The street lamps flitted past my periphery with a regularity that reminded me of heartbeats... slow and lazy, and in a manner that I wished my own heart to emulate. It had done a pretty good job, too. I'd been driving my car around the city for just over an hour, allowing myself to recover and relax, keeping to the residential area up north near Towson, away from the docks.

Yeah, well away from the docks....

I hadn't done a great job of calming down at first, having sped away from both the scene of the brutal crime Stevie had perpetrated and the agonized screaming of the victim he'd chosen to murder this evening.

Well, not 'chosen', as such. In all fairness Stevie had just shown up and done the sort of thing Stevie did. I was technically the one who had chosen his latest victim, in a sense. I did feel kind of bad about that. Not a lot, but a little bit.

That's the nice thing about working a job where using mafioso types as 'bait' was part of the work profile. All of these guys had done some brutal, heinous stuff due to the nature of their employment, and thus you could do pretty much anything you wanted to them and not feel particularly bad about how things turned out. So, when things went horribly wrong with something you planned, well, karma can be a bitch, can't she?

Of course, I'd perpetrated some pretty heinous stuff myself in the past, although my activities had been strictly limited to the execution of violence against men and women who society, if it knew about the sorts of things they'd been involved with, would have called walking human travesties. Still, what was my own karma like? What would society think of me, if it were aware of all the things I'd done? How well balanced were my own karmic scales, exactly?

Bah. Karma. I had no time for thoughts like that. My spontaneous evening drive had relaxed me well enough to start thinking again, and I needed to use this thinking time to figure out what I should do next.

I turned a slow, lazy turn off of the street I was on and headed further north, considered this evening's encounter with Stevie. What had I learned?

Well, I'd learned he could punch his way out of a reinforced metal box, for one. That was both hugely surprising and ridiculously absurd. And terrifying, obviously.

And while I didn't know the precise manner in which he'd learned of Shoe's memorial service, he'd shown up about the time I'd expected him to, marching into the building without stealth or guile, like he was invincible. That had been consistent with my expectations. And when, once he'd arrived, he'd looked around, and... I don't know. It was as though he was the embodiment of anger. I'd never experienced fury just being projected outward like that. He was like...

A revenge spirit.

Yeah, just like that. Everything about him felt just like that feeling that bubbles up and wants to take over when you're looking at something that took something from you, or diminished you somehow. That part of you you're constantly holding back - the one that doesn't care what the odds are, how many people it has to go through, or what sort of things it has to resort to... because it knows deep down that it'll somehow find a way to even the score.

That's what he embodied. That was who he was, plain and simple. And it was terrifying.

And then, when he'd busted out of his metal prison and stormed into the room, despite the shaky reflection of my handheld mirror I had plainly seen that one moment... the one where Stevie had acknowledged the presence of something, like a bloodhound testing the air. He'd slowly looked up, like he was looking through the building's roof, and just like that he knew exactly where he needed to go to find another fellow from his list. He hadn't been able to sense me, despite the fact that he was plenty angry with me, obviously... but he could 'sense' the people he felt were responsible for the fire, for the deaths of his brother Lucas and his sister-in-law.

And quite possibly... his death?

Hmm. Why hadn't I considered that before?

Well, mostly because it had made no logical sense for me to do so earlier, back when Ifigured Stevie was nothing more than an underboss in the throes of a drug-fueled psychotic break and in the middle of a mafia co-worker killing spree. Now I knew he was clearly 'other', a revenge spirit of sorts... who also just happened to be in the middle of a mafia co-worker killing spree. He was a revenant, a sort of zombie, or restless dead, or whatever. Didn't matter. Those were just words, after all. What Stevie had become and what the proper name for it was unimportant compared to something I hadn't necessarily considered before this moment; Stevie had probably been killed sometime prior to all of this shit happening.

That just made sense, didn't it? None of the accounts I'd read ever mentioned a revenant not coming back from the grave, after all. They transformed themselves somehow, like a butterfly, or a phoenix rising from the ashes... a transformation that was likely triggered by his death. You didn't come back as a revenge-spirit-zombie-killing-machine if you hadn't already died.

So, how exactly had Stevie died? And was that information useful?

