The Silver Bear by Derek Haas Page A

me finish my beer.” I was playing the spoiled college kid for all it was worth.
    Ponts took the beer bottle out of my hand and downed it in front of me in two quick gulps. “Now you’re finished. Where’s my money?”
    I pulled out a roll of bills from my pocket. “I got five large here. If you’ll just let me place it on tonight’s game . . .”
    The fat man snatched it out of my hand, quickly handed it to Gorti, who began to thumb through it. After a quick count, he nodded back to Ponts.
    “You got five days to come up with the other forty-eight.”
    “Come on . . . why so hostile . . . ?”
    “You think this is hostile? Hostile is Friday morning if you don’t have my money.”
    “Jesus. I went out of town for a few days. Here I am and I paid you.”
    “You paid me half.”
    “I don’t see why . . .”
    And then my voice trailed off, the words choking in my throat. The last thing I was expecting, and the very thing Vespucci had warned me about, rose up and stung me.
    Jake walked into the bar with a friend of hers.
    Now, my plan had been to show up on Friday and ask for an extension, to claim poor, to see how physical Ponts would get with me when I didn’t have the money. I was beginning to understand why Vespucci preached making a connection with the target; it was my job to seek out the evil in people. Everyone has a dark side, and once I find that dark side, it is my job to home in on it, manipulate it, exploit it, enlarge it. I must see the evil in the target, taste it, put my finger in it the way Thomas did to the wound of Christ, so that the act of killing becomes diminished, becomes necessary. It is a trick of sorts, an illusion created by the mind to keep the horrors of the job at bay. I wanted to see what Ponts would do to me, so that when I killed Levine, I would understand what he had done to others. Then I could walk away from it like a vigilante instead of a hired gun, at peace with my decision to take someone’s life.
    But all that changed the moment Jake walked into the bar and saw me.
    She immediately made a beeline over to where I was standing and kissed my lips, saying my name . . . a different name than what I had given Ponts and Gorti.
    I started to say something to get her to walk away, but Ponts read me like a book and interrupted before any words could come out of my mouth, addressing Jake directly.
    “Hello, there! I’m Ponts and this is Gorti . . . we’re friends of your boyfriend. What’s your name, beautiful?”
    She turned to them warmly. “Jake. Jake Owens.”
    Ponts grinned so large I thought he was going to swallow her. “You go to school here, Jake Owens?”
    She nodded. “Almost finished at B.C. How do you boys know each other?”
    “We’re old friends from way back, aren’t we?” and he said my name, the one Jake had handed to him.
    “Yeah,” I mumbled. “You know, Jake . . . let me finish up with these fellas and I’ll come sit with you.”
    “Okay,” she said, like she knew she had interrupted something she shouldn’t have.
    “It was nice meeting you, Jake Owens from B.C.” Ponts said, holding the words like he didn’t want to let them go.
    As soon as she was gone, his eyes hardened. “I don’t care you gave us a bum name, I don’t care you think you’re so fucking smart you can game us like a couple of fruits. What I do care about is the forty-eight big you owe us. Now you know that we know about Jake Owens from B.C. We get the money on Friday or somebody’s day gets ruined. We understand each other?”
    I nodded. “Yeah . . . sure, Ponts.”
    “Don’t do anything dumb again, kid.” He patted the side of my face and turned back to the bar like the conversation was over.
     
     
    I was sweating. I sat in my apartment, the window open, a nice breeze blowing in off the water, and yet I was sweating, like the room had nothing but stale air trapped inside.
    I had ignored Vespucci’s advice, I had kept up my relationship with a girl who loved me,