It made me wonder if the wife had left him or if he left the wife, and then I decided it was probably the former. He had a kid, too – a young one not yet in school. I wondered if she found out about who he worked for and walked out. I wondered if I’d have to kill him.
Or her.
Maybe the kid.
Nah, probably not. Rinaldo was a businessman, and killing a kid rarely achieved anything that couldn’t be achieved just as well by killing the parent.
The elevator dinged, and I pressed the button for the seventeenth floor. My apartment was the perfect location as far as I was concerned – right on the corner of the building, up high enough for my rifle to be very effective from a distance, and just two stories above the adjoining building. If I needed to get out via the balcony, I could. I usually took the elevator up and the stairs down but not for any particular reason. I was used to doing little things like that to keep myself in shape, and it was just a habit.
My eyes traveled over the door to my apartment, automatically looking for any signs of forced entry. There were none, but you couldn’t be too careful. I slipped the key in the lock and opened the door.
“Hey, bud.”
Odin jogged his way across the living room to greet me, and I rubbed his shaggy head. It was good to see his hair growing back in again – he looked better with it longer. Well, he at least looked more like a giant mop, a.k.a. a Great Pyrenees. When we had been out in the Arizona desert all that time, I had to keep it closely clipped to keep him cooled down. His buzz cut had been nearly as short as mine.
Maybe dogs did end up looking like their owners. Or was it the other way around?
Whatever it was, if dogs were man’s best friend, Odin did his best to live up to the job. He had been with me for years and was about the only living thing around me I felt like I could actually count on. He would always be there when I got home from whatever I was doing. He never judged, never asked me a bunch of questions about why I was the way I was, and he never looked at me with fear.
He was my buddy, and it was one of the few things that scared me. I kept quiet about him because making it known I had something to care about – even a dog – was enough to bring those who had something against me out of the woodwork and into my private life. I didn’t need that shit, and I couldn’t always be around to protect Odin. As big and ferocious as he could look to some people, he was an easy target to others.
I started up my netbook computer before heading to the kitchen for some orange juice. It was the good stuff – fresh squeezed. I had been splurging on little things like that since returning to Chicago from the cabin in Arizona. The little things were so much more important than people realized when they had to go without.
Not that I had taken any of the small creature comforts for granted beforehand, either. It had been like that in the Iraqi desert, too, even at our base. Ration everything was the rule. It sucked, but it beat being left for dead in a hole.
Odin rubbed up against my leg, and I realized I had been lost in thought for a moment. I patted him in thanks and wondered for the hundredth time how he knew to do that. Like those service dogs that would get epileptics to lie down on the floor before a seizure starts to keep them from hurting themselves, Odin always seemed to know when I was thinking too much about the past.
He worked better than the drugs the doctors had prescribed.
I finished the OJ, took Odin out for a quick walk, and checked my email.
More lotto winnings.
Amazon would like me to review my purchase of a new set of headphones. I hadn’t actually tried them out yet, but I’d be hanging out with Jonathan tomorrow and would probably need them. The dude smoked a lot of weed and usually started babbling when he was stoned.
A dating site called Lost Connections wanted to hook me up with an available woman in my area. I licked my lips and thought I was going to need a little company for the weekend but not from a fucking dating site.
Lost Connections.
Before I could stop it, expressive and soft brown eyes in the center of a heart-shaped face invaded my thoughts. Long, dark hair and a fucking luscious ass came next, but I pushed the rest of the memory away before it could really take hold and turned back to my email.
Pizza Hut had free cinnamon sticks with any large pizza.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” I muttered to myself. I clicked on the pizza link and quickly ordered a large stuffed crust with mushrooms and pineapple to be delivered.
Hey – it’s what I like.
Fucking sue me.
When the pizza showed up, I sat on the floor of the living room with my back against the couch and dug in, tossing bits of crust to Odin as I ate. It was a good thing I had gone to the gym today because I had eaten a shitload of pizza since returning to the city.
More thoughts about the simple things spun around in my head. Pizza, beer, coffee – even a gym where I could work out properly. For some reason, my pleasure at the thought of the mundane alarmed me. My tongue moistened my lips, and I grabbed the remote to find something to watch on the television.
I was definitely thinking too much. I had to stop.
Television wasn’t a necessity; it was a luxury and a way to pass the time. I never really liked television much as a kid but found it was good for helping me relax now.
This History Channel was always good for a few z’s, and it was playing something about dinosaurs. I tossed the half empty pizza box up onto the coffee table and lay down on the couch. The throw pillows picked out by Luisa were soft and comfortable, and I wondered how Rinaldo’s youngest daughter was doing. I hadn’t seen her in a while.