“Pour some in there,” he said.

  “You want me to poison him?” Shaky asked.

  “He won’t die,” Moon said. “He’ll just get sick.”

  “I dunno, Moon. This is bad stuff.”

  “Just do it!” Moon hissed.

  Shaky hesitated, then took the cap off the bottle. “I want a bigger pay-off,” he said.

  “You already got my Revolution. I ain’t got nothing else!” Moon said.

  “But I could go to jail for this.”

  Moon looked up, his throat tight. Behind him, he heard the smash of a sure strike, followed by laughter. Man, could he really do this? Yes. He could. He would make it up to her somehow.

  “Okay,” he said, looking back at Shaky. “If you want Helen—and I mean for one quickie—I’ll get her to do it.”

  Shaky’s eyes widened, then he slurped the acetone into the drink and quickly put the bottle away. The scoreboards suddenly turned a bright blue, indicating practice was over. Everyone started back to their own lanes. Moon turned to look at Bulldog.

  He was standing by the approach, holding The Thing Lives in his arm. He made a sweeping gesture toward the lanes.

  “You’re up, Moon.”

  BULLDOG THREW UP in the wastebasket in frame nine of the first game, and no one was sure if he was going to be able to continue, but right after, he got back up and threw another strike—a Moses ball—the kind that hits the head pin and divides the pins right down the middle.

  It was the kind of thing that always happened to unpure bowlers when they found themselves up against real talent. Moon called them ugly strikes, the ones that never should have been and although everyone took them—you had to take them—Moon thought there was an element of shame in having too many. Bulldog didn’t seem to think so.

  Moon glanced up at the scoreboard. Dammit.

  They were going to lose this game. Shaky wasn’t concentrating. His shots were laden with guilt, and he was having a hard time keeping his eyes off Bulldog’s drink.

  Shaky apologized five times for losing the game, even though he had bowled a 218, nineteen pins above his average. Moon had bowled a 266. Any other night, it would have been more than enough. But not tonight.

  Bulldog spent most of the second game in the bathroom. Moon wanted to call Tony Valleni and his rule book down to see if there was a set number of minutes someone could delay a game before they forfeited. But half the damn league was in the john, worried about Bulldog, and Moon didn’t want to come off as a jerk, so he stayed quiet, just sitting at the table, staring at the scoreboard, which by the end of the second game, read: THE STEEL BALLS 521, BULLDOG’S BEST 499.

  It was even up. All they needed to do was to win the third game, and the league, the thousand dollars and that big-ass gold trophy would be his.

  Moon rubbed his face, wishing the knot in his belly would go away. He looked out at the lanes. Most of the bowlers had stopped their own games to gather behind eleven and twelve to watch the championship. The alleys were so quiet, Moon could hear his own heart.

  Someone called his name and he looked to see Bulldog and his entourage heading back to the alleys. Bulldog’s fat face was sweaty and white as the pins, and he was walking unsteady, but he managed to find his way to the approach and grab The Thing Lives.

  SHAKY STARTED OFF the third game with a Moses ball strike. Moon followed with a perfect pocket hit, but so did Bulldog and his partner. By the middle of the game, amidst rolls of thunder and flickering lights, the game was tied, with X’s in every box on the scoreboard. The crowd behind was thickening.

  The score stayed almost tied through the ninth, even though Bulldog was staggering, with sweat running down his face and only the cheers of the faithful behind him to give him strength.

  Moon looked up at the scoreboard. They were a few pins behind, but it was not out of reach. He was calculating up how many pins he would need if Bulldog struck out when he heard a groan from the spectators and he looked at the alley.

  Bulldog had done the unthinkable. The Thing Lives was rolling down the gutter.

  Moon watched the ball until it disappeared into the black abyss behind the pins, then his eyes flicked up to the scoreboard. His brain worked like lightening. All Moon had to do was get a spare. Two balls to get all ten pins. It was theirs. Goddammit. The whole thing was theirs!

  Bulldog lofted his final ball, a weak hook that toppled the pins in slow motion. He stumbled back to his chair, holding his stomach, falling into the arms of a dozen other bowlers.

  It was time to end this.

  Moon picked up his Atomic Revolution and took his place on the approach. Lowering his head and concentrating on every step, he threw his first ball. It was perfect—absolutely fucking perfect—and he felt a surge of greatness as the Revolution exploded into the pins and scattered them.

  Wait. . .there was one left. One damn pin. The ten pin.

  Dammit. Dammit to hell.

  Moon grabbed the Atomic Revolution off the return and cradled it, staring at the ten pin. If he missed this, it was over. Everything was over.

