For a job to go right, all the pieces have to line up. For a job to go wrong… The possibilities are endless.

Max knew. He’d been at it for a quarter of a century. Longer, if he added the New Jersey years that he didn’t want to be reminded of. He was a goon in training then, expendable, a low-ranking gunslinger in a cheap shiny suit. It was a miracle he walked away from that shit show with only a groove carved with precision along a left side rib. A tiny variation in the angle of impact and he wouldn’t be standing there wondering about what he found in the back seat of the Lincoln Navigator.

A mop of dark hair emerged from a ratty plaid blanket. A boy. Asleep. Six years old maybe. Max wasn’t good at guessing the age of children. He didn’t have any.

He still held the Glock 9mm with its obscene suppressor extension. The hit had gone through without a hitch. R.I.P. Stan Lombroso, Las Vegas casino investor. In a pool full of sharks, the dude had managed to not only acquire way more than his share but also digest the loot without a prayer of ever being able to pay any of it back. Max had no sympathy for idiots. You reap what you sow. Lombroso reaped three slugs, the last one in the forehead, to make sure. Now that the job was done, Max was focused on the exit strategy. He’d rehearsed the route from Lombroso’s posh Miami neighborhood to the retention pond he selected for the gun disposal. The extra clip that weighed down his jacket pocket would go in a canal nearby. The suppressor would end in a dumpster.

There was no room for a stray kid in this scenario.

Max didn’t care much for the poke in his heart when he looked at the boy, or the moisture in the corner of his eyes, or the hitch in his breathing, as if inhaling was a disturbance. There were no innocents in Max’s universe, only wolves and what they fed on.

Still, he couldn’t dump that kid by the side of the road, not next to Lombroso’s mansion anyway. He slipped into the driver seat. The doors of expensive vehicles didn’t clang and the kid didn’t stir. Max would figure what to do with him later. There was no time to ponder. Lombroso’s bodyguard was unconscious and tied up next to the garden shed. He would come by soon and discover his boss’s body. Max preferred hits without collateral interferences, but Lombroso was never alone. The only time he was vulnerable was when his homme de confiance worked in the yard, which he did, regular as clockwork, at sunrise and sunset. Thank heavens for people’s eccentricities. They made a hitman’s life a lot easier.

In a few hours, Max planned to be miles away across the Florida state line. He jacked up the temperature in the car to keep the boy asleep. After ten minutes he had to lower the temp, and bump up the air. A rotten stink was coming from the back seat. Where was this kid coming from, a sewer?

 

Max parked outside an outlet mall. It was just before sunrise and traffic was minimal. He wasn’t as far from the hit scene as he wished but he had to know what kind of disaster was bundled up in the back.

He turned in the driver’s seat and pulled on a corner of the blanket. The boy’s shoulders were bare and streaked with dirt. It looked like feces.

Max kept his voice low, as deep a rumble as a well-tuned motorcycle. “Hey, buddy, wake up.”

The boy sighed and pulled the blanket over his head. The smell was toxic. Max breathed through his mouth.

“You know you’re in a car, right? A nice car. Not a bad place to take a nap. I wouldn’t mind taking a nap myself, but I’m a big guy, I have trouble spreading over the gear shift.” Max babbled to get this skittish young animal used to the sound of his voice. Eventually, he would reach out to the creature, give it his hand to smell or lick, after trust had been established.

The boy was awake now. He pushed himself tight into the corner, as far as he could get from Max. His eyes were wide, more surprised than frightened. That was good. Max wasn’t looking forward to bawling and waterworks.

“I’m Max. This is my car.”

Close enough. It would be his car until he dropped it off at a remote location for somebody to take away somewhere and do whatever was appropriate with.

“What’s your name, kiddo?”

“Uh, Jake.”

“Good name. Simple, solid. Are you hungry?”

The kid bit his lower lip. The mention of food got his stomach rumbling. The sound was loud for coming from such a small person.

Max chuckled. “I guess that’s a yes. What would you like?”

The kid gave Max a sliding appraising look from under long eyelashes. He wasn’t a dummy. He knew he was being manipulated, but he was hungry. His stomach growled again and he winced. “Uh, pizza?”

Might be a bit early for that. “Sounds good. We need to clean you up first.”

It had been too direct but Max wasn’t a model of patience. His ex-wife had said it best: Max, you’re not a people’s person.

The boy looked out of the tinted windows. The blanket slipped below his waist. He was emaciated to the point of starvation. His ribs stuck out and all he wore were dirty skivvies. His entire body was an abstract canvas of cuts and bruises. Max felt the anger rising. Who had tortured this kid?

The boy needed to be hosed down, and clothed. It briefly crossed Max’s mind that the cops should be involved. What was done to this kid made him want to puke. He should drop him at a hospital or a church. But that wasn’t in the cards. The boy could describe him and the car.

He was a man of quick decisions. “Let’s go get some grub.”

“Where are we?” the kid said.

There was little to see out there. A parking lot and store walls, a row of skeletal palm trees in the semi-blurriness of dawn. The deep line between the boy’s eyebrows added years to his age. Max thought he’d make a pretty intense teenager someday.

