Joe Haldeman - Work Done for Hire

The dinner was great, a deep-South crab and shrimp boil with small new potatoes and baby onions cooked in the broth. We tarried over it and had a bottle of wine and a plate of fresh gingersnaps, the house specialty.

Our lives might have been a lot simpler if we’d just picked up some burgers. Driven on.

We got back from the restaurant about eleven and there were no parking spaces in front of our motel room at Traveler’s Rest. I let Kit off to run to the bathroom while I went around back to the auxiliary lot.

We were separated for less than three minutes.

When I opened the door, there was only a line of light coming from under the bathroom door. “Kit?” I called.

She made some noise from the bathroom and I stepped into the darkness. A sharp pain exploded in the back of my head, and I was conscious just long enough to think Stroke?

It had been a stroke, all right; the stroke from a club or a blackjack. At three in the morning, 3:17 by the bedside clock, I sort of woke up, ears ringing, pain radiating in spasms from the base of my skull. A big tender swelling there. No blood. I swallowed back vomit and staggered to the bathroom and drank some water, and managed to keep it down. Splashed cold water on my face and rubbed it with the harsh towel.

There was an insistent buzzing in my ears that I eventually realized was coming from a strange cell phone, centered on the neatly made double bed. I got a tissue from the end table and picked up the phone like a master criminal, or an amateur one.

I pushed the button but didn’t think “hello” would express how I felt. “Fuck you.”

“Now, now,” a familiar female voice said, “what if this was your mother calling?”

“I suppose I would ask her what the fuck was going on. But I guess I’ll have to ask you. Who the fuck are you?”

“We are the people who have your girlfriend. That’s all you need to know.”

“So you’ve upped the stakes to federal crime.”

“Technically, no; I think it was already a federal crime when somebody killed a DHS agent. But yes, the stakes will be higher… for you.”

“How so?”

“It goes like this: we’ll give your girlfriend back. If you cooperate, we’ll give her back all at once. If not, we’ll send you a finger first, and then negotiate the next part.”

I couldn’t speak. It was like my vocal apparatus was glued shut.

“You can reach me at any time by touching the REPLY button. Do not make a recording of the call. If you don’t reply in one hour, or if you call the authorities, we will definitely give you the finger. Registered mail.” She hung up.

I stared dumbly at the phone while it sank in.

They had me pretty well figured out. It might not work with an actual war hero; he would probably make the calculation and, more or less with regret, do what he had to do.

But to me? Killing some stranger, no matter who he might be, was not unthinkable; that had been my business as usual for more than a year, not that long ago. But allowing the woman I love to die—slowly, tortured by amputation? Through my inaction?

The ghost of my missing finger talked quietly all the time, in a language no one else could hear. Now it screamed. You can’t let them do this. Do this to her.

It wasn’t just the pain. The chest pain was worse, when it was bad. But nothing was missing in there.

The muscle below the stump flexed and flexed. The ring finger clawed in sympathy.

As it had done when I woke up in the hospital bed in Germany. The tight swath of bandages that covered the chest was nothing compared to the arm suspended just above eye level, twitching, broadcasting loss more than pain. This will never grow back. Never be better.

I pushed the button. The phone rang once, and the person who picked it up didn’t say anything.

“So what do you want me to do?” I asked the silence.

A man’s voice: “Do you feel fit to drive?”

I didn’t, actually. Maybe I could walk to the door. “How far?”

“Some distance. You should sleep first.”

“Sure.”

“There are sleeping pills and aspirin in your shaving kit.”

“I don’t carry sleeping pills.”

“You do now. Take two and I will call you in the morning.” He hung up, a comedian.

My “shaving kit” was a courtesy zip-bag from Harrah’s. It now had an aspirin bottle with eight aspirin and four purple pills.

No way in hell. Even if I knew they looked like sleeping pills, which I didn’t, I wasn’t going to take them on the word of a probably homicidal mystery man. I walked across the street and got an ice-cold quart of beer from a local place called Swamp Hawg Brewery.

It was not as bad as it might have been. I drank the whole quart in about ten minutes, while nibbling on stale cookies for my stomach’s sake. I started to undress, but only got my shirt off. Decided I had to rest a bit before tackling my shoes.

Woke up slowly with shoes still on, eyelids stuck together, clothes twisted and heavy with sweat. The clock said 9:14. Dappled sunlight coming through the window by the bathroom. Funny feeling in my stomach, butterflies rather than nausea, and probably a bad case of Swamp Hawg breath.

Maybe nerves, too.

I set up the coffee machine and slumped to the shower. It had a head more talented than my own; I set it to a complex vibrating mode and let the thrumming hot water try to wake me up. When it turned cold I stepped out carefully, remembering a stupid accident in junior high. Slipped in a strange bathroom and laid open my chin.

No Time for Stitches , a good title for my autobiography.

I got the cardboard box out of the trunk and dumped the rifle out onto the bed. A lot heavier than the one I used in the desert.

I’d only used the sniper-mod M2010 once as a plain rifle, rather than a sniper weapon, and the results were more instructive than impressive. The bolt action that gives it such accuracy is a handicap when you’re not punching somebody a new orifice long-distance.

There were seven or eight of us deploying in a roomy MaxiStryker, crawling up a steep hill with maybe a dozen other vehicles on our way from nowhere to elsewhere, and we ground to a halt when the vehicle either ran over a mine or was hit by an IED. We were all deafened, but otherwise unhurt. Smoke everywhere. There was some small-arms fire whispering from above us, and we all piled out on the downhill side to shoot back.

It was an unholy racket, even to the deaf; at least two Strykers blasting away with fifties and the littler machine guns and grenade launchers chattering and booming. I could see by tracers what they were aiming at, a dun-colored lump that was probably a pile of sandbags, and I managed to get two rounds in that general direction while the Strykers pelted it with about a thousand. Finally something hit something and it went up in a big orange-and-grey blossom. Some guys pumped fists and cheered, I guess the way Goliath did until his last engagement.

I remembered taking comfort in the rifle’s weight and balance, back then, and now allowed myself a familiar fantasy: those guys pull up in their SUV and start taking pictures of Kit’s bare ass—but instead of the piddling Dick Tracy toy, I pull out my trusty M2010. Right eye or left? Perhaps a new one, in between?

It occurred to me that this might be the same rifle I’d “modified” by plugging the barrel with a low-powered bullet. I slid the bolt back and looked down the barrel; it was unobstructed.

I could take it to the cops. Tell them my story. Some lunatic assholes gave me this rifle and want me to go to Washington and assassinate someone, and they kidnapped my girlfriend to make sure I do it. Here’s a note that proves it.