The question seemed both inconsequential and very important for some reason. And trust me, if you ever get that particular feeling when considering a question, pay attention to it. Instincts and hunches are merely your subconscious mind's way of pointing out things your conscious mind hasn't quite figured out yet.

I decided my best bet was to return home and visit The Room, do a little digging and see if I could pull up anything related to Stevie's murder. I didn't know for sure it was murder, of course, but I figured it to be a pretty safe assumption under the circumstances. However, I definitely wanted to get some work in before the news feeds caught wind of Stevie's latest grisly act of revenge, something which would likely result in me receiving a phone call from a rather unhappy client.

I took my next left onto one of the side streets, then back over to a street that led downtown, heading back towards the bar. My head was a little clearer, and I felt much more relaxed than I had an hour ago, and all traces of panic had been shoved into a small, dark corner of my mind where it wouldn't get in the way of my thinking.

So, what had I learned tonight?

Well, Stevie was damned strong. Impossibly strong. That metal box I'd arranged to be made was no flimsy piece of work, and would have easily confined a normal human being from now until doomsday. And he'd simply smashed his way out of it. True, his fists had looked hella banged up afterwards, but they had still been shaped like fists. If he was holding bits of himself together despite pieces becoming damaged or bludgeoned to bloody stumps then he might find it more difficult to grip things with his hands, or hold on to things like knives, or victims.

I was also going to make it my operational assumption that Stevie could sense his victims, and that's how he was tracking them down. He didn't consider me to be in that same category, and hadn't known where I'd been hiding during those tense twenty seconds in the funeral parlor, but I couldn't count on that always being the case. Still, a useful thing for me to keep in mind.

The grenade I'd fired at his back, however... what was to be learned from that?

It hadn't gone off, which, considering the reliability of the firing mechanism that particular grenade launcher ammo utilized, was next to impossible. It had connected with my target, and with enough force that half of it had actually buried itself into Stevie's upper back. There was no reason it shouldn't have exploded. Aside from the fact that Stevie was 'other', of course.

Which... hang on.

A couple of stray remembered facts stood at attention and waved at me from the dark recesses of my memory.

Those photos Calvino had shown me, back when I'd been first informed about the existence of revenants. The thermal imaging photos. In the regular photo I'd seen that Stevie's knife had fresh blood on it, and yet the entire knife had been the exact same shade of dark blue as the rest of Stevie in the thermal one, which shouldn't have been possible. The blade of the knife, or the blood on it, should have been warmer than the rest of him.

And I could also remember those scientists who had informed Diavolo that the scenario proposed in the pictures was 'impossible' because of the lack of residual waste heat from kinetic activity Stevie was directly responsible for. And then there was my encounter with him up on the rooftop... how he killed Shoe with the knife, and me noticing a few minutes later that Shoe's lips had turned an eerie shade of blue.

So what if, in addition to turning him into an unstoppable killing machine, becoming 'other' had also turned Stevie into a walking violation of thermal dynamics? Shoe couldn't have gotten cold enough for his lips to turn blue mere minutes after being killed, and Stevie had been the last one to touch him. With his knife. Knife goes in, Shoe goes down, lips go blue. So maybe a big bunch of heat from Shoe's body got absorbed by... Stevie?

I considered. Various experts had already claimed what Stevie was doing was impossible, so perhaps energy did strange things around this particular type of 'other'. Which, though I didn't exactly understand the mechanics behind it, might go a fair ways to explain the lack of 'residual kinetic energy' from the thermal photos, in addition to the blue lips. And yes, that would even explain my grenade not going ka-boom. A small explosion was used to trigger the bigger one, and if the energy from that was something Stevie absorbed instantly, well, obviously it would result in the sort of thing that had happened earlier in the evening.

Did he need this energy? Was it like food, or something? Was this a side-effect of him being the way he was, or was it something else... something potentially helpful?

Could Stevie be frozen, perhaps?

There was an interesting thought. If he did absorb heat energy, then subjecting him to a near or total absence of said energy might just give me the leg up I was looking for.

I considered this possibility, and I sighed.

There are many, many complications that pop up when you're planning to freeze someone. And before you even ask... yes, I have. Twice.

