Can a reflection kill?
The morning sun, soft and glowing, beat the last of the rain towards the golden horizon, where pure light and the strong shapes of clouds floated slowly over sharp shadowed buildings. The hard details formed a ring around them that cut through the dull blur of everything else, like jaws closing in. He felt something was coming with the day that would slice his soul neatly into two pieces, the worthless and the invaluable.
They ate breakfast at a café in a shopping center just a few blocks away from the apartment, and Sam ignored him the entire time. She stared at her phone and talked to EP on the earbuds until the food came. Gradie looked around at the packed Saturday crowd and tried to push on the Hardworld in little ways it might let him get away with.
A woman spilled iced coffee down the front of her chest and stood up in a hurry, pulling on her white t-shirt while dabbing her tits with napkins. A man got a call from a telescam company three times in a row. A waitress sensed him watching her and shot him a smoldering smile over her shoulder.
But, he was never sure any of it was out of the ordinary, couldn’t even be sure if he had been thinking anything at all before they happened, and other events were absolutely opposed to his intents. The brunette in the crop top wasn’t seated across from them. The food didn’t come out of the kitchen when he commanded it to. Sam never remembered last night fondly and decided to forgive him for threatening to rip her towel off.
After a while, upon reflection of his memory, he was sure he had about as much control over the world around him as the coffee cooling in a forgotten mug on an empty table. His electric sense of power ignited by the shootouts and the clothes evaporated. The chain of events leading to his suit being dropped off was laid out perfectly logically in his memory, and his Spirit was too beaten down by something to argue. That something, he realized as the waitress set down their food, was Sam’s coldness. He tried to push her out of his mind as he ate, to gather all the memories that had enlivened him earlier in the morning, but it wasn’t the same. The Otherworld seemed a dream, while Sam was very real and very close.
He looked out across the tables, out to the teeming dawn breaking over the road, and reached his hand, almost reflexively, to his hip, where his pistol rested under his coat. He pressed the fabric with his hands until he felt the polymer of the grip, and tried to remember what it had felt like to—
“Hm-mm,” Sam cleared her throat. He moved his hand away and went back to eating, half-formed confidence fluttering in his head.
Out on the fractured concrete lot on the way to the car, Philip came over the earbuds.
“How’s the date going?”
Sam just groaned.
“Hot and heavy,” Gradie said. “Taking a water break right now. But I think we need something with more electrolytes.” Sam glared at him.
“Oh yeah, he took his shirt off and I threw up, really took—” Philip interrupted her.
“Whatever, listen. Johnny and I are over at the bail bonds finishing up. Come pick us up.”
“Don’t you have your own car?” Sam snapped.
“What, worried I’ll stink up your little Honda? I showered today. I promise.” He sounded like a dad teasing a child.
“All right, see you in a bit.” Sam’s voice was like a bad script reading.
EP added the address to their phones and Gradie added another marker that popped up on the dash navigator as Sam pulled out of the lot.
“What the fuck is that?”
“A coffee shop. That stuff at the café sucked ass.”
Sam was quiet for a bit.
“Yeah, it did.” She pushed past the speed limit and rolled through a freshly red light. Gradie exhaled sharply and she laughed.
“Just close your eyes if you’re scared, little buddy.”
“Are you still upset about the towel thing?”
“Holy shit dude I don’t care.”
“I wasn’t used to seeing you out of those coveralls.”
“Yeah I know, you almost had a heart attack.”
He heard the smile in her voice, and stayed quiet the rest of the way to the Coffee shop, instead focusing his mind on what he could remember about it.
The shop was at the edge of the gentrification near the hospital district. Opened two decades ago by a former Mexican lawyer with an obsession for coffee and handloading. Photos of him in front of a loading press and a La Pavoni Europiccola lever espresso machine, the same look of loving focus in both, hung on the wall over the green recliners and couches in one of the seating areas. The woman at the counter may have been his niece or granddaughter and mirrored the look of focus from the photos when she pulled the shots. Gradie ordered the drinks and let the world move, like a thing he had been pushing against, and now released to sail somewhere wonderful.
Back in the car, he handed her her drink and looked away, pretending to watch the lot thoughtfully.
“I miss pronounced Cortado and everyone laughed at me,” he said suddenly and Sam half choked on her drink laughing. Then she got still and smacked her tongue in her mouth.
“Oh my god finally,” she whispered.
“I said it like Potato.”
“Shut up!” She let her laugh slip in and he smiled at the side of her face.
“This coffee is unbelievable!”
“I know,” Gradie spoke in a tone like sharing a secret. Sam looked at him with an expression of pure surprise. It was so endearing he almost squeezed the lid off his cup.
“What, you pushed it?”
“Yeah. You needed some good caffeine.”
Sam gave him an ‘I don’t know about that’ sideways glance and patted him on the thigh.
“That’s sweet, but how do you know it’s not a coincidence?”
Gradie smiled and sipped his flat white. It was perfect.
“I don’t.”
