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better off staying away from all of them: Wulff, the PD, his wife, his own inner voices. Shut it off, shut off everything and just live your life from day to day. It was the only way to do it. But if he knew anything, he knew they wouldn’t let him do that. There was no way out, no way out of it at all. You could not get off this planet alive. You could not even stay on it alive. All your life in a trap, and nibbling at the edges of it that giant animal, death.

V
    One of the two men in the intercepting Bonneville in New Mexico was an experienced assassin. The other was not. One was cool under pressure as the result of having freelanced for almost ten years. The other, just getting into it in his late twenties, almost disintegrated under stress. One of them, in short, knew his job and the other was merely faking it. And they were both working for Carlin because Carlin was faking it too, getting what he could in a tough business at the front end and hoping for the best thereafter. But between experience and inexperience it all began to come apart in the pressure of the chase. The older man, riding shotgun, had put the shots into the rear panes of the Fleetwood that they had miraculously picked up near the state line, thinking he would panic them into scrambling for it so that he could get a nice shot at their rear tires in full flight. But it hadn’t worked out quite that way. The answering fire had come immediately and, worse than that, had hit the windshield of the Bonneville on the driver’s side, splintering it so that the younger man, the driver, could not see. The Bonneville swerved in a sickening way. “You stupid son of a bitch,” the younger man said, “look what you’ve done now.”
    “Shut up,” the older man said. “Just keep on driving and we’ll run them right off the road.”
    “Keep on driving! I can’t see!” the younger man said, fighting the wheel, the car beginning to slide. Another shot came out of the Fleetwood, splintering the glass on the passenger side, and the older man, forty-two years old, in and out of this business in good health and bad since he had come out of Korea, began to feel something he had not known since An San Loc, a little white edge of panic moving in his chest. The younger man was right; he had fucked this up, they should not have made the approach directly but should have swung around and tried it in a less direct manner. But the luck of stumbling across them, the promised fifty thousand dollars on delivery of the body, the rumors that Carlin might in combination with some others go as high as a hundred thousand if he felt particularly generous … all of that had unseated his judgment. He hadn’t even calculated the second man he had seen in the car with Wulff so eager was he to get this damned job done and haul in the goods. Now they were in real trouble. He had really fucked this one up. How could he have been so stupid? he thought vaguely, as if he were thinking of another person. It was not in his track record to fail like this. If anything, what had distinguished his work was its caution and finesse. Its utter control. That was how he kept on getting hired, that was how he had built his reputation. This was really stupid, taking potshots at the Fleetwood. But who would have expected that they would have had the luck to run up against Wulff? When he had taken the assignment he looked on it as expense money, that was all. It was a crap game, but this Carlin would have had to be out of his mind to think that any of the teams actually had a chance of getting this guy. If he hadn’t gotten taken by now he wasn’t going to. Maybe he didn’t exist. And yet there he was. Description, everything dovetailed against the photographs. And the answering fire, that was the key. There was just the slightest chance that they had opened fire on someone who was innocent—and that was one of the risks that had to be taken in this business. It was war, innocent people got