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

protest about having his back put toward the approach to the table. Again, Dox was struck by the man’s confidence. Whoever this guy was, he must have been exceptionally connected to carry himself like no one would ever dare make a run at him.
    “Enjoying Phnom Penh?” Gant asked, pleasantly enough.
    Dox couldn’t place his accent. American, and not from anywhere in Texas, where Dox had grown up, and nowhere else in the south, either. But beyond that, it could have been from anywhere, much like Gant himself.
    “Sure, I like it fine. How about you?”
    Gant waved an insect away. “I get tired of these third-world pissholes. I keep waiting for a problem to crop up in London, or the Côte d’Azur. Someplace where the tap water won’t kill you and they know how to make a proper martini.”
    Not that a proper martini wasn’t important, but Dox thought the guy sounded like a dipshit. “Well, you’ve got your priorities,” he said, wanting to stay noncommittal.
    Gant raised his eyebrows. “What about you?”
    “How do you mean?”
    “Your priorities.”
    “Oh, I don’t know. Paid and laid, and I’m usually pretty happy.”
    Gant smiled. “A simple man.”
    Dox smiled back. “That’s what people say.” He could have added,
That’s what I like them to think.
    “In Phnom Penh, I doubt you’ll need my help getting laid. As for getting paid, you’ve received the deposit?”
    Dox nodded. “Twenty percent, plus travel expenses.”
    “Good. Now let’s talk about getting you the balance. What do you need from me?”
    “Well, unless you’re carrying a thumb drive or something, I assume you’ve uploaded the file to the secure site?”
    “I don’t think you’ll need a file.”
    “How am I going to find the subject?”
    “I can tell you exactly where he’ll be, and when he’ll be there.”
    “How am I going to recognize him?”
    “It shouldn’t be hard. He’ll be sitting next to me.”
    Dox looked at Gant, wondering if he was serious. “You want to be sitting right next to this guy when it goes down?”
    “It seems the surest and most uncomplicated way of doing things, don’t you think?”
    Dox considered suggesting,
I think you don’t know a damn thing about what it’s like to be talking to a guy one moment and having his brains all over you the next.
    Instead, he said, “Well, who is the guy?”
    Gant frowned. “Is that… something you ordinarily need to know?”
    Dox didn’t answer right away. The truth was, ordinarily he didn’t need to know much: a name; known locations, acquaintances, and habits; a photograph. The people who hired him didn’t want him to know more than necessary, and that suited him, too. Learning too much could make the target become too human. The more human the target became, the harder the job got. “If it inhabits your mind, it will inhibit your trigger finger,” an instructor had once told him, and he’d found the admonition to be true.
    Still, he’d never been brought onto a job and been told flat-out nothing. It was disconcerting, and he realized that until now he’d always been relying on some minimum amount of information about the target to feel comfortable taking the job. Maybe it was a rationalization, but the people he killed, one way or another, they were all in the game. If you wanted to be in the game, you had to accept the risks. An ordinary bare-bones target file was always enough to confirm, however incidentally, that the target fit the “in the game, knew the risks” profile. But killing some guy he didn’t know the first thing about… that just didn’t feel right.
    “Mister Gant—”
    “Call me Mike if you like.”
    “Whatever. The point is, I don’t even know you. I’ve got a buddy who vouched for you, and okay, that’s worth a lot, but I don’t know what outfit you’re with and I don’t know shit about what you’re mixed up in. For all I know, the guy you’re having a problem with is the damn prime minister of Cambodia.”
    “What if he were?”
    Dox smiled. “Well, then I priced the job too low and we’d need to fix that.”
    There was a long silence. If Gant thought the silence was working on Dox, making him want to talk more, he was wrong. Silence and patience were some of Dox’s best friends.
    Finally, Gant said, “How much do you know about this country?”
    “I know the tap water can kill you and they can’t make a proper martini.”
    Gant laughed. “All right, let me fill you in. Our man is named