Ninety percent of the things involved in arranging something like that were going to be a huge pain in the ass, based on what I already knew about Stevie. Usually in those circumstances you have complete control over your mark, and possess the ability to contain him or her in a contained space, whether it be industrial walk-in freezer or an everyday chest freezer available at the local appliance store for a few hundred bucks.

And before you even ask... yes, that's how both of those went down. Moving on....

Containment was going to be a problem, as Stevie himself had demonstrated earlier, punching his way out of a box that was easily many times stronger than any chest freezer you could point at. I didn't doubt he'd be up to the task of smashing his way out of a room-sized industrial walk-in freezer either. So maybe I just needed to find a better container.

A shipping container, maybe? The kind they had at the docks, loaded up and put onto cargo ships heading out to god-knows-where? Perhaps... but based on what I'd seen this evening, I had my doubts.

It wasn't long before I arrived at the downtown core, and after a few turns down this street and that I found myself in an underground parking lot, in my usual stall, one of four places I'll park any of my cars that isn't already sitting in storage somewhere. Expensive to maintain, but it's very handy to have multiple parking spots at your disposal located here and there. And let me tell you... heaven help the man or woman who decides to ignore the 'reserved' sign and park in my spot. It's only happened once so far, but that particular fellow certainly won't be making that same mistake twice...

I inspected my immediate surroundings before getting out of my car, then headed towards the parkade exit at a brisk walk. From there it was a mere two block walk to my building, which I decided to enter via the back alley entrance for the sake of variety. If you don't know whether or not a diabolical organization has sent a fellow hitter after you or not, changing things up is just a good idea.

Once at the door, I reached up to enter the ten-digit code into the security keypad, reaching for my key as I did so....

And I froze.

A tiny black dot was blinking on and off inside of a small black square on the bottom-right of the liquid crystal display on the face of the keypad.

It was small enough that it was hard to notice unless you were specifically looking for it, but I never attempted to enter my place without checking that particular section of my alarm. And this was the reason why.

Something had been tampered with while I'd been away. The dot was located in the top left of the square that contained it, which meant that the side building entrance – the one I'd gone out through earlier this morning, and which could only be accessed by me – had been fiddled with.

All of my senses went into overdrive, and I became very, very alert.

Without making it obvious I was doing so, I checked the door and frame in front of me very carefully, attempting to appear as though I were searching for my keys as I did so. It didn't look like anything had been done to the surface of the door, and the fact that there was only one flashing black dot instead of two suggested that it was probably safe to open. I entered my ten digit PIN onto the keypad, pulled out my building key, unlocked the door and opened it, swiftly making my way inside.

I immediately closed the door behind me and turned to the right, walking into the maintenance room which housed the building's fuse boxes, cleaning supplies, as well as a couple of well-hidden other things. I retrieved one of the well-hidden other things – a Beretta nine-two-G – and pulled it out of its holster, confirmed it was loaded and the safety was off, then walked back out into the hallway and tread slowly into the bar area, looking around carefully as I did.

The front doors were still locked, and the closed sign was still hanging in the window next to it. Nothing unusual or out of place... the room was empty. To be honest, I had half-expected to find someone sitting in my usual spot, waiting for me. It was just as well that there wasn't – I didn't exactly need that sort of shit right this minute.

I doubled back into the hallway and gave my private elevator a cursory inspection before hitting the 'up' button. The building's side entrance led to a set of stairs that went directly to the alternate entrance to my apartment, and the alarm hadn't suggested anyone had been fooling around with my apartment door, so it was likely that taking the elevator up to my floor would be safe.

Once the elevator arrived I stepped into it and pressed the button for my floor. Then I spent a bit of time stretching out my shoulders and breathed some deep, relaxing breaths. My heart rate had jumped up a little bit, but aside from that I wasn't doing too bad.

The elevator doors opened, and I risked a quick look into the hallway before stepping out into it, keeping my pistol up and pointing at the ceiling, ready to drop it down into firing position at any moment. I then crept down the hallway near-silently, listening carefully. Once at my apartment door I gave it a quick check, and finding nothing I unlocked it, turned the handle and pushed it open.

My apartment, just the way I'd left it. Nothing unusual, or out of place. Myrrh, who was cat-napping on 'his' spot on the couch, lifted his head up from between his paws and gave me a quizzical look.

