Like riding a bike, right?

  “Car just dropped two off in the alley,” EP said on the line. “Now it’s ing around the block.”

  Michael stood up and faced the back door.

  “You two go y down ihtub.”

  Celeste got up and grabbed Cooper, but he shook her off.

  “Fuck that. Give me a gun.”

  Michael gred at him, aared back like Michael had sprouted wings. There was real murder in that stare. He couldn’t believe it was the same guy who had handed him drinks a few moments ago. He was so stunned he let Celeste walk him into the bathroom without saying a word. She moved quiet as a cat and breathed like a corpse. Her stealth was iious, aried to make all his movements hushed as he y down over her iub. She reached down her bad drew her pistol.

  Out in the living room, Michael was still as death.

  EP watched the two gunmen e down the back alley as the car screeched to a halt on the wn out front. Smoothly, calmly, as if grooving to piped-in music while waiting to be seated, Michael took his pho and flipped on the house’s camera feeds, then drew his pistol.

  Despite all their jobs together, it was the first time EP had ever seen him draw his sidearm. Even through the fuzzy camera feed, it was beautiful. A big, polished, ed handgun that said, “MEGASTAR 10” on the slide. It fit him like a glove. Her on ID algos filed it away.

  He g his phone and aimed the gun one-hahrough the kit. The two alley shooters were setting up around the back door. Twunmen had jumped out of the car on the front wn and were moving to the front door with ons raised. She stopped herself from saying anything, afraid to disturb what seemed to be in perfect bance, like silently watg a wild animal prepare to pounce.

  It all happened so fast that she didn’t even take another breath until it was over.

  A fshbang crashed through the kit window and fizzled on the floor with an anticlimactic ‘pshuh’. A dud. In the same instant, Michael’s gued with fire and ear-shattering noise, and dryuffed off the wall to the right of the door. Outside, one of the gunmen fell back as his head spttered open all over the grass. The sed shooter didn’t even have time to pull the trigger. Another scream of fire, another headshot through the wall. The two shell gs fell within the same heartbeat.

  The men at the front door heard the gunfire and rushed in, hoping to overwhelm the shooter, surely eo the rear, with some good old-fashioned violence of a, but Michael had about-faced before the first two were done dying in the backyard.

  He dropped his phone, grabbed his pistol with both hands, and stepped to the left just as point-man kicked in the door and put one foot over the threshold, his AR sweeping the right side of the room.

  Before his phone had even hit the ground, Michael put a single round through the door, still swinging towards him, and spttered point man’s brains on the curtains of the window to the right of the door. As it finished swinging inward to the left, Michael stepped to the right, dug low into the dead man’s line of fire, somehow cealing his massive frame as the other shooter came in like clockwork, sweeping his rifle across the left side of the room.

  Michael shot over the dead man’s shoulder and got shooter wo in the side of the head before he even realized his partner was falling.

  As the shell g tumbled in the air, Michael shifted his weight bato his left foot, glided in front of the door frame, and fired through the wide-open front door, putting a final bullet through the passenger window of the car outside and out the top of the driver’s head. There was a brief shout of guhe only shots the five-man team ever got off, as the driver squeezed the trigger on his drum-magged AK as he died and put a burst through the car door and into the wn.

  Then the bodies settled, and everything was still again.

  Michael stood there in the quiet, looking up and dowreet. A bird chirped and a dog barked and the sounds zipped like arrows through the cool air. He went baside and pushed the door to, having to kick a pair of legs out of the way first.

  He holstered his pistol over the corpses.

  “Cooper,” he called like a dad with a report card in hand.

  A few moments of squeaky scrambling on por and lier, Cooper ae stepped in cautiously.

  “Where is the ?” Michael said.

  Cooper stared open-mouthed while Celeste looked away from the bodies and covered her face.

  “Boss, you need backup?” Philip said in his ears. Michael held a finger up to the couple.

  “No, all good here. I think I’m done being rusty.” The smile that broke out over his face made him look even more like a big kid than ever, and for some reason that scared Cooper worse than the bodies.

  “ime put some better doors on,” Michael said, pleasantly. “It’s supposed to be a safe house, after all.”

  Cooper slid into the coud went back to work on his drink, still spitting fizz. A shell g had nded on the coffee table and id sideways, spent. Celeste watched him drink like he had his straw in one of the bodies.

  “Still waiting for an answer, Cooper.” Michael pulled up a leather slipper chair from the half wall uhe kit ter and sat down opposite the coffee table.

