Peg never made dinner that night. I’m not even sure if she and Robbie ever left her room. I think we all just wanted that night to hold our lovers close in the calm of the storm.

I had no idea then the lengths the men Patrick worked with would go if they felt the need. I was naïve. My biggest fear was that Patrick would somehow be taken from me, that he’d be picked up by the police or killed fighting a war that I didn’t understand.

I didn’t realize that the big bad wolf was closer than I could imagine.

Not even when Patrick turned from me as I fell asleep, pulling me in against his back as he lay facing the doorway to our room, a pistol in easy reach next to him on the floor.

Chapter 28

Patrick

I’d always thought my da was an idiot, but I couldn’t help but respect the man. He knew everything about everyone, and he never forgot a face. We were on a job that was taking days instead of minutes, and I swear the man had the patience of a saint. I guess that had worked well for him in the years before I’d taken over his job.

They called him The Executioner. At first, it had been hard to reconcile the fact that the man who loved my mother so fiercely and had taught me to tie my shoes was a cold-blooded killer—but it hadn’t taken long before I understood it to some degree.

He’d learned how to separate the two different lives in a way that was still a struggle for me after two months. It was as if he shut off one part of his brain when he was at home, and the other part while he was working—though I knew he’d struggled with that when I’d been brought in. In his mind, the two lives were completely different. He was two different men.

I wasn’t able to compartmentalize my life that way.

Sometimes, it took all I had to wrap my arms around Amy when she raced to meet me the moment I got home. She couldn’t see the blood on my hands, but I could. I felt like a monster… and those were on the good days.

I woke her in the middle of the night just to lose myself in her body. I sat at the pub where she worked just to watch her move around the room. I couldn’t stand to be at home without her. I shook like a man with palsy when she left for school in the mornings, and found myself sitting on a bench across the street more often than not, waiting for her to finish for the day.

It was finally the day of her commencement ceremony, and I knew without a doubt that I was going to miss it. The man we’d been watching was moving around his house as if he didn’t have a care in the world, and there wasn’t anything I could do to speed things up and give him a dose of reality. His wife and three kids showed occasionally in the first floor windows, and we couldn’t move until they were gone. It was bloody frustrating in the extreme.

We’d been sitting in the car all morning, and I had to piss so bad I felt as if my eyes were floating. I should have known that coffee wasn’t a good idea when Da had refused a cup, but I’d been so tired I hadn’t been thinking straight. Sleep was getting harder to come by as the days went on, especially on nights that I was away from Amy. I’d found myself plagued with either insomnia or nightmares, the two intertwining until I was no longer aware of how long it had been since I’d slept.

The morning was moving into afternoon when Da finally sat up a little in his seat and nodded toward the house. The wife and husband were moving between the house and the car, carrying what looked to be luggage.

Fuck.

He had better not be leaving town before we could get to him. My orders had been clear. Eliminate him before he had a chance to do any more damage than he’d already done. I wasn’t sure whose ear he’d been whispering in, but the information we’d been given said he was passing things on that he shouldn’t have been and it needed to be stopped.

We watched silently as the man kissed his children as they piled in the car, then stepped over to his wife to kiss her long and hard. I didn’t quite understand what I was seeing until I heard Da mumble, “Well, fuck me,” as the wife got into the car and drove away.

It was our chance.

We waited about a minute after the wife’s car turned the corner before we stepped quietly out of our car and moved toward the house. It was a stroke of luck that the family seemed to have been going on some sort of trip. They wouldn’t find him for days.

As we reached the side of the house, headed for the back door we knew led out to a small garden, we heard the shot. Both of us ducked down and searched the street, but nothing was moving.

“Jesus Christ,” Da hissed as he stood to his full height and looked into one of the windows. “De man shot his bloody head off.”

I moved in behind him to get a look and then wished I hadn’t.

The man was sitting on his sofa, a hand-stitched afghan wrapped around him like a cocoon, with one hand out—holding the gun that was resting on his chest. He’d pulled himself so far into the blanket that he hadn’t even tilted his head back before putting the barrel into his mouth and pulling the trigger.

He’d wrapped himself like a baby before ending his own life.

“He must’ve known we were comin’,” Da said quietly, pushing me from where I was frozen. “It’s time to leave. Now.”

We made our way to the car in what seemed like slow motion, and for the first time in over a month I felt the urge to vomit.

It took us over an hour to get home, and we didn’t speak one word during the entire trip. I was sure that my father had seen much more gruesome sights in the past twenty years, but he didn’t seem any more inclined to talk than I was.