“Sure. I know.”

“Now, come on, nobody really cared that those students died, right? But to me it was stupid shooting them. Because what purpose did it serve? None. If you wanted to stop the movement, or whatever it was, you should’ve targeted the leaders and taken them out. It would’ve been so easy. Infiltrate, evaluate, delegate, isolate, eliminate.”

“That’s how you kill people?”

“You infiltrate the area. Evaluate the difficulty of the kill and the defenses. You delegate the job of diverting everyone’s attention from the victim—make it look like you’re coming at them from one way but it turns out that it’s just a delivery boy or shoe-shine boy or something, and meanwhile you’ve come up behind the victim. Then you isolate him, and eliminate him.”

Jodie sipped his orange juice. There were dozens of empty orange juice cans piled in the corner. It seemed to be all he lived on. “You know,” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, “you think professional killers’d be crazy. But you don’t seem crazy.”

“I don’t think I’m crazy,” Stephen said matter-of-factly.

“The people you kill, are they bad? Like crooks and Mafia people and things?”

“Well, they’ve done something bad to people who pay me to kill them.”

“Which means they’re bad?”

“Sure.”

Jodie laughed dopily, eyelids half closed. “Well, some people’d say that’s not exacly how you, you know, figure out what’s good or bad.”

“Okay, what is good and bad?” Stephen responded. “I don’t do anything different than God does. Good people die and bad people die in a train wreck and nobody gets on God’s case because of it. Some professional killers call their victims ‘targets’ or ‘subjects.’ One guy I heard about calls them ‘corpses.’ Even before he kills them. Like, ‘The corpse is leaving his car. I’m targeting him.’ It’s easier for him to think of the victims that way, I guess. Me, I don’t care. I call ’em what they are. Who I’m after now are the Wife and the Friend. I already killed the Husband. That’s how I think of them. They’re people I kill, is all. No big deal.”

Jodie considered what he’d heard and said, “You know something? I don’t think you’re evil. You know why?”

“Why’s that?”

“Because evil is something that looks innocent but turns out to be bad. The thing about you is you’re exactly what you are. I think that’s good.”

Stephen flicked his scrubbed fingernails with a click. He felt himself blushing again. Finally, he asked, “I scare you, don’t I?”

“No,” Jodie said. “I wouldn’t want to have you against me. No sir, I wouldn’t want that. But I feel like we’re friends. I don’t think you’d hurt me.”

“No,” Stephen said. “We’re partners.”

“You talked about your stepfather. He still alive?”

“No, he died.”

“I’m sorry. When you mentioned him I was thinking about my father—he’s dead too. He said the thing he respected most in the world was craftsmanship. He liked watching a talented man do what he did best. That’s kind of like you.”