He shrugged the thought away. He couldn’t get bogged down with considerations of the kid’s future when he cringed at the idea of having to scrub him clean. He slammed his foot on the pedal and laid rubber on the tarmac.

He looked for a motel with a store nearby, a shop where nobody would wonder why he bought kid’s clothes. Once that was taken care of, he and the boy—Jake, his name was Jake—needed to have a talk.

 

The motel was part of a chain, moderately priced, clean, no frills. Max had learned long ago that the roach and flea dives should be avoided. The lower in the price range, the more law enforcement was likely to come knocking. And with the brand-new Lincoln, he would stick out so bright he might as well put up a neon sign. A neighboring gas station shop had a rack of souvenir tee-shirts. They were close to the sea, the gear featured surfboards and sailboats. Max grabbed a pair of green flip-flops and swim trunks that looked the right size. He added ham and cheese sandwiches, sodas, and cookies to the stack on the cashier’s desk. The greasy gas station pizza didn’t strike him as a sensible food choice.

The motel room had a shower and tub.

“You’re kinda stinky, Jake. Mind getting some soap action going? Get the muck off in the shower while I fill the tub.” He opened the bathroom door and turned away to give the boy privacy. He put the clothes on the sink. “Let me know if you need help.”

The boy managed on his own. The clothes were about right, even if the red tee-shirt seemed to be draped over a coat hanger.

Max used his pocket knife to cut the sandwich into small pieces. He was concerned the food may make the boy sick. “Eat slow, okay?”

Watching Jake eat, Max felt that poke in the heart again. He had a pretty good idea what happened to the kid. His bruises were multicolored, he’d been beaten over a long period. Beaten, starved, and abused. By the kind of monsters Max would drill for free.

“Do you want to tell me, Jake? Where’s your mom?”

The boy made a sound like a hiccup. Then the tears came. Max repressed a groan. Why was this happening to him? He was a contract killer used to fixing other people’s messes. He carefully avoided creating any of his own. He was a scary bear of a man, with hands the size of skillets. And a heart like a sieve, apparently. Life never stops teaching you stuff … he thought he knew himself inside out by now.

“Okay, no sweat. I ain’t got a mom either. Sorry I asked. Didn’t mean to, you know … How come you were in my back seat, bud?”

The sniffles subsided, smothered in the tee-shirt. “I, uh… I saw you… at the shed.”

The shed. Max came behind Lombroso’s man who had just opened the shed, and he clocked him. Then he rolled him over and zip-tied him. It didn’t take a minute. The kid saw all that, in the dark? Well, unless you’re in the middle of nowhere, there is never total darkness. Light pollution, it’s called

“You were in the shed?”

Jake nodded.

“You were locked up in there?”

Another nod.

“How long?”

“I don’t know.”

The story came out, bit by bit. A boy in foster care, multiple foster homes, each worse than the one before, the last iteration a violent nightmare, several squashed attempts to run away. Then a successful escape, sort of, that ended in the parking lot of a bus terminal where a man took him. He woke up in a box, the garden shed.

“The guy I knocked out kept you in there?” Max’s fury was boiling. He should have put a couple of slugs in that bastard while he had him down. A mistake he planned to remedy as soon as possible.

“He was scary, but not as scary as the other one.”

Lombroso. The son-of-a-bitch. He got off easy, way too easy. Damn!

“I thought you came to save me,” Jake said, “but then you left.”

“The door of the shed was open, you ran out.”

A nod. “I found the car.”

“That was lucky,” Max said. The car was hidden near a clump of trees, outside the property wall.

Jake’s gray eyes clouded. “I won’t go back to the foster home.”

If the kid had been reported missing, was anybody looking for him? Did anybody care? The system was a clusterfuck. “What’s your full name, kiddo?”

“Jacob Llewellyn Denton.”

Max’s eyebrows went up. “You have a funky middle name.”

The answer came sharp as a whiplash. “Oh yeah, what’s yours?”

“Wolfgang.” Max winked. He held out his hand. “Jacob Llewellyn Denton meet Maximilian Wolfgang Singer. And if you call me anything else than Max, I don’t know what I’ll do to you, but it may require stitches.”

“Max Singer.” Jake said the name as if to test how it sounded. He flashed a smile, so bright it dimmed the ray of early sunshine that sliced through the curtains of the motel room.

Max exhaled slowly. He was about to do something stupid.

“We could pretend you’re my nephew or something like that.”

The boy blinked. He looked at the sandwich leftovers on the table. There were tears in his eyes again. “Don’t hurt me, please.”

“I won’t let anybody hurt you ever again, kid.” Max held out his hand.

The boy’s hand was swallowed by the bear paw. “Can I have another middle name?”

Max grinned. “Whatever you like. Not Wolfgang, that’s mine.”

And just like that, he added kidnapping to his catalog of sins. Compared to the other crimes stored in the recesses of his memory, this one felt as light as the ocean breeze brushing the palm trees in front of the motel.

He knew it was going to be fine. Just fine.

And he would bite off the head of anybody who dared say otherwise.