“Yeah. His profession. Anyway, he does the job. Clean, quick, no problems. Then he shows up at the man’s place of business to get paid. The man he did the job for. The man tells him he has to wait—a cash-flow problem. Peter says, ‘No, you pay me now.’ Man says, ‘No, you gotta wait.’ Peter says this makes him unhappy. Man laughs at him. So Peter shoots him. Bang. Just like that.”

Gurney shrugged. “Never a good idea to stiff a hitter.”

Angelidis’s mouth twitched into what might have been a split-second grin. “Never a good idea. True. But the story don’t end there. Peter goes to the man’s house and shoots his wife and two kids. Then he goes around town, shoots the man’s brother and five cousins, wives, kills the whole fucking family. Twenty-one people. Twenty-one shots to the head.”

“That’s quite a reaction.”

Angelidis’s mouth widened, showing a row of glistening capped teeth. Then he uttered an eruptive growling sound that Gurney thought was probably the most unnerving laugh he’d ever heard.

“Yeah. ‘Quite a reaction.’ You’re a funny guy, Gurney. ‘Quite a reaction.’ I got to remember that.”

“Seems like a chancy thing to do, though—from a business point of view.”

“What do you mean, ‘chancy’?”

“I would think, after that—after killing twenty-one people because of an overdue payment—potential customers might worry about dealing with him. They might want to deal with someone less … touchy.”

“ ‘Touchy’? I’m telling you, Gurney, you’re a fucking riot. ‘Touchy’—that’s good! But what you don’t understand is that Peter has a special advantage. Peter is unique.”

“How so?”

“Peter takes the impossible jobs. The ones other guys say can’t be done—too risky, the target is too protected, shit like that. That’s where Peter comes in. Likes to prove he’s better than anyone else. You see what I mean? Peter is a unique resource. Highly motivated. High determination. Nine times out of ten he gets the job done. But the thing is … there’s always the possibility of some collateral damage.”

“Can you give me an example?”

“Example? Like maybe the time he was hired to hit a target on one of them high-speed Greek island ferries, but he didn’t know what the guy looked like, only that he was going to be on the boat at a particular time. So what did he do? He blew the fucking thing out of the water, killed about a hundred people. But I’ll tell you something else. It ain’t just that he produces collateral damage—the word is he likes it. Fires. Explosions. Bigger the better.”

That started Gurney wondering about a lot of things. But he kept coming back to one central question: Exactly what was it that made Panikos seem like the right choice for the Spalter hit? What made that job seem impossible?