Free The Professionals by Owen Laukkanen Page A

pukes fucked up,” he said. “You fucked up real good.” Then he turned toward the front of the van. “Which one of you is Pender, anyway?”
    All of the air seemed to rush out of the van. Pender felt like he’d swallowed a brick. Marie was staring at him, shocked. Mouse stood frozen in the back.
    “Which one of you little fucks is Pender?”
    Sawyer was already reaching for his gun. “I gotta shoot him, right?”
    Beneteau smiled wide. He cackled, triumphant and incessant. Sawyer rammed the gun into the back of his head. Beneteau kept laughing.
    Pender’s brain went to overdrive. He knows my name, he thought.
How?
Who cares? What now? If we kill him, we set the whole goddamn mob against us.
Jesus—shut that guy up.
If we let him go, he knows who I am. Somehow.
How?
Calm down. He knows Pender. How many Penders in the world? In Detroit alone? We’re good. We’re fine. They’ll never find me.
    He looked up, relieved. “It’s all right,” he told Sawyer. “He doesn’t—”
    BAM
. The gun roared, and Beneteau’s head exploded. Blood everywhere. His body pitched forward, out of the van and onto the pavement below. Car alarms sounded outside. Marie screamed. Sawyer yelled at him. “Go, go, go!”
    Mouse slammed the door shut, and now he started yelling, too. Lights started blinking on outside. Pender’s head rang from the shot, the sound. Marie screamed. “We gotta go, Pender. We gotta go!”
    Sawyer smacked him, hard, and he stomped on the gas. A reflex. The van jumped forward, and the tires squealed. The noise came in loud. Lights on at the Beneteau residence. People at the window. Go, go,
go
.
    Pender stood on the gas pedal, and the van fishtailed down the block. He got traction, got the van back under control, and made it to the end of the street. Hard right and more speed. He drove fast, not daring to look in the mirrors, not wanting to know who was behind him.
    They made the main roads and he was still standing on the gas pedal and Sawyer and Marie were grabbing onto his sweater, shouting, and finally he heard them. “We gotta slow down, man. We gotta slow down,” Sawyer was saying. “We can’t be driving so fast right now.”
    Pender realized he was right. He slowed down and tried to blend into traffic. Tried to breathe.
    “How the hell did he know your name, Pender?” said Marie.
    “He must have heard us arguing in the other room,” said Mouse. “Walls are so goddamn thin.” Pender glanced at him in the rearview mirror. He was pale, shaking. Pender was shaking, too. The adrenaline rush.
    “We were too loud,” said Sawyer. “We should have shut the fuck up.”
    Pender watched a blue-and-white patrol car cruise past them in the opposite direction. “We didn’t have to kill him,” he said.
    Mouse stared. “He knew your name.”
    “My last name. So what?”
    “We had to do it, man,” said Sawyer. “We had to get rid of him.”
    Pender shook his head. “There’s gotta be a million Penders in the United States. There’s probably a couple hundred in Detroit alone. They were never going to find us based on one fucking last name, Sawyer.”
    “We couldn’t take the chance.”
    “Bullshit,” said Pender. “That’s bullshit, and you know it. You just wanted an excuse to use that gun.”
    “Hey.” Sawyer leaned forward between the two seats. “I was trying to protect us. I shot him so we’d get away clean.”
    “Yeah, well, now we’ve got a body on our hands.” Pender couldn’t keep the anger from his voice. “Not just any body, a mobster’s body. That means not only do we have the police looking for us, we’ve got Carmela fucking Soprano as well. If you’d let the guy go, he would have gone back to his family and started searching Penders in the phonebook. The
Detroit
phone book. We would have been hundreds of miles away before he figured out his Pender wasn’t from around here.
If
he figured it out.”
    Pender turned to look Sawyer in the eye. “You fucked us up, Matt.