Finally getting back to my apartment and relaxing with a drink should have been enough to lessen some of the anxiety that had strapped itself tightly to my ribcage.

It wasn't.

After pouring myself a truly monstrous scotch, I'd spent several hours reclined on the more comfortable of my two couches, mulling everything over, occasionally leafing through some of the more relevant papers that Maria had printed off for me. I was seeing logical inconsistencies in just about everything to do with this job, no matter where I happened to look. Whenever I attempted to peel away the uncertain bits and focus on something solid and real, I would just end up re-exposing some impossible or bafflingly bizarre aspect of this situation I'd somehow found myself knee-deep in. Not the most relaxed headspace to be in, nor the most productive.

That, and I was becoming annoyed with myself for how I'd handled that whole meeting with Diavolo, now that I'd had time to think everything through. At the time I'd wanted to find out how serious he was about keeping me on the job, and had thrown out what I thought was an appropriately audacious figure for him to chew on. What I'd thought he'd do was call my proposal preposterous and then explain the situation further, or otherwise attempt to prove that my fee was completely out of line with the expectations of the job. Surprisingly, he hadn't even balked at the number I'd given him, and before I'd even had a chance to realize what I'd done he'd transferred half of the payment to my account. Now I was on the hook for a job with more holes in it than a wheel of Emmentaler cheese someone had mistaken for a dartboard. Stupid.

And, of course, now that the price tag for this job was so ridiculously high, there was also the possibility that Diavolo would simply try to get rid of me once the job was finished rather than pay the remainder of my fee. That sort of situation has happened to me before, and more than once. Offering to pay someone huge, whopping loads of cash might seem like a perfectly reasonable idea when you're in the middle of a life-threatening situation, but once the problem gets resolved and the crisis has abated, almost everyone begins to think thoughts along the lines of 'Do I really have to part with the rest of that money like I promised?'

Waiting until the job was done and then setting me up to be killed later amounted to a fifty-percent discount if he was successful. I was fairly confident Diavolo hadn't really been keen to tell me about all of his various shenanigans concerning the piano shop, either. By getting rid of me, he'd be tying up what he probably considered a loose end, and save himself some money to boot.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Myrrh came skittering into the living room from the kitchen area, ears perked forward, looking ready for action. He glanced over at me, then turned his attention to a perfectly normal and un-suspicious looking section of rug, immediately falling into a crouch, his feline butt wiggling mightily. A half-second later, he pounced upon the unremarkable spot, reared up on his hind legs, gave two swipes at the air in front of him, did sort of a twisting backwards cartwheel, stuck the landing, briefly looked to his left, and then zipped away like a mottled lightning bolt.

A second later I heard the distinct sound of claws seeking purchase on linoleum floor tiles, followed by the familiar 'whumph' of a furry body crashing lightly into the far kitchen wall.

"You do know there was nothing there, right?" I called out behind him.

He responded with a single 'Mrowr?' before taking off down another hallway, presumably to do battle with some other nonexistent thing on the other side of the apartment. Chasing after ghosts again . . .

Kind of like I was, actually.

Ghosts, spirits . . . reanimated dead. Jesus Christ, what the hell was I supposed to do with this mess?

I poured myself another tall drink.

The thing that bugged me the most was how utterly convinced both Diavolo and Maria had been that Steven was some sort of boogie-man, or zombie. 'Revenant', as they'd called it. I'd done a quick search for the term online, wading through a few entries here and there. A revenge spirit, from the Latin 'revenans', or 'returning'. 'One that returns after death or long absence' according to Merriam-Webster. Even Wikipedia had an entry, complete with a whole host of specific stories concerning supposed real-life revenants, most dating from around the twelfth century, and all involving tales of ne'er-do-well scoundrel types who had died and somehow come back to terrorize the living. They sounded like vampires in a lot of ways, right down to the need for decapitation, or removal of the heart.

So, my fictitious, supernatural quarry that couldn't possibly exist possessed many similarities to some other fictitious, supernatural being that didn't really exist either. Fan-fucking-tastic.

Then again, this was Wikipedia we were talking about. I could very well be reading a caffeine-fueled fictional essay written by a Dungeons and Dragons enthusiast.

I snorted softly, took another healthy sip of my drink, and once more focused my attention on a particular piece of paper sitting nearby. It contained a list of names, as well as notes about their current whereabouts. These were the five members of Diavolo's organization who were still believed to be at risk of dying from a 'random act of Steven'. I took some small measure of glee noticing that one of the names on the list was Shuggy Cucinotta, or 'Shoe' as he was known to his fellow mobsters.

'Shuggy', huh? Well, it was easy to understand why he was such an asshole, growing up with a name like that. I almost felt sorry for the guy.

Well, no . . . not really.

Four out of five of these guys were currently in the air, each flying to a different location. I'd been told that the fifth one, Pietro Cracchiolo, or 'Chicory' as he preferred to be called, was aboard a yacht staying a couple of miles off the coast of Reedville, keeping fairly close by just in case I happened to require his presence. The manner in which I'd been given this piece of information had an unspoken 'use him as bait if you wish' sort of feel to it. I wondered how Pietro felt about that.

