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Eli watched the journalist check up and down the street, peer under her car's fender for a nerve-wracking moment, sigh, and drop into the driver's seat. She'd pissed off cops, cartel members, organized crime, and several multinational corporations, fought for righteousness and innocence like a martyr. People like her were Eli's bread and butter. All he had to do was push a button and boom.
She pulled away from the curb. His finger rested on the button. She paused at the light. His finger trembled on the button. She rounded the corner and disappeared, and Eli hadn't pushed the button on the remote to trigger the car bomb; he'd tried as hard as he could, but he couldn't do it.
He squeezed his opposite wrist with his trigger-hand just to make sure it wasn't something neurological.
This was bad. He'd taken an advance for this hit. He could follow her, try again tomorrow, but who could say that today's freeze wouldn't happen again; he'd have to pay the money back and figure out what was wrong with him. Why couldn't he kill an innocent person without provocation?
It won't be the end of the world, he told himself as he stalked out of the cafe. Contractors get to pick their own jobs, and contract killing was the same. He could just pick someone who deserved it for the next job. But killing crooks didn't pay as well as innocent people. He'd already spent half his advance. And the blow to his reputation—killing wasn't hard, Eli's value was in his combination of unscrupulousness and reasonable long-term planning skills. Add scruples, and he's just another ex-con with an expensive habit.
Fuck.
He staggered back against a hot cinderblock wall and raised the remote. It worked off the cell phone towers; as long as the car stayed in the city, it'd be in range. He hovered his finger over the button and concentrated his entire will on pushing it down. Millimeters from the plastic surface, his hands froze. He couldn't do it. He couldn't.
He couldn't control himself. What would he fail to do next? Could he even take a job, not knowing for sure if he had the guts to follow through with it? Not for big money, and not for anyone who was serious about protecting their reputation; for high-dollar jobs, learning the target meant a death sentence if he failed to terminate them. He'd have to retire, full-stop. He dealt a bit on the side, but if word got out he got palsy in his trigger finger, he'd be finished. He didn't have the connections to work the social circles where dealers got too spooked to cap each-other, and if he couldn't bring in five grand a month minimum he'd have to default on the mortgage, sell the cars. Get sober.
Time and space lurched around him. He only had one clean alias, and it was pretty thin. Eli had never had the patience or discipline for a regular job. Maybe he could work at a used-car lot? A lube shop? He'd never had the head for numbers Yegor wanted in the guys he put in charge of his rackets; killing was the only thing he'd ever been really good at. He'd lose the house, and he'd have to move in with—
—Another lurch, and here he was, sweating and hunched, head pounding, penniless and humiliated as he raised his hand to knock on Beto's apartment door in Hillrock Heights, praying that Beto was home and he wouldn't have to abase himself to—but no, it wasn't Beto, it was his tiny woman with her dimpled chin and fake smile that faded when she looked up at his face, lurching back awkwardly with her gravid belly weighing her down, and Eli could no more kill her than he could kill the journalist who'd started this whole tragedy. He was ruined, doomed to live out his life in mediocrity while Beto made eyes at Juliana over the table, sleep on their floor, thank her for sharing her Bronx-inflected culinary abberations, and he would give anything, anything, for a different future, please let this not be real!
“Mom!” Robbie yelled, bolting upright in bed and clawing back the remnants of the dream as they faded. No! Stop that! Let it die! Robbie held his breath, concentrated.
Mom had been short, young, with stress lines starting in the creases of her light brown eyes. She'd worn her hair up, not in the ponytail she'd worn in the only photo Robbie had of her, but in some kind of clip. She had Gabe's—Gabe had her smile, and her nose, and her ears. She'd been right there, real and alive when he'd wrenched free from Eli's life and fetched up on his parents' doorstep, Mom, it's me, it's really me. I got away—
What the fuck is wrong with you? Eli snarled. That was appalling. Everything that makes me me, twisted and perverted for your sick agenda. Stay out of my head!
The memory rippled and blurred under the waves of Eli's anger. Robbie lay back down, massaging his eye-sockets as the distant rush of traffic filtered through the walls. Just a dream, he replied, instead of the dozen far more biting remarks that fought to rise up from his subconscious. Doesn't mean anything.