Free Namaste by Sean Platt, Realm, Sands, Johnny B. Truant Page A

counter that lost by Nisha .  
    But if Amit stopped now, she would have died for nothing: no lesson learned. Everything had purpose, and if Nisha died in front of him, it was to catalyze Amit into action. Some of his duty was done, but he had only chipped the fingernails of the hand behind the strings. If he did not continue and strike at the heart, the evil’s hand would buff its nails and deal more death. That was far worse than Amit’s transgressions.
    He thought of the compound and the wall. He thought of the seven armed guards at the gate and the pairs around the edges, all within easy sight of each other. He could take out one man, then possibly retreat. But to what end? He’d never be able to take another. And they would surely add more guards tonight, now that the killer monk had declared his intentions. The Right Hand had been comparatively easy.  
    He could wait for the boss to come out, but there was little chance that he’d do it in the way Amit needed. The man had to be alone before his guts could spill. This wasn’t an assassination; it was, at least in part, an interrogation. If he came out, the boss would be in his car, in public, surrounded by guards.  
    Amit could attempt to infiltrate as a guard, but he wasn’t big enough, and they didn’t wear helmets.  
    He could try to scale the wall in stealth, but he’d circled several times and hadn’t seen any expanse without at least four guards in view.  
    He kept his eyes closed, deeply inhaling the day’s sweet air. The sounds of nature surrounded him, down to the slightest rustle of brush. Animals skittered. Beneath his legs, he felt the rock where he sat. He breathed, feeling lighter, until the deeper part of his mind heard nothing. While his outside layer remained hyper-aware, a pure calm descended inside. Amit was in a void, with nothingness around him. Floating, as if in a tank.
    Everything had a weakness.  
    Amit waited for the situation’s vulnerability to surface from the void.

Chapter 10

    A WEEK LATER , J ASON A LFERO set the supreme pizza on a tray he’d taken from a high cabinet above his stainless steel refrigerator. The tray was oversized, like Jason. Sometimes, it occurred to him that he was a cliché: fat, Italian, and able to pretend that his wife believed their money came from a line of designer vitamin waters — when in fact she knew about the dirty dealings and neck-breaking that were part of NutriBev’s ancillary marketing plan. Julia was a good woman and didn’t like what her husband had dragged them into, but Jason was a good liar, and she mostly believed they were barely criminals.  
    Everyone cheated on their taxes; everyone bought shoes that were sewn together by Third-World kids working in some Malaysian sweatshop. Every American had benefitted from the theft of land and the murder of natives, and had the luxury, today, of outrage because nothing could be changed and outrage cost nothing. Everyone was complicit in crimes against the environment, and everyone here was party to the segmentation of the very poor into the gutters. Jason wasn’t a bad guy; he was a realist. He had a few businesses that skirted legality. So what? He was being honest; everyone else was a hypocrite.
    The pizza was medium. He used to get larges, but his doctor said in stern terms that eating more large supremes was tantamount to driving a stake into his heart. He’d shown Jason a few photos because his most frequent patient was great at getting terrified about his own health in short bursts. The photos showed blood vessels so tightly constricted with arterial plaques that blood hadn’t been able to go through them. “You’re begging for a heart attack, Jason,” Doctor Altieri had told him.  
    But heart attacks were too common for hypochondriacs, so when his behavior failed to change, Doc A had discussed a few more exotic diseases, constantly flicking his eyes away as he listed them, as if embarrassed about what he was saying. Jason