Free The Killing Kind by Chris Holm Page B

their product from the LA family, which would make this a supply chain issue.”
    “How old is he?”
    Lester sighed. “Listen, Mikey, I know you, and I know what you’re thinking here. But Franklin isn’t some scared kid who fell in with a bad crowd—he’s a fucking drug dealer.”
    “How old, Les?”
Les hesitated. “He’s sixteen.”
Sixteen. Jesus. “There a time line on the hit?”
    “Nothing solid. Be a few days, at least.”
    Hendricks finished his beer. Nodded as if something had been decided. “Get me on a flight to Long Beach. I want to give this kid a look.”
    “You sure you don’t wanna sit this one out, Mikey? You’ve been running yourself ragged lately, and you haven’t even been home yet since your last job.”
    “I’m fine, Les,” Hendricks replied. “Book the flight.”
    “Say for a second that I’m wrong about this Franklin, and he really is a decent guy—there’s no way he’d be able to pay your fee. Only way he’d have the money’s if he’s crooked. You’ve said yourself you’ll never kill for free.”
    “True. But I can warn him to get clear, at least.”
    “And if I’m right? If this kid is just another piece of shit drug dealer?”
    “If you’re right, I let him die.”
    Lester studied his friend a moment, the lines in Hendricks’s face deepened by the angle of the light.
    He’s looking old, Lester thought. Tired.
    Not for the first time, Lester wondered just how long Hendricks could keep this up—and what kind of toll this job was taking on him. Gone was the scrubbed idealist he’d met those many years ago when their unit was first assembled. Then again, apart from him and Hendricks, gone was the whole damn unit. Maybe becoming something cold and hard was the only way to make it through.
    Lester’d tried another route. Tried to put the past behind him. After his injury, Lester was of no further use to the military—his very existence a reminder to the current administration of the sins of the past. His discharge had been listed as general, as he knew it would be; regardless of how valiantly their unit served, their actions were covert and could never be acknowledged, so an honorable discharge was never in the cards. Still, after all he gave—and all he lost—it stung. And when his parents died just six months after he returned Stateside, burned alive in his childhood home when his mother fell asleep with a cigarette between her lips, he just gave up. He used his parents’ life insurance and his meager disability benefits to buy this bar—an utter shithole at the time—and spent the next year or so behind it, the place closed more often than not as he tried his damnedest to crawl into a bottle and die. He’d lost everything—his friends, his family, his hope, his sense of purpose.
    Then one day, Michael walked through that door—back from the dead—and everything changed. Michael gave him hope. Gave him purpose. Gave him some small measure of absolution, as though he’d been sent by God himself to let Lester know the guilt he’d been carrying around for getting his unit killed was too much for any one man to bear. Michael represented both an easing of his burden and someone to help him shoulder the remaining load.
    The money didn’t hurt, either. Anyone who says it can’t buy happiness should do without it for a while. The money he and Michael brought in turned the bar around—turned it into the kind of homey neighborhood place one goes to live a little, instead of just die slowly. And, more important, it got Lester out of the storeroom and into a proper apartment. He’d bought the bar before the market crashed, and by the time Mike found him, he’d been so far underwater he couldn’t afford a place to live, so he’d been sleeping on a cot in back. Now the bar was beautiful and so was his apartment, with its stunning view of Portland spreading out below him to the west and nothing but the icy blue Atlantic to the east.
    Lester didn’t think of