Kevin's breathing sounded like a saw cutting through wet wood. Haakuh. Haakuh. It was too loud. It was the only thing he could hear over the blood rushing in his ears.
He stood in the kitchen of Marco Reyes' suburban safe house. It wasn't a fortress. It was a colonial in a quiet neighborhood, filled with the smell of fabric softener and leftover dinner.
Kevin wiped his sweating palms on his silver suit trousers. The fabric was expensive, Italian, and currently stained with garden mulch from when he had tripped climbing through the patio window. He was high, a jagged, chemical cocktail of his own design meant to steady his nerves, but it had only cranked the volume of the world up to a screaming pitch.
Be the fire, Kevin told himself, gripping the heavy pistol. The metal was slippery. John said James was a fire. I can be fire.
He moved toward the stairs. His foot hit a squeaky board. Creak.
Kevin flinched, spinning around, aiming the gun at a refrigerator covered in crayon drawings. Nothing. Just the hum of the compressor.
He forced himself to turn back. He wasn't James. James floated. Kevin stomped. He moved up the stairs, his knees knocking together, the gun shaking so violently the barrel drew circles in the air. He wasn't here to kill Marco. Marco was at a club. Marco was guarded. Kevin was here to kill the vulnerability. He was here to prove that the "Spanish James" had left his flank exposed.
A message, Kevin thought, his teeth chattering. An announcement.
He reached the landing. The hallway was dark, lined with family photos. Marco smiling. A beautiful woman laughing. Two kids, a boy and a girl, eating ice cream.
Kevin felt a wave of nausea. This wasn't the Gilded Hall. This wasn't a room of gangsters. This was a home.
Don't be rust, his father's voice whispered in his ear. Don't be a flaw.
He kicked open the master bedroom door.
It wasn't a smooth, tactical breach. He kicked it too hard, losing his balance, stumbling into the room.
The woman in the bed woke up instantly. She sat up, confused, hair messy, blinking in the sudden light from the hallway.
"Marco?" she whispered.
Kevin raised the gun. He didn't have a silencer. He hadn't thought to bring one. He just had the heavy .45 he had taken from the armory.
"Don't," Kevin whimpered. He was the one with the gun, but he was the one pleading. "Don't look at me."
The woman saw him, a sweating, twitching man in a dirty silver suit. She didn't scream. She froze.
Kevin squeezed the trigger.
He anticipated the recoil too much. He yanked the gun down.
BOOM.
The sound was deafening. It was an explosion in a shoebox. The bullet missed the woman entirely, burying itself in the mattress between her legs. Feathers and foam erupted.
Now she screamed. It was a high, tearing sound that pierced Kevin's eardrums.
"Shut up!" Kevin yelled, panic taking the wheel. "Shut up!"
He fired again. BOOM.
The bedside lamp shattered. Darkness fell over the room, save for the hallway light.
The woman was scrambling backward, clawing at the headboard, begging in rapid Spanish.
Kevin squeezed his eyes shut and pulled the trigger again. And again. BOOM. BOOM.
The screaming stopped.
Kevin opened his eyes. The room smelled of sulfur and burnt feathers. His ears were ringing, a high pitched whine that drowned out his own thoughts. The woman lay half off the bed. It wasn't clean. It wasn't artistic. It was a mess of red and white sheets.
He stood there, panting, the gun smoking in his hand. He felt sick. He felt small.
Then, from the room across the hall, a door opened.
"Mama?"
A sleepy, small voice.
Kevin spun around. A boy, maybe seven years old, stood in the hallway rubbing his eyes. Behind him, a younger girl peered out from a pink room.
They saw Kevin. They saw the gun. They saw the dark shape on the bed behind him.
Kevin looked at them.
James would have walked away. James would have known the point was made. Or maybe James would have killed them before they even woke up, silent and merciful.
Kevin wasn't James. Kevin was a terrified animal who had just made a mistake and now had to bury it.
No witnesses, the chemical part of his brain shrieked. If they see you, John will know you were messy. If John knows you were messy, you are rust.
"Go back to sleep," Kevin whispered, raising the gun. His arm was shaking so bad he had to use his other hand to steady the wrist.
The boy's eyes went wide. He opened his mouth to scream.
Kevin fired.
BOOM.
The bullet hit the doorframe, sending splinters flying. The boy flinched, covering his head.
Kevin advanced. He wasn't flowing like smoke. He was stumbling, crying, snot running down his nose. He walked toward the children like a nightmare that didn't know how to end itself.
"I'm sorry," Kevin sobbed, stepping over a toy truck. "I'm sorry, I have to, I have to be the fire."
He fired again.
The hallway lit up with the muzzle flash.
BOOM.
The boy fell.
The girl screamed, a sound that was cut short by the next shot.
BOOM.
Silence rushed back into the house, heavy and accusing.
Kevin stood in the hallway. The gun clicked empty on a dry chamber. Click. Click.
He looked at what he had done.
There was no artistry here. There was no symphony. There was just a hallway destroyed by a panicked amateur, walls pockmarked with missed shots, the carpet stained with the blood of innocents. It didn't look like a warning to a rival Don. It looked like a tragedy on the evening news.
Kevin dropped the gun. It landed on the carpet with a dull thud.
He fell to his knees, his silver suit bagging around him. He put his hands over his ears, trying to block out the ringing, trying to block out the silence, trying to block out the truth.
He hadn't lit a match. He had just thrown up on the carpet.
He retched, dry heaving onto the floor next to the toy truck. He gasped for air, his lungs burning, his mind fracturing under the weight of his own inadequacy. He was a butcher. He was a failure.
And worst of all, he knew his father would look at this carnage and see only the rust.