Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

“Temporary,” Jodie repeated.

Eyes watching the bar of soap, as if it were a prisoner trying to escape.

“Temporary. Owing to my necessary vigilance. In my work, I mean.”

“Sure. Your vigilance.”

Scrub, scrub, the soap lathered like thunderheads.

“Have you ever killed a faggot?” Jodie asked, curious.

“I don’t know. I’ll tell you I’ve never killed anybody because he’s a homosexual. That would make no sense.” Stephen’s hands tingled and buzzed. He scrubbed harder, not looking at Jodie. He suddenly felt swollen with an odd feeling – of talking to someone who might just understand him. “See, I don’t kill people just to kill them.”

“Okay,” Jodie said. “But what if some drunk came up to you on the street and pushed you around and called you, I don’t know, a motherfucking faggot? You’d kill him, right? Say you could get away with it.”

“But… well, a faggot wouldn’t want to have sex with his mother now, would he?”

Jodie blinked then laughed. “That’s pretty good.”

Did I just make a joke? Stephen wondered. He smiled, pleased that Jodie’d been impressed.

Jodie continued, “Okay, let’s say he just called you a motherfucker.”

“Of course I wouldn’t kill him. And I’ll tell you this, if you’re talking about faggots let’s talk about Negroes and Jewish people too. I wouldn’t kill a Negro unless I’d been hired to kill somebody who happened to be a Negro. There are probably reasons why Negroes shouldn’t live, or at least shouldn’t live here in this country. My stepfather had a lot of reasons for that. I’m pretty much in accord with him. He felt the same about Jewish people but there I disagree. Jewish people make very good soldiers. I respect them.”

He continued. “See, killing’s a business, that’s all it is. Look at Kent State. I was just a kid then but my stepfather told me about it. You know Kent State? Those students got shot by the National Guard?”

“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 exactly 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.”

“Craftsmanship,” Stephen repeated, feeling swollen with inexplicable feelings. He watched Jodie hide the cash in a slit in his filthy mattress. “What’re you going to do with the money?”

Jodie sat up and looked at Stephen with dumb but earnest eyes. “Can I show you something?” The drugs made his voice slurred.

“Sure.”

He lifted a book out of his pocket. The title was Dependent No More.

“I stole it from this bookstore on Saint Marks Place. It’s for people who don’t want to be, you know, alcoholics or drug addicts anymore. It’s pretty good. It mentions these clinics you can go to. I found this place in New Jersey. You go in there and you spend a month – a whole month – but you come out and you’re clean. They say it really works.”

“That’s good of you,” Stephen said. “I approve of that.”

“Yeah, well,” Jodie curled up his face. “It costs fourteen thousand.”

“No shit.”

“For one month. Can you believe that?”

“Somebody’s making some bucks there.” Stephen made $150,000 for a hit, but he didn’t share this information with Jodie, his newfound friend and partner.

Jodie sighed, wiped his eyes. The drugs had made him weepy, it seemed. Like Stephen’s stepfather when he drank. “My whole life’s been so messed up,” he said. “I went to college. Oh, yeah. Didn’t do too bad either. I taught for a while. Worked for a company. Then I lost my job. Everything went bad. Lost my apartment… I’d always had a pill problem. Started stealing… Oh, hell…”

Stephen sat down next to him. “You’ll get your money and go into that clinic there. Get your life turned around.”

Jodie smiled blearily at him. “My father had this thing he said, you know? When there was something you had to do that was hard. He said don’t think about the hard part as a problem, just think about it as a factor. Like something to consider. He’d look me in the eye and say, ‘It’s not a problem, it’s just a factor.’ I keep trying to remember that.”

“Not a problem, just a factor,” Stephen repeated. “I like that.”

Stephen put his hand on Jodie’s leg to prove that he really did like it.

Soldier, what the fuck are you doing?

Sir, busy at the moment, sir. Will report in later.

Soldier -

Later, sir!

“Here’s to you,” Jodie said.

“No, to you,” Stephen said.

And they toasted, spring water and orange juice, to their strange alliance.

Hour 24 of 45

A LABYRINTH.