Page 33 of Assassin Anonymous

“My old employers want me dead. They know I’m here.”

He scratches the back of his neck slowly, then says, “I’ll make you a deal.”

I put my hand up, beckoning him to proceed.

“I can get you on a boat, no problem. We have a route between here and Jakarta.”

“What do you want in return?”

“I get to tell people that I messed you up. That you killed my dad…”

He pulls out the drawer on his desk and goes rooting around in it. The deal tastes sour on the back of my tongue. The Pale Horse doesn’t get slapped around. He doesn’t leave people alive. He wouldn’t let some kid one-up him and walk away.

But that’s not me anymore. That’s just a story I told myself, and I’ve been trying to change that story. What does it matter if the narrative spins in a different direction?

“And,” he says. “I want a souvenir.”

He places on the desk a Damascus steel dagger with a pearl handle.

“Nondominant hand is fine,” he says. “Even though my dad was an asshole, it seems like a pretty fair price, right?”

Four seconds in, hold for four, out for four, empty lungs for four.

He places his hands palm down on the desk and smiles, waiting for me.

I stand and take the knife. Feel the weight of it, get a good grip, then spin it in my hands and slam it down into the wood, between the ring and middle fingers of his left hand.

“Your souvenir is you get to live,” the Pale Horse says.

He blanches at that. I offer him my hand. He shakes it with a blank expression.

“It’s not just me that needs to get out of town,” I tell him. “I’m with someone. And we have a cat.”

He pulls out a piece of paper and scribbles on it, his hands shaking, then passes it to me. “Be at this address in two hours. Ask for Xiao.”

I drain the rest of my beer, put the bottle on the desk, and tell him, “Thanks.”

As I’m headed for the door he says, “Seriously, man, I feel like I need you to impart a little wisdom on me before you go. I’m twenty-six and I run the Singapore Triads. What would you tell yourself if you could talk to your twenty-six-year-old self?”

I think about it for a few moments and then tell him, “Go be an astronaut.”

I leave without seeing how he reacts to that.

—

Raindrops tap the windshield of the cab as it pulls to a stop in front of the hotel. I hand the driver some sing, get out, and watch him pull away, leaving me alone on a quiet, tree-lined street next to the highway.

I hope Astrid has calmed down a bit. She did not approve of the accommodations—it’s a two-star hotel, flung far from the city center. There is no spa. As much as she wanted to get a room in Marina Bay, the surveillance network is too tight.

But something broke our way: it’s a ten-minute stroll to Jurong Port, where we’re supposed to meet Xiao, if he exists and Billy isn’t planning to show up with an army of Triads. I doubt it, though. I think I succeeded in both impressing him and scaring the piss out of him.

I tilt my head back to the sky and let some raindrops fall onto my face.

What I did, dropping into my old persona, I did to survive.

I ignore the tingling in my fingertips. The floating feeling in my chest.

The fear in Billy’s eyes as I plunged his dagger an inch deep into that desk.