The only good Lawyer

no sense, none whatsoever. How the fuck do you get a leak in your gas tank from a flat tire? Even if whatever it was caused the puncture kicked up from the road, how could it be going fast enough to penetrate—
    The sound of brush parting and crunching footsteps across the road made Woodrow stand up abruptly, the knee now screaming at him for it. His eyes must be going, too, because he surely couldn’t understand what they were telling him.
    A human figure, dressed in a bulky parka, was clumping toward Woodrow and his fine machine. Both hands were in the pockets of the coat, the hood up and tugged low enough that it shielded the face. But there was something familiar too. About the walk or... something.
    “Car trouble?” said the figure, still approaching.
    The voice placed the walk for Woodrow, but that didn’t help him understand things any better. “What are you doing out here?”
    For an answer, the figure stopped about ten feet away, a hand sliding from one of the pockets. The hand had a shiny leather glove on it, but in his car’s flank lights, Woodrow caught a different kind of reflection.
    The glint of blued metal.
    “Hey, man?”
    “You betrayed me, Woodrow.”
    “Wait, wait. We can—”
    The first shot struck just above the belt, ratcheting Woodrow’s rear end up in the air as it brought his shoulders folding downward. Both of Woodrow’s hands clasped his stomach, the blood already running freely between the fingers and onto his pants.
    Hunched, he looked up at the figure, some pain beginning to filter through the shock of the impact. “No, please—”
    The second bullet hit Woodrow high on the left shoulder, turning him, almost spinning him, away from the hooded figure. Woodrow tried to make his legs work—like from the football drills back in high school? Drive and lift and stride, but between the bad knee and the wounds, all he could manage was a lurching shuffle toward the grass at the right-hand side of the road.
    The third bullet punched Woodrow squarely in the back, shattering a vertebra and ripping through his heart. He dropped like a rag doll, face first and turned toward the BMW, the upper half of his body in the grass, the lower half still on the pavement.
    A last thought crossed his brain. “My fancy car... What’s gonna happen to...?”

    The hooded figure moved quickly to the fallen man, squatting down to watch the light of life fade from the eyes. Having Woodrow Wilson Gant die here was consistent with the plan, but being close enough to see that glazing effect in the pupils was also more... satisfying as well.
    Standing again, the hooded figure breathed three times. Deeply and slowly, in through the nose and out through the mouth, to regain complete control of all body parts after the adrenaline rush of taking another’s life.
    And, with luck, not even the last for this night, either.
    The figure moved very steadily to the passenger side of the BMW. It was important that the woman not have heard the brief exchange with Gant, not be able to remember a voice or even a speech pattern.
    If she did, the plan would have to be changed, and she would have to be killed, too.
    But no, no worry of that. The woman was dead drunk, as she’d appeared when the vehicle’s courtesy lights had come on a few minutes before, as she’d appeared those other times when—
    The woman began to stir, though her eyes remained closed. The hooded figure hesitated only a moment, then decided to follow through on the original plan, just without using the car door.
    After redundantly wiping the outside of the revolver against the parka’s material, the figure slipped the weapon through the partially open side window, allowing the gun to drop so that it landed in the woman’s lap.
    At which point the hooded figure ducked down below window level and scuttled, crablike, to the rear of the BMW. Moving diagonally away from the woman in the passenger’s seat, the figure recrossed the road and began climbing back up the hillside.
    To retrieve the rifle used to shoot out the tire and return to the car hidden over the ridge.

    Somewhere in the dream, the cute male flight attendant stumbled, dropping an anchor right into her lap.
    An anchor. Just what she needed, after all the bumps and banging noises on this airplane already. Her first real vacation in years, all by herself to the Caribbean without any cares, any responsibilities. But despite paying for a first-class ticket, the flight was bumpy and the