  He set himself, his heart starting to pound, beads of sweat forming on his palms. Just as he started his first step, thunder rolled overhead. Moon stopped, waiting for it to pass before he set himself again.

  He wiggled his fingers into the ball, then slipped in his thumb and stared down at the pin. It stood gleaming and silent, waiting for him.

  As he took a step, another explosion from outside vibrated through the building, sending the lights flickering and the pin trembling. He stopped again.

  The sign outside must be flickering, too, trying to talk to him, and he wished he could go look at it to see what the message was, but he couldn’t leave now.

  But then, suddenly, imaginary letters started flashing in his head. They made no sense, like one of those scrambled word puzzles in the newspaper that he couldn’t do.

  He set himself again, trying not to think about the letters. But now words were starting to form in his head and with every step he took, another letter would drop into place.

  S. . .T. . .A

  Third step and the swing of his arm.

  Y. . .P. . .

  It amazed him that he could see his messages now in his mind, and that realization, more than the letters themselves, filled him with a sense of magical power as his arm started forward.

  U. . .R. . .

  The ball was cupped in his hand like a perfect size C boob, and as he started to lay it down, the last letter dropped into place in his head.

  E.

  In an instant, he saw it, all the letters blinking as sure and strong in his head as he knew they were blinking outside.

  STAY PURE

  What? That wasn’t the right message. It couldn’t be the right message. He was already pure.

  Wasn’t he?

  The Atomic Revolution was just coming off the tips of his fingers when something pulled at him, something powerful and creepy and irresistible, and he did something he never thought he would do. He flipped the ball just a half-inch to the left. The moment it hit the wood, he knew it would miss the pin.

  And it did.

  The ball disappeared into the dark bowels of the alley, and Moon stood and stared at the ten pin.

  It stared back, silent and defiant.

  Somewhere in his brain, he could hear cheering and then the rattle of the Revolution coming up the ball return. But everything he expected to feel—rage and disappointment—were not there. All that was there was a scary kind of peace.

  He turned slowly and packed up his stuff. Shaky was talking about next year and Bulldog was shaking hands and someone was on the loudspeaker announcing that bulldog’s best were league champs. In the corner of his eye, Moon caught sight of the huge, gold trophy coming through the crowd.

  He headed outside, Shaky hustling along behind him, still yakking about next year and summer leagues and tournaments, but Moon wasn’t hearing him. He wanted to see the sign and he wanted to make sure the message he had seen in his head was the right one because if it wasn’t, then everything that had happened to him in those last few seconds had been fake.

  He stopped under the overhang and told Shaky to shut up. They both stood there, staring at the sign, watching and waiting.

  With a crack of thunder, all the letters went out. A few seconds later, they flickered back on.

  U L

  U L O

  U L O SR

  Moon stared, and blinked, and kept staring. Then he started slowly off across the parking lot. Shaky trailed behind.

  “Do I still get your Atomic Revolution, Moon?”

  “No.”

  “What about Helen?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then do I get the old red Inferno?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, what do I get out of all this?”

  Moon stopped and faced him. “Purity, my friend. We get purity.”

  ED GORMAN

  ED Gorman has published more than thirty novels in twenty-five years as a full-time writer. Booklist noted, “In Gorman’s novels good and evil clash with the same heartbreaking results as they do in the more urban crime novels of Block and Leonard.” Gorman has also published six collections of short stories.

  On the subject of this anthology, Ed says, “I suspect that hitman stories are voyeuristic exercises for both reader and writer. How simple life would be if we could just bump off those who displease us.”

  Visit Ed at: www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/3192/ejgorman.html

  BEAUTY

  Ed Gorman

  MOST OF US USE code words. I suppose that sounds a bit melodramatic, but how else are you going to separate the wheat from the chaff? Or, more specifically, the real client from the undercover FBI agent who wants to bust your ass and send you away for a long, long time.

  The lady called me while I was on the Stairmaster in my hotel room. She’d guaranteed a nice sum to fly to her city. I was nice and winded from my workout while she went through this nervous little introduction without once giving me that one word that could put us in business.

  “Oh, damn,” she said. “The—what do you call it?—the code word. You want that, don’t you?”

  “Be nice to hear it.”

  “Associates.”

  “There you go.”

  “So how do we proceed from here? I suppose you can tell I’m sort of nervous.”

  “Where are you?”

  She told me. I mentioned a nice little Chinese place two blocks from her hotel.

  DURING MY BRIEF tenure in the loving arms of the fine folk who run Joliet state pen—bank robbery gone wrong; nothing to do with my present occupation—I spent a lot of time reading psychology books. I figured that psychology would be useful no matter what kind of work I took up when they gave me back my cheap suit and the free bus ticket.

