Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

And with a hefty 7.62 x 51mm NATO round, he’d more than likely gotten his attention.

Who had it been? he wondered. Not the coppers. Company, then? Someone else? Definitely someone in the business, by the looks of the hardware they had. Whoever they were, they were a little sloppy. Fireworks?

Then he thought about it. Maybe not so sloppy. He had, after all, almost gone to the window.

Plus the fireworks were pretty. It was almost elegant, in a way. Like a birthday party. Only the opposite. A little light show before they cut his cake once and for all, the bastards.

When he got back to his room, he put the gun away in its case and called Pavel, who had hired him. It kicked into voice mail. Had Pavel turned on him for some reason? He pondered the implications of that.

Should he leave now? he thought as he went into the bedroom.

No. If it were company or anybody else in the game, they’d want him out on the street at night to keep it discreet. He took an OJ out of the minifridge beside the bed and cracked it and took a long sip. He nodded to himself. To heck with it. He’d check out in the morning, like a regular human being.

“Well?” said his wife when he got back into the bed. “What was it?”

The Brit thought about who would want to kill him. Then he laughed. He’d be up all night.

“I don’t know,” he said as he snuggled in next to his wife. He kissed her above her camisole, right where he’d just shot whoever it was who thought he could pull a fast one on him.

“Aren’t we so tender all of a sudden? What was that for?”

“Love, darling,” he said as he pinched her bottom. “All we need is love, right?”

“And rockets,” she said after a moment, and they both began to crack up.

Chapter 40

“Now, finish up the rest and don’t screw it up,” Flicka said, stabbing one of his long fingers in Marvin’s face. “I know what a gram looks like in my dreams, so you think about skimming, you think again. I’ll go down and get the car. You be in the lobby waiting when I come around. Don’t make me text your ass.”

Marvin waited for Flicka to leave before he let out a tense breath and looked around at the spare room.

The table. The electronic scale. The massive mound of rank marijuana.

“What the hell are you doing?” he whispered to himself.

The apartment was in Flushing, Queens, near LaGuardia Airport, with planes screaming overhead every five minutes. Flicka had taken him here three hours before and set him to work, busting down a couple of pounds of weed.

This whole thing was all over his stupid cousin. He just had to get into weed dealing with Flicka. But he messed up, stealing money or losing product, and got shot dead by Flicka. And now Marvin had to do Flicka’s bidding to pay off his cousin’s debt, like some sort of slave, or else his poor uncle down in North Carolina was going to get it, too, from the other guys in Flicka’s crew.

Marvin had been trying to think of how to get out of the situation, but so far, he was coming up empty. What the hell could he do?

Maybe he could ask the family living here in the weed apartment for advice, he thought, shaking his head at the insanity of it all. The apartment belonged to some Asian people, apparently. A grandma, it looked like, and a three-year-old and a baby.

As he sat busting up the last of the weed, he watched as the grandma walked obliviously past the open bedroom door and headed into the hall bathroom.

Did Flicka have a deal with them or something? Marvin thought. Was the mama-san some sort of crook? He had no clue.

Marvin finished bagging the last gram and stuffed everything into the knapsack, along with the scale. When he came out into the hallway, he almost stepped on the three-year-old who was sitting there in a diaper, eating one of those long ices in a plastic sleeve. Which would have been way weirder than it already was had the apartment not been stiflingly hot. The ice was a blue one, and the stuff was stuck to the little guy’s face and neck and chest. He was just covered in it.

Marvin winced as he stepped over him and headed out the door.

“What you waiting for? I should get out and hold the door open for you?” Flicka said as Marvin hit the sidewalk. “Get in.”

Flicka was in his Escalade now. What he called his company car. The inside of it smelled more like weed than a lawn mower smells like cut grass. Marvin got in and put on his seat belt and looked around for cops.

About ten silent minutes of driving through the maze of Queens later, they pulled into the parking lot of a Stop & Shop supermarket and parked.

“Go out and get me one of them carts,” Flicka said with a jut of his chin.