Well, if Myrrh was all calm and relaxed, then nobody had actually been in here. I could relax a little.

I headed to the kitchen, picked up my phone and entered my ten-digit PIN on it, hanging up once I could see that The Room was in the process of rising up from its usual spot below the floor. Once it had finished doing its thing I opened the door, thumbed the safety for the Beretta, tucked it into my waistband and walked inside.

Yes, if you're not wearing a shoulder holster, a waistband is a perfectly good place for your weapon, but for the love of Christ... if you're ever going to spend any amount of time with a gun pointing directly at your junk, make damn sure you've got the safety on.

I logged on to my computer and launched the application that kept track of the various security measures I have set up around my building, and I pulled up the camera feeds. I have sixteen pinhole video cameras in total, all strategically placed where they can do the most good, and none of them can be seen unless you're specifically looking for them, and know where to look. Regular security cameras have a pretty significant down side to them, and that's the fact that they look like security cameras. Sure, that can be pretty handy in and of itself if you're merely concerned about keeping out thieves and other miscreants, but they're a little less handy if your primary goal is to see what sort of things people have been up to when they think they're not being watched.

Isolating the camera I wanted to look at, I pulled up the feed and set the time marker for around the time I'd left for the funeral parlor. Then I slid the video control bar forward and skimmed through the footage in hyper fast-forward, watching for any signs of activity. Before long something caught my eye, and I backed it up so I could play it back at regular speed. Then I paused it.

What I saw in the video was a rather grainy still of a nervous-looking Glenn Quinn standing there in front of my door, working away at the lock. I made a note of the timestamp, as well as the surge of anger that was now threatening to make my lip curl the slightest bit.

Yeah, this was just what I needed right now....

I pressed play on the video once more and watched what he was doing with great interest.

He appeared to be using pretty standard lockpicks, and got through the deadbolt after about three minutes or so, glancing around nervously the whole while. Once he'd succeeded in opening the door he entered the building and adjusted the bag that was hoisted over one shoulder, a move that caused the top of the bag to open fractionally, revealing a glimpse of its contents. I paused the video again, scrubbed back a few frames, and stared.

I could make out the front of a large canvas bag, and I recognized the large, stencilled letters that had been spray-painted onto its surface. I had a similar bag sitting in a large aluminum trunk in the corner, not twenty feet away. What it contained was a Russian-made MON-50.

A land mine? Really?

It was a directional land mine, meant to take out something directly in front of it rather than everything around it. Which meant I had a pretty good idea what he'd ended up doing with it. I hit play, set it to four-times speed playback and then watched the sped up video for another five minutes, which pretty much confirmed my suspicions. I couldn't really see him well enough from where he was working, but I saw bits and pieces of his coat pop into camera view as he worked away somewhere near the bottom of the very first set of stairs. At one point he put down what appeared to be a trowel.

The building was primarily brick, but there was a goodly amount of drywall in the stairwell, which meant lots of room in between the studs for something like an anti-personnel mine. His plan was to cut open the drywall, position the mine so it faced the room, string up a trip wire over the stairs, arm it, and then cover up the damaged wall with some spackle, as well as perhaps a quick bit of paint. Not that he'd really need it for that stairwell – it was rather poorly lit, though the wall was in fairly good shape, it was old enough that I probably wouldn’t have noticed something like a patch of slightly mistinted paint.

GQ got up to inspect his work in the video, and I slowed the playback down to a reasonable speed, watching him. He gathered his remaining things up into his bag and calmly left through the same door he'd jacked open, then spent another two minutes or so re-locking it behind him with his picks. Once that was done he sprayed a little liquid on the face of the lock, donned a glove, pulled out a square something from his bag and rubbed it vigorously against the lock for about twenty seconds, probably to remove any errant trace that a lock pick had been used on it. He inspected the lock, took off his glove, put on a pair of sunglasses, and then spent at least a five-count just standing there, looking pleased with himself. Then he turned and sauntered away.

"Asshole," I muttered quietly. He didn't strike me as the sort to do an overabundant amount of research, so he probably didn't know that I was the only one to use this particular stairwell. He might have suspected, of course, but he couldn't have known... not for sure. So he probably figured that if he got me, great. If he got some other luckless fool who happened to use that entrance, well, it was worth a shot.

