NEVER A FRONTWARD STEP, PART TWENTY-ONE

Yvette wore her hat again the next morning. I’d checked out of my hotel and was ready for the heat as I stepped from the lobby. I’d nodded to the doorman, and he’d nodded to me, and I counted his pile of heat-stricken tourists stacked in the shade. I drove my hire car—a new car, of course, and a new company—down the motorway yet again, with the pulsing lights in the darkness. I had already thrown the ubiquitous sanitary floor crepe out the window.

As I walked down to the dock, I felt the security lights on my back from my old friend’s house on the hill. He had contracted me some years ago to take out a thorny property developer, and his laugh washed through my head as I walked to Yvette’s pier.

“I had a feeling you’d be okay,” I told her.

“No one takes any notice of an old fisherman,” she said. “Even if she’s sitting next to a hitman.”

“Don’t really like that word.”

“Can’t imagine you would.”

“So I suppose I owe you one.”

“How’s that?”

“You saved my life.”

“Just trying to redress some karma. I perform two killings to your one—remember?”

“Thanks anyway.”

“Could have brought me a flower. Being so grateful and all.”

“Guys in suits don’t bring flowers.”

We sat for a few moments in silence, and it occurred to me that I had never seen her with a fish, let alone catching one. Seemed to fit, though.

“So,” she said, “did everything work out?”

“Not exactly. I fulfilled someone’s revenge fantasy, but I didn’t get them what they really wanted.”

“An answer.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think there’ll be an answer?”

I thought about this for a moment and then reached inside my jacket. I pulled out the photograph of the unknown dead man and showed it to Yvette.

She raised her eyebrows. “Oh,” she said. “Him. You should have said.”

I smiled.

NEVER A FRONTWARD STEP, PART TWENTY

Afterwards, when I’d spoken to the brother and taken his body to a National Park, I buried him. I took pictures of the grave, as per my contract, and then I sat down on some mulchy earth and reflected on my thoughts. Whenever I finished a contract, whenever the blood had stopped and run cold, I would try to convince myself this would be the last time. But then I would see myself in a grey shadowless office, or in an unemployment queue, and I would see the corner I had painted myself into. I still had not found the dead man from the photograph, the brother of the man I had just killed. My target had not known a thing. This I had not anticipated. But I had to admit it was always a possibility.

NEVER A FRONTWARD STEP, PART NINETEEN

The brother was not hard to find, not as obvious as Big Red Reg at Hungry Jack’s, but nonetheless it didn’t take a genius. The notes I had on the brother were comprehensive. It wasn’t like I knew the colour of his pyjamas—or any of those ridiculous details you see in Hollywood police files—but an old head like me could put two and two together. I knew he’d be waiting for me. He knew his dead brother’s widow wanted to know where her husband was buried. He had known someone would come for him.

I called my wife from a payphone in the city, as strangers rushed past me in the lunch-hour cram.

“This is the final thing,” I told her. “I’m going to visit him.”

“Does he know you’re here?”

“I think he has a fair idea.”

“Did you sort out the guy on the beach?”

“Yeah.”

“Good luck.”

“Okay.”

And it wasn’t as if my wife thought that every time we spoke it could be our last words to each other, but it was at least something to consider.