Silencer by Campbell Armstrong

Black and fucking white.’
    â€˜So what?’
    â€˜So what ? He’s only a homicide cop and she’s only the goddam prosecutor whose last case was Victor Sanchez. I’m trying to run a discreet little disposal business here. Some business. Galindez floats out of sight down a fucking river and a woman the size of Minnie Mouse has you running your asses off.’
    McTell shuffled his feet in the grass. ‘Yeah, but we got her, Anthony.’
    â€˜Sure you got her. That’s what you’re paid for, McTell: getting people. Only now we have a goddam homicide cop and this former prosecutor bitch, and they’re rolling around inside my head like very loud fucking marbles and I’m thinking, Maybe they’re not just gonna drop this matter. Maybe they’re gonna be intrigued, McTell.’
    â€˜Hey, they’re a problem, no sweat, no big deal, we can fix them,’ McTell said.
    â€˜A homicide cop and a former prosecutor and you can fix them, huh?’
    â€˜Listen. Anybody can be fixed.’
    â€˜All your solutions come down to the same thing: blow somebody away. Here’s a problem, let’s blast it into oblivion.’
    â€˜Saves time and trouble in the long haul.’
    Dansk tried to imagine how Einstein felt in a bus station, say, surrounded by morons. How he felt standing in a cafeteria line for a hot dog and fries and listening to empty drones chatter about last night’s soaps.
    He looked across the grassy square. He admired how the freshly laundered office workers gathered up their trash before they left. House-trained. Picky-picky. They worked in smoke-free zones and drank bottled water and belonged to health clubs and had mortgages and good credit ratings. They were respectable, central to the way the country worked. The machinery couldn’t turn without them. Politicians drooled for their votes.
    He found himself imagining what would happen if a passing gunman opened fire on this bunch just for the sport of it. He saw blood spilling across grass, white shirts red, people screaming and diving for cover, total chaos. He thought of snipers in towers and fertilizer bombs in vans parked outside government buildings and deranged sorts in the badlands who were at odds with revenue officials. This is America, bulletproof vest country, where you don’t sit with your back to the door. The nation was bent out of shape.
    He rose, brushed blades of grass from his slacks and looked at McTell. What was it about killers, why were they so well-endowed in the vicious department and so challenged when it came to brains? You took what you could find, he thought. It wasn’t like you could go down to an employment bureau and ask for assassins. McTell and Pasquale came out of sewers. All they knew was death. It was a limited kind of understanding. They enjoyed killing, it thrilled them. It was their own crazed theatre.
    He pondered this, what it would be like to buy a ticket and go inside. Snuff scenes at the Blood Bijou. People blown away. Carnage galore. And maybe when you slept you dreamed of human slaughterhouses and corpses hanging upside down from hooks, skinned and de-veined and raw.
    He watched McTell yank a daisy out of the ground and destroy it one petal at a time, and he wondered if flowers felt pain and anguish, if this daisy was screaming at some level beyond the range of human hearing. The thought intrigued him. Noises you couldn’t hear, a place beyond the net of the senses.
    He said, ‘We’ll wait, keep an eye on the situation, see what comes up. Then I’ll decide. It’s not like there’s any bonus money in it for giving them the ultimate good-night kiss, McTell.’
    â€˜No bonus money?’ McTell asked.
    â€˜None. And if you don’t like that, take it up with your union.’

19
    The first thing Amanda heard when she returned to the house was a female voice. Rhees had a student with him in the living-room, a willowy