Hitters who thought like that really pissed me off. Especially ones who had the barest fraction of an inkling of how things were really done. And what really pissed me off was that now I had to take time out of my already way-too-busy evening to deal with this crap, because I couldn't just leave it lying around... all because of some arrogant, naïve douchebag of a kid who was gullible enough to believe he had a shot at joining a secret organization he knew almost nothing about, and who-

Hmm. How gullible was he, anyways?

An idea popped into my head. And a rather amusing one, at that.

I went over to the wall where I kept my tools and grabbed myself a hammer, a finishing nail, a pair of wire cutters, and a drywall saw. Then I left The Room and exited my apartment via the alternate exit, heading down the stairwell towards the area where GQ had been working earlier that morning. Once I'd gotten near the bottom I slowed my descent and then stopped entirely, eyes roaming over the patch of wall I suspected he'd laid his trap. It took me hardly any time at all to spot, mostly because I knew what I was looking for. He'd disguised things cleverly enough that it would have likely tripped up someone who was unawares, but twenty minutes worth of drywall repair wasn't enough to keep his work hidden for someone who was actively looking for it.

I took my hammer to a portion of drywall well above where I figured the mine was located, then used my saw to carefully cut out a large section of the wall, exposing most of the mine without coming anywhere near the trip wire, which had been strung across the stairway a few inches above the second step. Reaching in and tipping the mine forward, exposing the side of it that faced away from me, I calmly inserted my finishing nail into a small hole next to a small plastic switch marked with a bunch of Cyrillic letters. Once I'd judged the nail was in far enough I flipped the plastic switch to one side, then the other, an action which produced a soft 'click' from somewhere inside the device.

From there I simply used my wire snips to cut the trip wire, gently pulled the mine out of the hole that I'd made for it, gathered up my tools and went back upstairs to my apartment.

Once I was back in The Room I carefully set the landmine down on my workbench, made a mental note to deal with it a little more permanently later that evening. I put my tools back in their respective places, dusted my hands off, exited The Room and went through the apartment doors I normally used, heading for the bar down below.

It took me a few minutes of searching behind the bar counter before I managed to locate the cellphone I'd taken off of Glenn when he'd come in here in an attempt to scare me off that one afternoon, the one he'd managed to take my picture with. The battery had been removed, so I located it, popped it back into place and thumbed the power button. The LED screen chimed some friendly cadence at me and came to life, and a few seconds later it was displaying the typical grid of user-friendly icons you get on most home screens.

Not even a PIN login for his phone. Hilarious.

I went into the settings and quickly identified the cell's number, then went into the address book. It was rather sparse, which probably meant this was more of a burner phone than anything, but it did have a four entries in total – Deb, Donna, Mary, and 'Me'. I selected the 'Me' contact and looked at the phone number. It wasn't the same number as the phone I held.

Whistling cheerfully to myself, I took the phone back upstairs with me to my apartment, and upon my arrival my first order of business was turning on my oft-neglected television. Opening a small panel on my entertainment unit, I leafed through a stack of Blu-ray discs until I found the one I wanted, pulled it out of the stack, and inserted it into my multimedia player. I located my remote, hit 'play' on it, navigated my way through the various previews and piracy warnings until I got to the movie's scene selection menu. It took me a couple of tries to find the scene I had in mind, but after only a few minutes I had the movie paused at precisely the place I'd wanted it.

Then I turned up the volume on my Bose Dolby-enabled home theater system. Way, way up.

Bringing the darkened LED of the phone back to life with a quick swipe of its surface, I selected the contact labeled 'Me' and hit the phone icon in the lower-left corner.

Ring. Ring. Ri-

The third ring was interrupted by the sound of someone fumbling to get their phone to their ear.

"Who the hell is this?" GQ asked from somewhere on the other end.

"Glenn! Marvelous... this is Joe calling. How you doing, buddy?"

"Who-... wait, what? What do you want? Hey, hold on," he said, sounding a touch surprised. "How did you get this number?"

