didn’t know what to expect, but what he saw was terrifying and captivating at the same time. The man unwrapped the gauze from around his middle and peeled the blood-sticky pads from just below his ribs. He dug into his pockets again and pulled out a lighter. The lighter was shaped like a boot and he flicked the flame to life and ran the sewing needle under it for about a minute.
Then he picked up the hydrogen peroxide, twisted off the cap, and trickled a good amount over the wound, as he’d done earlier. It fizzled and foamed about the raw flesh like the remnants of ocean waves on a shoreline. The needle poked at the flesh around the wound, reminding Reggie of a tent pole pushing up at the canvas. Resistant until the needle broke and slid through the skin and trailed the fishing line over the wound, then returning the way it’d come, criss-crossing the wound like train tracks.
As he watched, a memory of his mom talking to her sister on the phone shortly after his father’s death snapped to life in Reggie’s mind. He’d caught a snippet of the conversation from his hiding place just outside his parents’ room.
I saw him on the coroner’s table! He was patched up! his mom had said, fighting back tears, sniffling back sobs. Stitched up like a doll!
The man before him now groaned behind the bit of the wallet.
His eyes teared and he had to stop to swipe at them.
His hands trembled and he had to stop again to still them.
And then the wound was closed, trickling blood like a squinty, weeping eye. He motioned Reggie over. Reggie obliged without hesitation. The man took the wallet out of his mouth.
‘Bandage it again …’ he managed, his voice again tremulous.
Reggie nodded and found the unused gauze and pads and went to work, standing, crouching, moving around the man as necessary, bringing the gauze about his middle and over the sterile pads.
‘Make it … tight …’ the man said, and Reggie did so, using the enclosed clasps to bind the gauze. When it was done, he stood and moved back, looking at his work.
The man’s eyes fluttered. He settled back onto the floor, slowly, carefully, favouring his aches and pains.
‘No ambulance …’ he said, losing consciousness. ‘No police … we have an … arrangement …’ he muttered, repeating what he had said earlier. And then he was gone, out cold, and Reggie was alone in the tree house that his dad had built and a stranger now inhabited.
1.
The man awoke in the middle of the night. He sat up, saw Reggie there still watching him. Reggie smiled at the man, feeling dumb, but not knowing how else to greet him. A handshake or wave would have been even dumber.
‘How long …?’ he rasped. Reggie reminded himself to bring some water back for the man next time he went to the house.
‘A few hours,’ he said.
The man held up his arm, looking at his watch.
‘It’s two in the … morning,’ the man said. ‘You’ve been here … the whole time?’
Reggie nodded.
‘Won’t your … parents wonder where you are?’ he asked.
‘I snuck out,’ Reggie said.
The man nodded solemnly, as if considering something of immense importance.
‘You maybe … shouldn’t help me … anymore,’ he said, his voice gaining resolve, becoming stronger, more assured.
‘Why not?’ Reggie asked.
‘I’m not a good … person,’ the man said, choking back a cough, leaning to the side and spitting. Reggie looked at the spit, saw it was tinged with blood.
Then he looked back at the man.
‘Tell me about it,’ he said.
For a time the man said nothing.
Then he turned back to Reggie and did just that.
***
‘I kill people,’ he began.
‘Why?’ Reggie asked, mildly shocked by the man’s admission, and at the same time immediately interested. A part of him knew he should be scared if the man was telling the truth. Knowing the man was telling the truth, however, didn’t bother him as it should.
Reggie had seen death, close up, on a parking lot’s asphalt. And countless times afterward, replayed in night terrors. Its constant assault over the past year had numbed him.
‘For money,’ the man said.
‘Good people or bad people?’
‘Any people,’ he said. ‘Whomever I’m paid to kill.’
‘How many people have you killed?’
‘Many,’ he said slowly with a small nod of his head, as if confirming the answer. ‘Many people.’
‘How long have you been doing it?’
‘A long time,’ he said with another nod. ‘A very long time.’
‘Does it pay well?’
‘What?’ the man said, a slight note of surprise in his tone.
‘Killing people,’ Reggie asked. ‘Does it pay well?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you don’t need the money anymore.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I guess I don’t.’
‘So why do you keep doing it?’
He didn’t answer immediately. It was as if speaking gave the man strength, but in pausing his body rattled with laboured breathing. When he spoke again the tremors passed.
‘I guess it’s all I know how to do,’ he said.
‘Do you like it?’ Reggie asked.
‘Do I like it?’ the man repeated, taken aback once more.
‘My dad did many jobs until he found what he liked doing,’ Reggie said. ‘Then when he found the job he liked, he never left it. We don’t have to do things we don’t like. So you must like doing it.’
The man said nothing.
‘You must like killing people,’ Reggie said.
‘There’s a power in it,’ the man finally said. His hand roamed and found his gun, stroking it, almost as if he wasn’t aware of it. ‘Knowing you hold someone’s life in your hands. That you can end them and the world will continue as if they’d never existed at all.’
Reggie nodded as if he knew what the man was talking about.
But he didn’t speak. Waited instead for the man to continue.
‘There’s a thrill,’ the killer said, ‘a rush when I pull the trigger or tighten the wire around the throat or sink the knife in the belly. There’s no one to tell me what I can and can’t do. I answer to no one.’
‘Have you killed women?’ Reggie asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Have you killed children?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘What about God?’ Reggie said.
‘What about Him?’ the man asked.
‘What about hell?’