I'd tried to get some information on where Diavolo was keeping himself near the end of our meeting, but he'd cheerfully explained that his location wasn't important, and that he considered himself perfectly safe. Given the various surprises I'd handed him and his men this past week, it was obvious he didn't exactly trust me, which only proved that I wasn't dealing with a complete moron.

I sighed for what was probably the hundredth time in the past hour. This wasn't really going anywhere. I needed a strategy. Logic.

Back to basics.

Firstly, there was a bunch of strange stuff at work here . . . many situations where I'd performed action A, expected result B, and ended up with outcome C instead. Even if I wasn't in a position to understand why I didn't get result B, I had to factor the results into any plan I was going to make. I needed to plan for the exceptions, and eliminate the possibility of alternate outcomes.

Guns were problematic, and might be out entirely. Repeating the same activity over and over and expecting different results was practically the definition of insanity, and though I couldn't readily account for the reasons why bullets had been ineffective so far, I could certainly see that was the case here. Given the number of times I'd shot this guy, or seen him get shot by someone else, spraying him with more bullets clearly wasn't the answer. I needed something new.

Poison, perhaps?

I'd used poison-tipped rounds in my sniper rifle earlier, so maybe not. True, if he'd been wearing kevlar and ceramic plates the bullet wouldn't have actually penetrated, but-

'Bits of him flew off, okay?'

Right. According to GQ, he hadn't been wearing a vest, and he'd eyeballed my round coming out of Steven and hitting the street. So, if my round had penetrated skin and split apart, the neurotoxin didn't appear to have any effect. I assumed the walking dead wouldn't have much in the way of blood circulation, so maybe poison was out.

Fuck, really? Walking dead? Why couldn't I shake that notion? Was I seriously considering something as fucked up as that?

A recollection of Steven's cold, superhuman grip flashed through my mind, and I attempted to recall some of the details of that encounter behind the piano shop. The sound of four gunshots, the smell of scorched skin. There had also been the visible powder burn on his neck, and the way his voice had changed afterward, becoming even more raspy and labored.

Like I'd shot him in the throat.

I'd been the one with a gun, yet it seemed as though he couldn't have cared less. He'd been faster than me at the time, too. Whether it was due to drugs or something else I couldn't explain, I knew it was true.

And he scared me. I'd been terrified that first night in the alley.

I mean, I'd had a gun, and he hadn't. I had cover, and an elevated position, and he hadn't. I had years and years of very specialized training under my belt, training that I knew he didn't have, and yet somehow I'd been the one who was afraid of him. Not just afraid, but that 'little boy hiding-under-the-bed' kind of afraid that I hadn't felt since Edgar and his seemingly ever-present aluminum baseball bat, back at the group home, when I swore I'd never-

Sidetracked again. Unhelpful. Focus.

Right then. Time to put away my misgivings about all the things I didn't know and come up with some semblance of a plan. Let's say the impossible had somehow happened, and I was dealing with a dead man. No blood circulation, right? That was poison out. Same with bullets, since they were only useful for causing massive blood loss and creating malfunctions in various organs. If he was some sort of zombie, his organs were already malfunctioning quite enough as it was. So no poison, and no guns. And that left . . . what exactly?

Perhaps strangulation, or suffocation? Well, if he had no circulatory function, who's to say he needed to breathe? And besides, strangulation was a very intimate sort of way to dispatch someone, and required getting very close to your target. Considering how badly I didn't want to get close to him again, that was definitely out.

Trapping him? Finding a way to put him inside of something, like a steel safe or shipping container, and then dumping it in the ocean? Well, how exactly was I going to get him into a safe? Closeness, do not want. Good point.

Shipping container then? Luring him inside somehow? Maybe, but setting up something that elaborate took time, and was chancy at best. I'm not big on plans that depend on the mark behaving a certain way, or doing something specific, even if I did have something that could be considered 'bait'. The best plans are the ones that don't rely on chance, or capriciousness . . . ones where the mark doesn't have much say in how it goes down, or any opportunity to avoid it. That wasn't to say that trapping him in a shipping container wasn't an option, but there were probably a few better, less chancy ways of going about things.

Of course, chancy or not, my biggest priority was finding something that actually did the job, regardless of what kind of strangeness Steven had protecting him.

Incineration, perhaps?

Fire. That had potential. At a high enough temperature, everything can burn. After all, even if I was dealing with some unkillable twenty-foot tall werewolf-zombie-cyborg, it would still die if it was strapped to a spaceship and flown directly into the sun, right? Outlandish concept, but the principle was solid. There was nothing in the world that couldn't be un-made, no matter what sort of stuff it happened to be made out of.

The problem with that idea was how difficult it was to control fire, it being such a random, chaotic thing. Aside from arsonists, fire was hardly ever used as an actual method of assassination, mostly due to its unpredictable nature. It was, however, used fairly often by professionals after the fact, when disposing of the mark or covering their tracks after a particularly messy job. So, while fire might be a handy sort of thing to use once the job was done, I'd probably need something else when it came to actually doing the job itself.

