‘Thanks, sport,’ she says with a wink.
Like most males, Carter’s easily distracted. He’s also a master of the hook-up, the casual encounter, sex as pure sensation. An Australian merc named Arthur had explained the principle on a rooftop in Basra while they awaited the appearance of a doomed tribal sheikh.
‘Friction, that’s all it is, mate. Friction, friction, friction. The testicles are two organs that fill up every forty-eight hours and have to be emptied. There’s nothing more to the game.’
Now Carter observes the bar maid’s butt as she sashays across the room, his gaze speculative. Was she flirting? Or is flirtatiousness part of the show? Angel had flirted with him as they walked to the van, describing this fantasy and that. Not only didn’t he blame her, Carter was impressed with her control, and her obvious skill at projecting unfelt desire.
The beauty of the hook-up, Carter thinks, is that you can be certain your partner is attracted to you, at least physically.
But the waitress flirts with her next customer and with the next, leaving Carter to conclude that she’s just not into him. Carter isn’t disappointed. He finishes his beer and heads back to Janie’s apartment, walking the few blocks beneath clearing skies.
An hour later, still restless, he stands in Janie’s gallery, a narrow hallway lined on both sides with photographs taken many years before. The newest, judging from the Chevrolet parked at the curb, dates back to the 1950s. On this night, Carter’s eyes are drawn to one of the oldest photos, a wedding portrait. Here the groom is seated in a finely carved chair while the bride stands to his left and slightly behind him. She wears an embroidered white dress, tightly pinched at the waist, with a high collar that rises almost to her ears. Her veil drops from a spray of flowers to brush the floor.
Carter steps a bit closer. The bride’s lips are thin and her eyes appear sad to him. The groom isn’t smiling, either, although it’s hard to be sure because he sports a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache thick enough to obscure his mouth. In any event, they don’t touch each other, don’t stare lovingly into each other’s eyes, don’t exhibit any sign of affection. They might be strangers hired for a photo shoot.
These are photographs, Carter assumes, of his relatives, his and Janie’s, a family legacy. There can be no other reason why Janie went to the trouble of framing and hanging them. But Carter doesn’t know who they are because Janie compiled the photos after he left for the military. He’s searched the apartment for some sort of inventory and taken several of the photos out of their frames, hoping to find them labeled. Not happening. Janie has taken their identities with her. There was a time, of course, while Janie was still being cared for at home, when she might have identified the anonymous faces, might have connected them, one to the other. But Carter was in Sierra Leone, a soldier of fortune dumb enough to believe that blood can lead to anything but blood.
Soldiers learn to sleep when the opportunity presents itself and Carter nods off shortly after he gets into bed and pulls up the covers. Most nights, he sleeps soundly for about six hours and awakens refreshed. But on this night he rises just before dawn. Outside the room’s single window, the spring air is filled with birdsong.
Carter lies on his back, overwhelmed by the tattered remains of a dream. He’s in bed, as he is now, but there’s no room surrounding him, no walls, no floor, no ceiling, no sky, no Earth, no wind, no sun, no stars. He is utterly alone.
‘Goodbye, Janie,’ he whispers. ‘Goodbye, goodbye.’
Carter’s up and out of the apartment by six thirty, heading west over the George Washington Bridge and across New Jersey, to an outdoor gun range near the Delaware River in Pennsylvania. As he proceeds inland, from the warmer coast to the Watchung Mountains of western New Jersey, the season reverses. The grass on this end of the state is still winter-brown and the leaves on the trees barely formed. The day is warm, however. Even at this early hour, the temperature approaches sixty degrees and the sun, rising in his rear-view mirror, seems playful and determined. This is especially true as Carter crosses a bridge spanning the Delaware. The river’s running high and the angled sunlight dances in the spray. Fishermen stand on the banks of the river, casting out, while a flotilla of blue, red and green canoes braves the rapids in the main channel.
Carter reaches his destination, a shooting range tucked into the hardwood forest that covers most of north-eastern Pennsylvania, at eight o’clock. He’s driven all this way for two reasons. First, the Liberty Shooting Range has a training facility designed for handgun combat, a skill Carter’s determined to acquire. Second, Carl Maverton, the range’s owner, is an NRA nutcase obsessed with the constitutional right of high school students to carry weapons.
‘I’ll say this,’ he told Carter just two weeks before. ‘If every kid in Columbine was packing heat, a lotta lives would’ve been saved.’
Carter’s beliefs run in the opposite direction. He’d be happiest if the entire population was disarmed. Except for him, of course. He also finds Carl’s lectures as tedious as they are repetitive. But there’s good news, too. Carter’s weapons are illegal and Carl doesn’t give a shit.
Carl’s sitting behind a battered metal desk when Carter walks into his office, the first customer of the day. There are two American eagles on the desk. One augments an ashtray filled with cigar butts, the other carries the flag in its talons. A Gadsden rattlesnake flag – ‘DON’T TREAD ON ME’ – decorates the wall to Carl’s right. A framed poster of Gentleman Jerry Miculek hangs to his left.
Gentleman Jerry wears a blue and white shirt with the name of his corporate sponsor, Smith & Wesson, emblazoned across the chest. A competition speed-shooter, he holds a world record unlikely to be broken any time soon. On September 11, 1999, Miculek fired twelve rounds, hitting a target with each shot, in 2.9 seconds. That wouldn’t be impressive if he’d used an automatic with a capacious magazine, but Miculek accomplished this feat with a revolver, which meant he had to reload in the middle. Without the reload, Gentleman Jerry’s able to draw and empty a revolver (a Smith & Wesson, naturally) in less than a second, the shots coming so fast they sound like rolling thunder.
Training is what Carter’s life is mostly about. Contracts come to him once a month, on average, and are usually filled within a week. The rest of his time is devoted to staying sharp, an orientation developed in the military. Delta Force specialized in covert ops and was only sporadically deployed. Their assignments were invariably dangerous and filled with a tension that could only be overcome by training. The more you prepared, the greater the chance you’d survive. Carter harbors no illusions about the chance part. In the world of war, there are no certainties. At any given moment, the bullet might already be in the air. As, even now, the police might be knocking on his door.
Carter exercises three afternoons a week at a mixed martial arts gym in Manhattan, working alongside ranked cage fighters. Whenever possible, he spends his mornings and evenings at a locksmith shop, which he owns. Carter doesn’t install locks, or drill out locks for citizens who’ve lost their keys. He has an employee for that. Carter spends the hours opening locks with various tools, including picks and drills, and memorizing the wiring schemes for home alarm systems. As an assassin, he much prefers the privacy of a target’s house or apartment to the street.
‘So, how’s the big bad city?’ Maverton leads Carter to a yard enclosed by an earthen berm lined with bales of hay. There are eight targets in the yard, stationed at distances ranging up to thirty feet.