Revenant

Chapter 30

Any sort of setup takes time, unfortunately. Even when you're rushing it.

It took a full day and a half to get everything together, which was both incredibly quick and unbearably slow. I couldn't exactly afford to take a lot of time to prep, what with the possibility of someone coming into town to kill me and all. Or, for that matter, the rather sobering possibility of someone who was already in town and preparing to kill me. Generally speaking, when confronted with either possibility, my first instinct is to be somewhere else... preferably someplace far, far away. After all, given enough time and planning, anyone can be assassinated.

Anyone.

Assassins are no exception. In fact, it's something of an occupational hazard, since there aren't too many people in my line of work who aren't eventually taken out by one of our own.

Everyone in the industry knows that's the way things are, of course. Most know before they even get started in this business. The ones who don't, well... they find out eventually.

So needless to say the additional time required to put this setup together was making me the teensiest bit tense, and I'm prone to want to do some rather silly things when I'm worried. I'd actually considered paging agent Moss yesterday in order to have a quick sit-down and discuss exactly how he found out about me, precisely what he'd learned while investigating me, and who else could potentially know that information. I didn't, of course, because if the Hand had learned about me through him, and they hadn't pinned down my exact location yet, they might keep an eye on him to see if he would lead them to me. At least, keeping an eye on him is the sort of thing I would do under the circumstances if I'd been hired to take me out.

Funny, the thought 'How would I go about killing myself?' is usually a sign of someone contemplating suicide. For me, in this particular situation, it was just the opposite.

Getting both Shoe and the funeral home prepped for tonight's 'event' was understandably exhausting, considering all the work that had been put into it. I'd received some help on the first day from a few of Diavolo's guys, none of whom were on what I was now referring to as the 'short list' of Stevie's remaining targets. As Shoe had mentioned that night on the rooftop, he had called back all of the guys with targets on their heads, against Diavolo's wishes. Now, after a reportedly brief and unpleasant conversation with their boss, they were all back in the air, or on a train, or otherwise out of town, as per my request.

All of them, that was, save for one particularly nervous fellow, who was probably still smoking like a chimney atop the funeral home roof somewhere above me.

He probably had several good reasons to be nervous, honestly. He'd been dressed down earlier that day by a rather annoyed Angelo Diavolo for one, an activity that I presume usually results in someone's head being turned into a fine pink mist. His co-worker Shoe had been murdered, for another, and was currently lying in a large faux-oak casket somewhere in the building beneath the roof he was currently perched upon. And now he was sitting all by himself, with no protection to speak of, sitting on still and playing the role of what Diavolo had both specifically and explicitly referred to as 'bait' during the whole dressing-down process. I would imagine discovering that your boss considers you the very least important employee among those targeted for death, or at least the most expendable among those who remain, is not a very pleasant thing to become aware of. Then again, maybe Diavolo just felt like being blunt. After all, 'bait' was exactly what this guy was.

I didn't have a ready explanation for how Stevie was tracking down his former co-workers, nor had I gained any real insight from the multiple accounts of encounters with revenants I'd read in Atticus's papers. Stevie had pinpointed Shoe's rather unlikely position atop the building roof down near the docks with relative ease, despite the fact that I myself didn't know I was going to be ending up on that particular rooftop a couple of nights ago. He'd also said during one of our encounters that I wasn't one of 'them', and that he couldn't 'feel it', which I later realized could mean that he somehow had a palpable sense of his intended victims, which could perhaps include things like where they were, or how far away. For the moment, I was working off the assumption that this ability to track down the fellows on his short list was due to 'other'.