Free Bernhardt's Edge by Collin Wilcox

Santa Rosa, the smallest town he’d ever worked. He’d arrived five hours ago. He’d slept last night at a hotel near the San Francisco airport. He’d left a call for seven o’clock. He’d had breakfast, rented a car, made the drive to Santa Rosa in exactly an hour and forty minutes.
    And so far he hadn’t seen one black face. Mexicans, yes. Lots of Mexicans. But not a single black face. Meaning that, wherever he went, whatever he did, they’d remember him. He’d seen it in the motel manager’s eyes, seen that look, the look you always lived with, the look you never could quite forget.
    He’d picked the Holiday Inn, always a good choice, probably with the most rooms in town. He’d washed up, changed into a sweater, took the heavy suitcase, went out the back way, to his car. He’d put the case in the trunk and driven to the Starlight Motel, on the other side of the city. His first drive by, his first trip around the block, had told him a lot—told him that it would be very simple, to keep track of the Toyota.
    And very difficult, very goddam difficult, to get to them, get to the mark and the woman, get the job done. Because the motel was in a residential neighborhood: one-story houses built lot line to lot line, white picket fence to white picket fence, with no gaps, no vacant lots between, no alleys, even, that he could use. Meaning that, to get to unit twelve, he’d have to hop a fence, risk barking dogs, risk lights coming on, even husbands in pajamas, with guns.
    He glanced in the mirror, checked his watch: 3:15 P.M. In Detroit it was 5:15, less than twenty-four hours since “Carter” had called. No question, jet airplanes had changed the world. The telephone, the jet engine, communication satellites, they were changing everything. And computers, too. In a few more years, everyone would be hooked into a computer: big brother watching them all.
    In Sacramento, they had a fingerprint computer that. could make a matchup in minutes, a matchup that would take months, by hand. Meaning that, if he left fingerprints, they could make him before he got back to San Francisco, if they were hooked into the FBI’s computer, in Washington.
    The police had the computers—and he had the twenty-five thousand dollars, safe in the suitcase with the guns, and the silencer, and the ice picks, and the ammo—and the two pairs of surgical gloves, to take care of the computer.
    Three-thirty, now. Three-thirty on September thirteenth. In four hours it would be dark, or almost dark: seven-thirty, time to go to work.
    But in those four hours, they could leave, the woman and the man in unit twelve. They could check out, get in their Toyota, take off.
    Possible, but not likely. Checkout time had come and gone. If they hadn’t left by now, checked out, they probably would stay the night. Probably. But not for certain. Meaning that, if he didn’t want to lose them, he had to keep watching the entrance to the motel.
    Meaning that, to a dead certainty, he’d be noticed: a black man in a maroon Oldsmobile, hanging around. He could—would—keep moving. He could park a block away, and still see the entrance. Or else he could move forward a block, and see the entrance in the mirror. But that was as far as he could go: a hit man on a string, tied to his own stakeout.
    Was “Carter’s” private detective on the scene now? Right now, watching? He should’ve asked more about the detective. It had been a mistake, not to ask more. But in “Carter’s” place, he wouldn’t have answered. Or, if he’d answered, he would have lied.
    So, to be safe, he had to figure that someone was watching. A white man, probably. A white detective staying at the motel, probably. Watching.
    And some of them, some private detectives, they carried guns.
    Everything you get, his mother used to say, you pay for. Meaning that everything was a tradeoff. It was