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Monahan was a guy about about forty who lived a very respectable life for a contract killer, which is what he was. He was five seven or eight, in good shape, with short dark hair and the general button-down look of an insurance salesman, which as it happened was his cover.

I had no reason to believe his perky little blonde wife, also about forty, had the faintest notion Monahan was a hit man, to use the TV parlance. Certainly his two kids, a boy around thirteen and a girl of fifteen or sixteen were clueless that their suburban lifestyle was made possible by the man of the house committing commercial carnage.

Monahan’s life with his wife and kids and his split-level in a housing development in Omaha have almost nothing to do with this narrative, so I’ll keep it short. I’d never met him, but he was one of fifty-some guys like me who had worked for the Broker, the middleman who’d provided me with contracts back when I was in the killing game myself. For reasons recorded elsewhere, the Broker wound up dead and I wound up with a database of his worker bees.

“Database” isn’t exactly right, because when I came into possession of that file, it was before home computers, and when I say “file,” I mean literally that—a file, a fat manila folder full of extensive information including real names and aliases alike, addresses past and present, photographs for each name, even specific jobs that had been carried out.

Why the Broker maintained this explosive packet, I couldn’t say—eventual blackmail purposes should someone get out of line, maybe? Or food for the feds or cops should immunity and the Witness Protection Program come into play?

For all his veneer of suburban bliss, Monahan was an assassin whose specialty was particularly nasty: hit-and-run kills. This had made him one of the highest paid names on the Broker’s list—Monahan provided the kind of accidental death that sent official investigations off on the wrong track, and made handsome insurance pay-outs a breeze. As a professional, the guy had real skills, and you had to hand it to him.

But as I believe I already indicated, maintaining surveillance on a guy living in a housing development is a royal pain in the ass. Luckily I was able to rent a house just down the street from him on the opposite side of the block. I spent my time tailing him to the office he maintained in a strip mall, where he read newspapers and watched television and boinked a Chinese girl who worked for the carry-out joint two doors down; sometimes he went home on the lunch hour and boinked his cute wife, too. You know what they say about boinking Chinese girls—an hour later, you’re horny again.

So I smiled at my neighbors and mowed my fucking lawn and attended junior high baseball games and a jazz dance recital (the fifteen year-old blonde daughter looked good in a leotard) and even saw a Beverly Hills Cop movie and generally kept track of the prick.

Here’s the thing—after the Broker bought it, I decided I’d never work for a middleman again. Broker had betrayed me, and seeing his file with my own mug in it with detailed info about two dozen kills I’d been in on made me, let’s say, less than eager to ever work for anybody who wasn’t me. Pretty soon I’d figured out a way to use the file to stay in the same game, but on my own terms.

I would choose a name from the Broker’s list—the name of someone like myself—and go and stake out that party, then follow him or her to their next gig. Once I figured out who the hitter’s target was, I would approach said target and let him or her know he or she was in somebody’s fucking crosshairs.

I’d offer to discreetly eliminate the hired killer (sometimes, killers) for a fee that was in no way nominal. Further, I’d offer to look into who had hired the hit, and remove them, for the kind of bonus that meant I wouldn’t have to do this more than once a year or so.

You might find this risky—what if the target freaked out, being approached by a stranger with a wild story, a stranger who claims to be