"Oh come now, I can't be giving away all of my secrets, can I? Besides, that's not really important right now. Listen, I just wanted to call and let you know that I've had a bit of time to think about it, and I may have overreacted a bit. That, and I've changed my mind about a few of those 'things' we talked about. So, before I leave town in the next few days, I figured I'd give you a quick call and see if you still wanted me to try to set up that meeting you wanted. You know, the one you'd suggested we have with our mutual 'friends'...?"

There was a lengthy pause.

“Bull-shit, man. You think I just fell off the turnip truck or something? You wanna take me out, so you figure you'll just set something up, invite me out, and do it on your terms. Honestly, this sort of transparent play-”

“Is utterly transparent, which is why I'm making it. Because here's what you haven't heard about the whole thing – I'm not going to be there, with you. Or anywhere near you, for that matter. In a couple of days I'm going to be several thousand miles away from this place... maybe somewhere sunny. If you'd like I'll even have a video chat with you, establish that I'm nowhere near you, ease your mind a little.” I gave a wistful, happy sigh. “Getting out of the business now, before I get booted out the hard way. Probably overdue... I've had a good run.”

“Wait, so hang on,” he said, making the sorts of noises on his end that indicated he was moving from reclined to a fully upright seated position on a leather couch. Not sure if that was really what I was hearing, but whatever. “So lemme understand then – how's this going to work? If you're not there to introduce me, then how do I get a hold of them, or whatever?”

“This is what I was thinking; two days from now I send you a text from wherever I'm at, and we set up a video chat or whatever you figure it'll take to know that I'm far, far away from you, and that this isn't a setup. Then, you let me know the place you want to meet them. You'll have the next two days to make it as safe for yourself as you'd like, and I'd encourage you to take advantage of those two days. Once I let them know where you're wanting to meet them and they'll show up, probably within the hour. And I'm not going to lie to you... if they decide they want you dead there isn't a heck of a lot any of your preparations are going to do for you. But if you set things up nice and tight, give them the impression you're capable and know what you're doing, they'll probably be impressed... take you under their wing. It's an audition, nothing more... I can't promise they'll like you, I can only make recommendations and talk about the things I've seen, but I can set it up so at least you've got a shot.”

A bit more silence.

“Hey... wow. You'd like... you're actually serious about this?”

“Yup! Time for some new blood, I figure... I'm getting too old for this shit. I just-... oh, hell.” I reached into my pant pocket and produced my key ring, allowing it to fall to the floor. “Stupid keys. Hang on a sec...”

“What?”

“There. Sorry, just dropped my keys a sec. So listen, I'm at my place now, so I'm just going to pop upstairs and finish packing up a few last things, find that contact info I've still got, and more or less make sure everything's together for when I high-tail it out of here. Man, I wish my elevator wasn't busted. I hate stairs.”

“Hey, Joe?! Joe, hang on a sec-”

“Hey, what's th-” I said, cutting myself off mid-word. Then I held both the cellphone and the remote control away from me and pressed the 'pause' button.

The scene I'd paused in the middle of was a tense, dramatic one. It was that moment in this particular movie where it became apparent that the bomb squad fellow, an unimportant but fairly amusing character, had been just a little too slow and sloppy when it came to disarming the improvised explosive device in front of him. When the still-frame on my TV set came to life, so did the bomb in front of him, producing a big, dramatic, Hollywood-style explosion that had probably cost someone a pretty penny to set up.

In addition to being big and fiery, it was also very loud. Even more so, what with my speakers turned up as loud as they were.

My teeth felt like they were shaking, and the sound hit me like some sort of monster Nerf gun ammo fired directly at my chest... the kind of loud where you briefly wonder if your heart was still beating.

I raised the phone back to one ear, cupped the other, and listened.

I could hear GQ swearing and screaming, cussing up a blue storm on the other end of the line. After a few seconds doing that I could make out the sound of him yelling into the receive. “Joe?! No, goddamn it! Joe, are you there?! Speak to me! Are you al-”

Smiling, I pulled the battery out of the cellphone, hit pause on my movie, then turned the speakers back down to a much more reasonable volume. After a few seconds I actually started to chuckle.

That had actually been kind of fun.

I headed back to The Room, still smirking the tiniest bit. Once I sat down in my chair in front of my computer I took a deep breath, another one, and then lost the smirk completely. I spent a couple of moments considering the softly glowing monitor in front of me.

Okay. Time to get serious....