”
    “Twenty dollar.”
    “Well, it looks like you’re shit out of luck either way. But tell you what. If I pay you twenty, will you just vamoose? Leave, I mean.”
    The boy turned his head as though trying to see Dox’s face, to gauge whether the offer was serious. “You give me twenty dollar?”
    Dox reached into his pocket and took out a pair of twenties. “I’ll give you forty. Here.” He leaned closer and dropped the bills on the kid’s hand. The kid gripped them and squinted. Dox wasn’t sure if he could see them in the dark.
    “It’s forty. And you’re lucky I didn’t kill you. Get yourself a better job. Those guys who hired you were underpaying you and they would have sold you out in a heartbeat regardless. Christ, where are your parents anyway?”
    The kid glanced back at him again. “No parents.”
    Dox wondered whether he was being played. Still, he took out three more twenties and handed them over.
    “Now I’m going to step back, and you’re going to get up and run along the river. Forget about the toys you dropped. Just run away. Don’t make me regret letting you go.”
    He stepped back. The kid hesitated, then stood up and took off like a rocket. It was only then Dox realized how scared he must have been.
    Dox made double time back to the bike. Other than the three cooling Khmers, there was no one around. He drove a half mile, then stopped and broke down the rifle, wiping each piece with a rag and slinging it into the river. He purged the phone, pulled the battery, and sent all that in, too. Last was the duffle bag. Then he drove back to the city center. Along the way, he purged, broke down, and tossed his personal mobile phone, too. He wasn’t a hundred percent sure they’d followed him via a tracking device in the rifle, so no sense taking chances.
    There were no more flights that night, but he’d catch something to somewhere in the morning. Best not to linger after a job. Especially one that had turned out like this. He’d meant it when he told Gant he didn’t think anyone would bother to retaliate on Gant’s behalf, but he didn’t see any upside to testing the theory, either. Besides, there was always the law to be careful about, too.
    He thought about immediately checking into a