Free Duke City Hit by Max Austin

promised. He’d been staying there for a month under another name.
    “I watched the room until his light went out that night. I waited two hours more, letting him get fully asleep. The motel was quiet and dark. I go to the guy’s door and slap it hard a couple of times and yell, ‘Police! Open up!’ ”
    “Isn’t that about the last thing you want to yell to a fugitive?”
    “Rookie mistake. I hear a window break on the far side of the motel. I sprint around the building and, sure enough, there’s my man, running barefoot across a parking lot in his boxer shorts.”
    Vic looked around, then said, “I emptied a whole clip at him from fifty feet away, making a lot of noise. He went down, but I couldn’t go finish him because lights were coming on all over the motel and I needed to get out of there. I didn’t know for sure the guy was dead until the next morning, when I saw it on the TV news.”
    “Wow.”
    “One of the longest nights of my life.”
    “Yet you came back for more.”
    “As bad as that first hit went, it was an epiphany.”
    “A what?”
    “An eye-opening moment in my life. I felt like I’d found myself.”
    “Really?”
    “I know it sounds hokey. But you know that feeling when something just clicks? And you go, ‘Oh, I should’ve known this all along.’ ”
    “Sure.”
    “That’s the way this was. No remorse. No questioning. Just
pop, pop, pop.
Job done. Money earned. On to the next.”
    “You wanted to do it again.”
    “I couldn’t
wait
to do it again. Fortunately, Art always seemed to have a case or two like this one. Stool pigeons. Fugitives somebody doesn’t want found. Art might be holding paper on them, but the client pays a higher price and, what the hell, we remove some traffic from the crowded judicial system.”
    Ryan clinked bottles with him and they drank and came up for air and burped and drank some more. Their movements were so similar, Vic felt like he was looking in a mirror. A mirror that showed him as he was thirty years ago, not these insulting modern mirrors that showed a stooped senior citizen.
    “Eventually, I quit doing bounty hunting altogether. I specialized. Art and I made a lot of money together. After he died, Penny took over the business. We’ve managed to make it work.”
    “See?” Ryan said. “It
is
a family business.”
    “Not your family. You really don’t want anything to do with it. It’s not for you. Trust me.”
    “I think you’re wrong there, Vic.” Ryan smiled. “Because that thing you felt the first time, the ‘epiphany’? I got the same feeling in Phoenix. At that swimming pool.”

Chapter 18
    As they neared the Desert Rose Motel, Ryan said, “Just let me out anywhere.”
    “Nonsense,” Vic said. “I’ll drop you at your room. This isn’t the best neighborhood, you know.”
    “It’s
your
neighborhood.”
    “See? What if there are dangerous men like me living around here?”
    “They may be dangerous, Vic, but I’m sure they’re nothing like you.”
    The space squarely in front of room eleven was empty, and Vic slid the Cadillac into the slot, headlights illuminating the red door’s peeling paint.
    “Thanks for dinner, Vic.”
    “You’re welcome. Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”
    “Maybe so.”
    They shook hands, and Ryan got out of the Cadillac. He took his time unlocking the door to his room, but Vic seemed determined to see him safely indoors. Finally, the lock clicked from the inside and the door opened a few inches, still on its security chain. Tina peered through the gap. She was dressed for bed, in tank top and sweatpants, and her long black hair was pulled back into a ponytail.
    “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “I didn’t know who was fooling around out here.”
    “So you opened the door?”
    She tried to look past him, squinting into the headlights.
    “Is everything okay out there?”
    “It’s fine. Let me in.”
    “Is that your dad in the car?”
    “Come on, Tina,” he said tightly.
    The