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Back Dead of Winter Save as PDF
Chapters (42)
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“Trust me,” I said. “You don’t want to know.” Then I said, “It would pay for you to remember that if you’re fucking with me on this or anything else, I will come after you with a vengeance that will make God weep and the devil blush. And neither you with your billions nor men with guns nor nations with bombs will be able to stop me.”

“And—this?” he said, nodding to his unconscious lover.

“Sweet dreams, Vic.” I gave his hair a playful tousle. “Jesus,” I said wiping my hair-product-slicked hand on my tactical vest. “Lay off the Brylcreem.”

Walking past three unconscious, unarmed security personnel and two in a futile, half-conscious struggle against gags and zip ties, I thought about a man I’d met several years back. Less a man than a malevolent being who found perverse reason to consider me a kindred spirit.

An assassin.

I knew him as the Cleaner.

19

19

I had a little banking trouble a while back.

Not the kind that’s easily resolved by a twenty-five-year-old assistant bank manager still wearing a fresh MBA diaper from the University of Michigan.

No, this was the kind of banking trouble that involved a dead businesswoman, highly trained killers, briefcases full of dirty offshore money, a rogue CIA agent, the FBI and a phalanx of Detroit cops ready to douse my testicles with lighter fluid and strike a match. Trouble I hadn’t asked for and could have easily lived without.

And there was a very erudite professional killer.

More correctly, there was the silhouette of a very erudite assassin who, for whatever unnerving reason, took a liking to me before slithering back into the borderless ether of night.

At the end of it all, I was interviewed for several long, tedious hours by the FBI, then released.

That early morning when I arrived back at my rental Cadillac, ready to go home and sleep for a good five hours (an eternity for me considering the Afghanistan dreams that occasionally invade my mind), there was a business card tucked beneath one of the car’s windshield wiper blades: a card for a pastry shop in the old town of Geneva, Switzerland—La Corsican—with two phone numbers and a tagline: You deserve a sweet today!

For several years, I had kept the card in its own security lockbox in a drywall cutout at the back of my guest bedroom closet. I don’t know why I kept it. Maybe on my darkest days and cold-sweat nights, I did somehow feel a kinship with this assassin. Maybe I thought he could help me reconcile myself with the dark mirror reflection.

I had a pretty good idea how Pandora must have felt as I thought about opening the box at the back of the closet for the sake of Vic Bronson’s daughter.