  “Should we leave?” Celeste said suddenly. Michael didn’t even look at her.

  “We leave when I know where we’re going.”

  Cooper held the drink on his thigh. “How do I know that if I tell you, you won’t—”

  “You don’t,” Michael said. Celeste had to look away from him. She had never seen him like this. Evil in his eye, taunting. The gunfire had shaken up something ihat had only just settled after the earlier shootout, and she felt that other self, the strong one, fall away from her like it was esg.

  Cooper tried tain the versation. “Then why should I—”

  “Because I get paid if I kill yht now, but I get paid more if I get the .”

  “So I tell you where it is, you kill me—”

  “And the isn’t there because you lied to me.”

  “So you keep me alive just long enough to make sure I’m not bullshitting you, then you kill me.”

  “No.”

  “Why not? That’s what I’d do.”

  “That’s because you’re a small-time thief. I’m running an anization. I have to look ahead.”

  “What—”

  “If I kill you after you tell me where it is, then you run and tell everyone you meet how I fucked you over, the ime I get sent to colleething, no one’s gonna want to py ball and I’ll have to do everything the hard way.”

  “But won't wet around that you only do half a job? Didn’t someone hire you to get the and kill me?”

  “They also told me we would be the only team on the job. You’ve seen how that turned out. Getting the aing you slip out would be a nice way to tell them to go fuck themselves while still getting paid.”

  Cooper watched the golden bubbles rise to the surfad disappear. Where did they go, when they left this god-forsaken pce? Did they appear in the drinks served in the Allclub? Celeste was looking at him now, and he found something in her eyes he hadn’t seen before, at least not in years. He felt sure that the girl from his memories had e bad was trying to say how sorry she was about how long she had been goh only one look. Cooper squeezed her hand and looked back at Michael, suddenly feeling like he had someone on his side of the table.

  “All right. Let’s go.”

  “Tell me where we’re going, Cooper. I o get people on it as soon as possible. We don’t want to walk into another ambush.”

  It was an odd sileh the bubbling of the drinks and the muffled suburban ambiao Celeste, it felt like the past two days were bang on this thin sliver of a moment, and she was getting pinched somewhere between.

  Cooper came to the clusion, like rolling to a stop in a dead car, that his choices were betweeing shot here in this house or maybe getting shot ter and probably gettio Nightmare anyway. He didn’t trust the big guy, but he wasn’t ready to leave yet, now that he had found something worth looking at.

  “It’s at the DC.”

  “Distributioer. Got it,” EP said on the line.

  “Where at the DC?” Michael said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “I slipped it into the returns. I’ve never evehere.”

  “Fuck,” EP said. Michael unrolled his bag of rolli gummy worms and ate two without looking away from Cooper. EP cttered away on a keyboard in his ear.

  “When did you do this?” Michael asked, after he had chewed the worms for a bit, clearly w out some frustration.

  “Thursday.” Cooper shifted in his seat. Maybe he shouldn’t have told him until they got there. Would that have worked? He probably would have just got shot anyway. He pulled Celeste into a sideways embra the coud felt her warm full body to him. He looked her in the eyes and the look was still there. This is the way to go out, if he had to do it.

  “Found it,” EP said through ched teeth. “Thursday at eleven in the m. He just slipped a box onto one of the pallets!” She was on the verge of screaming. Michael puckered from the gummy worms and the thoughts zipping through his head.

  “What box?” he asked EP, but Cooper answered.

  “A Go-pro. It’s itle booklet thing.”

  Michael crushed the dy bag bato his pocket and stood up.

  “All right. Let’s go.” He waved towards the kit. Celeste squeezed Cooper and they rose shakily off the couch like a newly formed creature learning to stand.

  “We taking a different car?” Cooper asked.

  “Yep. One parked down the alley. you hit the lights?” Michael took his pho. “We clear outside?”

  Cooper left Celeste with his hand trailing behind him, slipping off her outstretched arm. Like two cells ing apart. He stepped over the bodies across the room to the light switch.

  “ we grab a bite somewhere?” He asked. “I haven’t had shit to eat since—”

  The room exploded in a fsh and the 10mm round caught him in the back of the head and spttered his face all over the curtains with the rest of the gore. Celeste hadn’t even seen Michael draw the gun. She stood there, watg Cooper bee just another obje the room, as Michael ejected the magazine and loaded a full one. After he had put both the pistol and half empty mag under his shirt, she drew her own gun and aimed it at his head.

  A paradox: Michaels aim is better when his target is partially obscured. Why? ime, it's time to go. episode, Departure.