Explosives?

I mulled that one over, tapping my scotch glass thoughtfully.

'Bits of him flew off-'

Yeah, maybe that was a plan - to make lots of bits fly off. The shockwave required to kill someone was minimal, and made factors like bulletproof armor completely irrelevant. And even if there happened to be some nightmarish 'unkillable' supernatural caveat to this whole situation, it was a pretty good bet that being blown into a few dozen pieces and then scattered over a wide area would at least slow him down.

Something like that would attract a great deal of notice if done somewhere in town, which did kind of suck. Still, it would have to be done from a distance, which satisfied one of the biggest requirements I had right now. The whole scenario might seem like complete overkill for taking out just one guy, but as long as it got the job done, I was fine with it. Use the right type of explosive, and there was even a reasonable chance of decapitation and removing the heart. There were possibilities of fire as well. Lots of different ways of bringing down the target, no matter who . . . or what he was.

An ugly feeling settled itself in the whereabouts of my shoulders. I scowled at it, and took another large-ish swallow of scotch.

God, why was I letting myself get creeped out by this whole mess?

I really needed to stop throwing those little 'what if's into my thinking. I'd seen Steven with my own two eyes. What I was dealing with was a person, and a fairly unskilled, not-too-bright person at that. Sure he was strong. Sure, there were a bunch of other things going on right now that didn't exactly make a lot of sense to me. Sure, a bunch of scientist types were at a loss to explain things, like why Steven hadn't shown up on thermal imaging.

And, of course, none of the scientific analysis I'd been provided offered any explanation whatsoever. Or anything helpful, really. No names, no contact info . . . nobody to call and ask "So, could you explain exactly why you jotted down the word 'impossible' in the margin here?"

The non-scientific notes were just as unhelpful. Aside from a couple of shamans talking about ravens, and one guy who wrote a frantic essay on Golgotha and the second coming of Jesus, every one of these yahoos who had combed over the various bits of evidence had come to the same conclusion - the restless dead. A revenge spirit. Three concluded their analysis with the word 'revenant', as though that somehow explained everything that was going on. One of them even underlined it a couple of times.

And, of course, none of those guys followed up that particular conclusion with 'Oh, and here's a few pointers on how you deal with a revenant.'

No phone numbers for any of those guys, either. Of course, given my current frame of mind, if I did have their phone numbers I'd probably just call them up so I could yell at them for a while.

I needed clarification on just about all of this wacky, insane stuff, and even though Diavolo had an entire array of experts and specialists in these various fields, I wasn't able to access any of them. All of my other, more practical contacts and resources were damn near useless under these circumstances. The closest thing I knew to an occult expert was that creepy drunk bookstore guy from the other night, the one who'd been sorting out some money issues with his pal, Jim Beam. That bookstore had certainly been spooky enough to qualify as 'occult-ish', or-

Hey . . . hold on a sec.

What if I'd accidentally stumbled into the shop of one of Diavolo's 'experts' that night?

That whole place had been radiating a gothic, creepy vibe the whole time I was there. And then there was also the guy's eventual reaction to me being there, right at the end. He seemed fine with a total stranger walking into his shop in the middle of the night, but then changed his tune halfway through and told me to leave, eyes wide and looking freaked out by something. His behavior hadn't made sense at the time, but what if he'd suspected I was working for Diavolo? That whole neighborhood was more than likely being hit up for 'protection money', so perhaps he'd already been approached by one of Diavolo's guys about this very subject.

Sitting up a little straighter on my couch, I allowed all thoughts of frustration and self-pity to bounce off my skull and fall to the floor, focusing on remembering everything I could from the other night, back when I'd gone into that one bookstore. I'd been following Nick, and had hopped into the bookstore once he'd gone into that convenience store on . . . Webster Street, if I recalled correctly. So, on the South side of the harbor. What had the place been called again? Something 'Attic'?

I got up from the couch and headed for The Room.

A quick search online for businesses ending with 'Attic' in that area yielded nothing, but I did manage to locate the convenience store Nick had robbed that evening. And the store was within sight of the bookshop, right? If it hadn't been, I wouldn't have bothered going in at all that night.

Well, it was worth going down there to check things out, even if I was just confirming he wasn't involved in any of this. Gathering information was never a waste of time in this profession, no matter how seemingly irrelevant or useless that information seemed. Preparedness had saved my ass more times than I could conveniently count.

I grabbed about ten grand from my wall safe and put it inside my custom pocketbook that was part Faraday cage, then tucked it into my inside jacket pocket. If this old guy really had been sorting out money matters, having a huge wad of cash on my person could come in handy. After a moment's thought, I also grabbed a few hundred in smaller bills so I could grab something to eat, as well as pay for a cab. Having already downed a few scotches on an empty stomach, there was no way I'd risk driving to that particular bookstore.

It wouldn't do to break the law, after all.