Mat Johnson - Hunting in Harlem

"Are you nuts? I want to be blinded! You're supposed to be guiding me, inspiring me with your faith! You were always the one who had the answers," Snowden tried to remind him.

"Yeah, and now my answer is you. Tell me, Snowden. I want to believe nothing, but I'm just not a natural so you're going to have to help me. Give me your secret," Bobby pleaded, but it was useless. His best chance at nihilism was already gaining momentum, moving physically and ideologically away from him.

LESTER IN TWEED. Tweed jacket, tweed pants, tweed socks. Snowden couldn't believe that last bit existed, but there they were covering Lester's ankles with their jagged woolen lines. Far behind his desk, Lester sat with his legs crossed. The folders laid out as before, each glossy face staring up, pleading to be overlooked.

"Pick your poison. No, that's not right, should be, 'Pick their poison,' that'd be a bit more accurate, wouldn't it? This is your last mandatory extinction, so make it a good one!" Wendell, in the corner, seemed to appreciate his own tweed ensemble much less, wiggling his long body around in his vest in an attempt to break free from it. "OK, fine," Lester said to him, rising to help the dog remove it. "No accounting for taste."

Snowden was going to pick very carefully indeed. Snowden was going to make it a very good one. A lot of thinking, a lot of thinking had gone into this, and he told himself he would think his way out this time, that it was possible he could actually save a life besides his own and get through this. The problem with his last effort was obvious: Don't think small, don't think weak and scared. Think confident. Think secure. Don't think nonthreatening, think non-threatenable, somebody capable of hearing out a warning and not acting like a cornered animal. Someone who felt in charge, assured that the world moved forward solely because he willed it.

"Him," Snowden said, putting down the file.

"Him?" Lester saw who it was. He picked up the picture, looked at it again anyway. "You're joking, right? I mean, I just put him out there for contrast, to let you know the other guys were nothing. To be honest, I was thinking more along the line of Horus on that one. It's not an apartment, it's a townhouse — don't have keys for his place, and believe me it's a fortress. The guy's got more thugs coming in and out of there than you can count. I'd do it but I've had run-ins with him in the past, so that gives me motive. To be honest, I figured it would even take Horus a couple months to work the nerve up."

"I'm not joking. Him. I can do it," Snowden told Lester, pumping his chest with simulated confidence. "I'm a cold-blooded killer, aren't I? I'm the bastard responsible for the death of three mothers' sons. I'm going to do him and that's it."

Parson Boone knew someone was trying to kill him, he just didn't know who, how many, or for what reasons. He was pretty sure whatever those reasons were they were valid ones, he just didn't know which of the shit he'd sown in the world was coming back to haunt him. Parson Boone was sure someone was trying to kill him, or had been in the past, or would be in the future. It was just the kind of life he lived, so he took actions in accordance.

Parson Boone rarely went outside his 137th Street brownstone and even inside it never below his top-floor apartment. Boone allowed the people with a propensity for violence in his employ to live on the floors below, so anyone who wanted to get to him would first have to go through them. The top-floor apartment was completely soundproof and fortified with security cameras covering nearly every room in the house below. There were more locks on the door to the fourth floor than there were on the front one. Good locks, a quality job. Lester knew this because he knew the contractor who did it.

The most obvious way to break into the brownstone of Parson Boone was to come in through the abandoned shell it was connected to. Even Parson Boone knew that, that's why he'd personally seen to the cinder-blocking of all its doors and windows. To Snowden it looked like a tomb. Here is a Bunch of Crackheads Who Smoked Their Very Souls, the hieroglyphic graffiti seemed to say, Only a Damned Fool Would Enter. At this point in his life, Snowden was pretty sure he was a damn fool, and he had the key to the overlooked back basement grate so that's exactly what he set about doing. Horus was sent to the block in a van on the night determined, armed not just with a gun but a cell phone and a pair of binoculars to aim at Boone's windows. On first sighting he called Lester and it was time for Snowden to go in.

Lester wasn't stupid. He was homicidal, delusional, addicted, but Snowden couldn't really call him stupid. As they made their way through the ravaged remains of the abandoned building, flashlights the only thing saving them from being swallowed by the profound darkness, Snowden listened to him explain all of his research into the blueprints to come up with his strategy and recognized for the first time that Lester was actually very clever. That that's what had kept the Chupacabra from being caught all this time.

The only thing easy about doing this job was that it didn't have to look like an accident; in the case of Parson Boone, no one would have believed that anyway. Lester's was a finesse plan. Snowden was not surprised to learn that Cyrus Marks, being the belligerent, homicidal hedgehog he knew him to be, had imagined a much more violent, blunt assault to get rid of Parson Boone: Shove a pound of C4 explosives against the adjoining living room wall, walk through the burning hole, and shoot everything living. Apparently, Marks had envisioned this job as the men of the Second Chance Program's graduating project.

"You and Horus leading in the assault, Bobby burning the whole thing to the ground before the police get there. That's how our congressman thinks. Big," Lester said, only the slightest slur. Snowden could tell when the man was stoned now, his nods in the wake of the first hit, the dilatory calm after, the frantic energy when his system was running out again. If Lester hadn't expressed his reservation about dynamiting a load-bearing wall in a condemned building, Snowden knew Marks would have actually forced them to go through with that. Snowden wished Bobby knew that too. That he would stop whining about a little shit on his shoes when people like Snowden were swimming in it.

When they made it to the fourth floor of the ruin, a long process in which no step assured purchase, Snowden could actually hear the echoes of talking Boone on the other side. Lester pointed his flashlight to the adjoining wall, illuminating its torn wallpaper of pink and blue lilies. Seeing the pattern, the optimism and life of the colors depressed Snowden more than the walk through the entire rotting house did. It reminded him that somebody had actually lived here once. Lester's spotlight found the fake fireplace from his Polariotls. Its grate was of ornate iron, as Snowden walked closer to it he realized it was totally solid, it only looked like it had holes in it.

"There's the old oil heating unit," Lester said lightly. There was yelling coming from the other building. Even without being able to make out the words, Snowden could recognize the sound of a man defending himself.

"It was never meant for burning wood," Lester continued. "The mantel, the way the wall comes out, real popular around the turn of the century. The look of traditional elegance with the latest in modern convenience." A hand on each side, Lester bent and strained to lift the lid away. The mechanics of the oil heater were attached to the back of it, leaving a brown, shiny stain along the wall as Lester attempted to lean it. Behind it were just two thin tubes and a lot of empty space.