Joe Haldeman - Work Done for Hire

A helicopter with a SWAT squad took off from Boston while FBI computers chased my credit card trail down to the Swan’s Island ferry. The black helicopter was already over Cape May, speeding north by northeast, when the FBI verified the location of the cabin and sent them a satellite photo and a map.

I have to wonder, as fast as they responded, what might have happened if they’d showed up a few minutes earlier. What would the bad guys have done if they’d heard a helicopter coming? It might have prevented a bloodbath. Or precipitated a different one.

The whole bizarre story came out in Ron Duquest’s trial. I had just missed my big chance at fame and fortune.

Duquest had concocted a scheme for a kind of cross between an action feature and reality TV. He hired a couple of lowlifes in Los Angeles and had them drive out to the Midwest, then Louisiana, then Mississippi, to put Kit and me through what he conceived as a fantastic paranoiac chase scene: Who is after us? Why does the sniper weapon from my past keep cropping up? Who’s on first? It would be a post-postmodern version of classic old television serials like The Fugitive and Lost , with the delicious variation that the star didn’t know he was on camera.

He testified that he knew me well enough to trust that I wouldn’t commit any serious crime, and the men he hired were under orders to just harass us; not break any laws themselves. But that all went out the window when I actually shot at them.

They had guns, too, it turned out, and an attitude problem that escalated into a runaway kidnapping scheme. Duquest lost control of them and was afraid to call in the police.

I’ve told the rest of the story here. Except for the happy ending.

The slight scar on my cheek from the shotgun just makes me look “interesting,” Kit says, and together with the missing finger they mark the beginning and end of my decade of violence.

This decade will be parenting, we just found out last week. Starting lives rather than ending them.

We’re even getting married, continuing a family tradition that started with old Grand-dude, back in the sixties: pregnancy, then marriage.

When the other hippies asked why they bothered, he said that one thing the world didn’t need was yet another bastard.

Oh, and the cube in my finger? Nothing to do with anything. The army won’t even tell me what it was. That probably means it never worked. Typical. All that aluminum foil wasted—and I’d been so proud of myself. Our tax dollars at work.

Worlds Apart

Dealing in Futures

Forever Peace

Forever Free

The Coming

Guardian

Camouflage

Old Twentieth

A Separate War and Other Stories

The Accidental Time Machine

Marsbound

Starbound

Earthbound

Work Done for Hire

Body Armor: 2000

Nebula Award Stories Seventeen

Space Fighters

There Is No Darkness

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

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This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

Copyright © 2014 by Joe Haldeman.

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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-63762-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Haldeman, Joe W.

Work done for hire / Joe Haldeman. — First Edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-425-25688-6 (hardback)

1. Authorship—Fiction. 2. Snipers—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3558.A353W67 2014

813'.54—dc23

2013034539

FIRST EDITION: January 2014

Cover photographs: rifle © Saulius L / Shutterstock; target © PILart/Shutterstock.

Cover design by Judith Lagerman.

Interior text design by Laura K. Corless.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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