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as the two targets walked out alive, he’d played by the rules.
    One person, though, was not going to be walking anywhere. The man in the greasy army jacket had picked the wrong counter stool. The car’s grill had chewed him up like a piece of toast and then spat him back out.
    Most of him, anyway. One khaki-clad arm still pointed in the air, a fork gripped in the bloody fist.
    If Kleingarten had calculated wrong, the car might have swerved, hit a pothole, or even struck another car, which might have caused it to veer into the back booth where the Slant and the Looker had sat with their coffee cups.
    He wasn’t sure his employers would appreciate the serendipity, but if they wanted it done a certain way, they should have given better instructions. And paid better.
    “Inducing a state of panic” could have been interpreted in any number of ways. The Looker’s dose had been administered last week, in a bottle of Perrier. The Slant had got hers, appropriately enough, in an order of General Tso’s chicken three days ago. But they’d needed the adrenalin boost, apparently, for the stuff to take effect. Briggs had called the accident a “trigger,” the same as Roland Doyle’s trigger had been to mess with his identity and play on his guilt.
    The first siren arose from the east end of town, toward Durham. Kleingarten tightened his gaze on Wendy Leng and the trendy chick one last time. The Slant had helped the blue-haired woman to the sidewalk and now rejoined her friend, who was dabbing at her wound with a napkin.
    No plastic surgery would be required, but Kleingarten suspected she’d wear a little extra powder while the wound healed over the next few weeks. A looker like that was bound to be a vain bitch.
    Anger flared through him, the type of anger that was riskier than any crime he could commit. He could have scared them the old-fashioned way, stalked them from a distance, figured out their patterns, then jumped them one at a time in some dark alley or parking garage, get a little action as he—
    No. With DNA tests, you couldn’t do hands-on work anymore. Why, just squirting a little harmless sperm in a stranger was enough to get you two dimes in Raleigh’s Central Prison, and if she happened to stop breathing on you in the middle of getting acquainted, you’d find yourself on the skinny end of the needle.
    Risks were one thing, but fatal consequences were another. No snatch on Earth was worth a death sentence.
    Of course, after the number he’d done on that hooker in Cincinnati last night, any other charge at this point would be a bonus prize. And it’s not like she’d taken his kill cherry, either.
    More people emerged from the carnage: a stooped-over man with a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, a fat woman in a “Git ‘r Done” T-shirt far too small for her wobbling breasts, a boy in camo hunter’s pants with what appeared to be ketchup staining the front of his gray sweat jacket.
    The cook, having overcome his shock at finding an empty driver’s seat, had collected a fire extinguisher and was hosing down a grease fire that had erupted above the grill. The oily smoke curled from the shattered entrance.
    Though the rubberneckers arrived under the guise of good intentions and a helpful spirit, Kleingarten knew the truth in their sorry hearts: they were hoping for a little peek of blood, something they could tell their spouses about over dinner while waxing philosophical about God’s random hand.
    Fuck God. Religion was just another calculated risk, a sucker’s bet. For Kleingarten, all the religion he needed was a Glock semi and a pile of unmarked bills. The kind of stack his employers had mailed to a Burlington post office box, the address of a fictitious consulting business Kleingarten had launched a decade ago after leaving the security industry and becoming an entrepreneur.
    He’d be picking up his next stack that afternoon, in person from Briggs, the down payment on a little job involving one