The bail bonds office was stuck on the end of a former macaroni factory (still proudly announced in faded stencils on the side) wedged between the highway and a triple-tracked vein of the railroad. The parking lot was shadowed by the curving arm of a ramp at the edge of the mix-master, where two highways webbed over the intersection of two rail lines. The nexus thus formed had the feeling of some great exposed organ, at times alive and throbbing, and other times dead still like a dusty museum piece. Sitting in the lot, Gradie had the sensation of being at the edge of some strange explosion or conflict that had just missed him.
Philip came out the door smiling in a navy tracksuit and a cloud of cigar smoke. Luke followed in skinny jeans and a hoodie that bulged slightly from his plate carrier and a backpack hanging from one hand.
Sam nodded at Philip.
“You see that smile? There’s gonna be some shooting today.”
Philip squinted in the open passenger window at Gradie.
“What the fuck are you wearing?”
“My Sunday best.”
“Cute.
“Thanks baby.”
“All right kid, get in the back.” He motioned to Gradie while Luke came around to the back door.
“Did you bring enough to share?” Sam said. Philip's smile turned up his cigar and Gradie had the feeling of being privy to a parental apology as he pulled a pack of Marlboro red 100’s out of his jacket and shook them at Sam.
“That will do, pig.” Sam took them and started packing them against the steering wheel as everyone got situated. Luke got his own cigar lighted and offered one to Gradie with the torch lighter.
“Thanks.” Gradie rolled the end over the flame, regretting he had finished his coffee. The pairing was a favorite of his Self, and he felt he owed him at least that.
“You know I wouldn’t let anyone else smoke those things around me,” Philip said to Sam.
“What, 'cause they’re not hand-rolled by starving Cuban kids?”
“Dominican grandmas, actually.”
“Mi Abuela!” Luke raised his cigar in a toast and they drove off towards the highway with smoke billowing out the slightly open bullet-resistant skylight like the car was on fire.
An orange mustang with the top down shot out of the neighborhood onto the access road and Sam had to slam on her brakes and blare the horn, getting ash all down the front of her shirt. Her middle finger rose up from the car like a salute.
“God I wish I could shoot his fucking tires out! Sam reached for something in the center console, then pulled her hand away and returned the finger through the windshield.
“Ok asshole, just thank Jesus when you get to the strip club that my boss considers you collateral!”
Philip chuckled.
“Shit, back in the day, he would have dumped a mag through this motherfucker’s back window for less than that.” He glared at the Mustang’s rearview mirror and took a slow drag on the cigar so that the end of it flared up like the fires of hell.
Sam looked over at him, confused.
“Boss?”
“Yeah. Why do you think he’s so hung up on this shit now?”
Gradie tried to imagine Michael letting out machine gun fire in anger and couldn’t. But why would Philip bullshit about something like that?
The Mustang revved its engine and there was a painful pop. It decelerated suddenly, but not slow enough to have braked.
“Go around him,” Philip said with a smile. Smoke was rising from the hood.
“Thank you Maxie!” Sam went around him on the right shoulder and pressed her middle finger to the window. Gradie heard the driver swear as they drove by.
“How did you do that?” he asked.
“Do what?” Philip said slyly. “Didn’t you hear that sound when he gunned it earlier? Shit was ready to go.”
Gradie remembered the sound, the subtle metallic grinding at the edges. Had it sounded like that at first? Of course it seemed that way now, but his Spirit went wild at the possibilities.
“So what, you knew Boss before this team?” Sam said.
Philip took a drag on his cigar before answering. Maybe he hadn’t meant to mention it.
“Yep.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Years.”
“Being vague doesn’t make you seem mysterious.”
“Look, kid,” he said so gently that Gradie thought it was someone else at first.
“I can’t tell you anything about what we did before this team. Its company policy.”
“What the fuck ever, Mr. secret agent.”
“I’m serious. And don’t go asking the twins—”
“I won’t, I believe you. You and boss were a big deal back in the day.”
“I’m not fucking talking about who we were. Fuck that. I’m talking about what we did.”
Philip’s tone had lost some of its paternal softness, and there was a pause where no one else did so much as breathe. Even Luke was paying attention, his cigar smoldering in a half-raised hand.
Sam broke the silence first.
“What, so, you used to be the bad guys?”
Philip Laughed. “There are no bad guys in this game, unless you count the guys we go after, and even that’s neither here nor there. The guys shooting at us this job might be on our side the next time or swapping war stories with us in the Allclub tomorrow.”
“So, then who would come after you?”
“People who keep grudges.”
“Over what?”
“Nothing. Drop it.”
“I want to know if I’m working for a mass murderer or something.”
Philip scoffed. “You’re not. You’re working for the guy who won’t even let us shoot at the cops.”
“But he wasn’t always like that,” Sam said, half asking, fumbling for another cigarette as the car stayed center lane like it was on a rail.
“No. No he wasn’t.” Philip said it with a tone of finality and Sam didn’t say anything else. In the ghostly reflection of Philip in the passenger window, seen through the sliver of space between the seat and the door jam, Gradie thought he might have seen a smile flutter across Philip’s face, one with the same kind of sad longing Michael’s voice had held when he told Gradie about the first Hardworlders. But it might have just been a trick of the glass.
