The Perdition Score (Sandman Slim 8)

“Then why were you there? I thought your looking-for-trouble days were behind you.”

“That’s the problem. They are most of the time. I want them to be, but sometimes . . . it feels like if I don’t hit something my brain will go nuclear and run out my ears.”

Carlos gives the bar a quick wipe-down and pours himself a drink.

“I know your problem. Seen it a thousand times before. Before I bought this place, when I was a little niño, I barbacked at a cop bar over by Rampart. The ones still working, most of them had their heads wired on right enough, but the old-timers? The retired ones or the bad ones that were exiled to desk duty? They could chew their way through steel. You killers, you men of action, take you out of the game and you’re always a month from eating your gun.”

I swirl the Aqua Regia around in the glass.

“Thanks for your concern. It’s touching. Really.”

“Don’t be so sensitive,” says Carlos. “Those guys, they didn’t have your advantages.”

“Such as?”

“The things you can do. The places you can go.”

I finish my drink.

“That’s the problem. I can’t go places anymore. I can still do everything I used to, but I don’t have anywhere to do it.”

“And you being you, you go looking for trouble and you’re going to find it.”

“Finding it’s not the problem. Not looking like I found it is. Chihiro would hate it, and my boss, he wouldn’t be too happy either.”

Carlos opens the cooler under the bar, puts some ice in a clean rag, and hands it to me. I hold it to my bruised eye.

“Then it’s just me that’s amused watching you twist yourself in knots,” he says.

“I don’t like lying to people, but I’m not built to be, I don’t know, a regular person. I was born to break things. Even my father said so.”

“A natural-born killer.”

“That’s what the old man said.”

Carlos pours me more Aqua Regia.

“Your problem is you’re all Koyaanisqatsi. You remember that movie?”

I nod. “A hippie music video ninety minutes too long.”

“The whole thing is only ninety minutes.”

“Yep.”

Carlos uses a finger to draw a shape on the bar in the moisture left from the rag. A little yin yang sign.

“Aside from its virtues as a film, the word Koyaanisqatsi means ‘life out of balance.’ That’s you, my friend. You go from crazy hit man to a pencil pusher on some board of directors or something with no steps in between. Of course it’s going to make you a little crazy.”

“And I’ve lost the Room. It’s not just that I could travel through it. I used to think that was it, but it’s not. The Room was always my place. Somewhere I could hide from this world, Heaven, and Hell. No one could touch me there. It’s the only place I ever felt . . .”

“Safe,” says Carlos.

I look at him.

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you know. You lost your happy place and now you’ve given up the thing that kept you alive all these years. Your fists. That’s not the recipe for a happy life.”