  I had a friend in high school that had spent every possible minute tending to this cherry 1957 red Ford Thunderbird his wealthy father had bought him at the start of our senior year. Ken had once been a fun guy. No more. After he got the T-Bird, he lost interest in girls, smoking dope, cruising our hangouts, and even the XXX videos that had just become available to the general public.

  The woman who slid into the booth across from me also had an obsession. Her obsession wasn’t with a thing. It was with herself.

  I don’t keep up on all the things women can do to keep themselves beautiful if they have the money. I know about plastic surgery, of course, and facials and bikini waxes and things like that. But I’m sure there are at least a dozen devious little tricks most men know nothing about. With her, it was probably two dozen devious little tricks.

  She was stunning more than beautiful. A lot of her appeal was in the important way she carried herself. She was fighting forty and winning.

  The smile disarmed you. One of those ridiculously outsize Hollywood smiles that mere mortals can’t muster. And what the smile couldn’t accomplish, the blue blue eyes did. Now you were not only disarmed, but raising your arms in surrender. The elegant suit looked to be Armani, the enormous tooled earrings looked to be real gold, and the long, calculatedly tousled golden hair finished you off.

  But she irritated me immediately. “What if I change my mind?”

  “I’m told that’s a woman’s prerogative.”

  “Do you have a kill fee?” The smile was genuine. “Oh, God, I used to work at a magazine and that’s what we called it when we canceled an article but wanted to give the writer something for his work. A kill fee. In this case, I guess it’s a bad choice of words.”

  I smiled. “Nothing to worry about. And a kill fee is already taken care of.”

  “It is?”

  I nodded. “Remember what I said on the phone. First half is payable right here, right now. If I don’t have the second half in cash by the end of the day, I keep the first half whether I do the job or not.”

  “What if I called the police?”

  “Again, your prerogative. But you’d be implicated in hiring me to kill someone. Conspiracy to commit murder probably wouldn’t go over too well with your friends at the country club.”

  “How do you know I belong to a country club?”

  “Please.”

  She frowned. “What you’re saying is that I’m a cliché.”

  Never accuse a narcissist of anything. Their egos move in for the kill.

  “You have a manila envelope. Let’s get to it, shall we?”

  “I resent your remark.”

  I started to slide out of the booth.

  She held up her perfectly manicured hand. “Oh, forget it. I am very country club and I may as well admit it. It’s just that common people are so snobby about country clubs. They don’t know about all the fine people you meet at them.”

  Like ladies who hire hitmen, I thought. Not to mention robber barons that cheat their employees out of their pensions, and then go home to sleep on thousand-dollar silk sheets in their ten-bedroom mansions.

  She opened the 8-by-10 manila envelope and slid out a small package wrapped in brown paper, accompanied by a newspaper story that included a full-color photo with the caption: Beauty of Beauties. The rest of the text listed the names of the three runners-up and the beauty pageant winner. The runners-up tried desperately to look happy. The queen didn’t have that problem, flashing a Hollywood smile that made you reach for your sunglasses.

  “You won this beauty contest.”

  “State winner. I went on to Miss USA. I was eighteen, just a sophomore in college.” When she mentioned her age, melancholy hushed her voice to a whisper. I wondered if she’d cry. She wasn’t putting me on. She was lamenting her lost youth. I suppose we all do that, though given all the time I’d spent in county jail, my youth wasn’t much to lament. “I didn’t win Miss USA. I was the second runner-up.” She mentioned the name of a prominent male singer popular at that time in the mid-80s. “He was one of the judges. He knew I should have won and he wanted to help me get through it. He took me dancing and other things.”

  I knew better than to inquire about those “other things.”

  “Now my daughter is in a beauty contest and I don’t want the same thing to happen to her.”

  “What ‘same thing?’”

  “To be cheated out of it. The word I’m getting is that the advertising agency man who runs this particular pageant is actually the father of one of the contestants. He got a girl pregnant when he was already married and now the daughter is in his show. I think the mother is blackmailing him. He won’t have any choice but to figure out some way for his daughter to win. This could be a very important stepping stone for my daughter. I don’t want some dirty old man to ruin it for her.”

  “When’s the pageant?”

  “Tomorrow night.” She named a convention hall. “Eight o’clock. My daughter’s all ready to go. She’s not only the most beautiful, she’s also the most talented.”

  “If you do say so yourself.”

  Another genuine smile. “If I do say so myself. I’m sorry if I sound egotistical. It’s just that I want my daughter to win this.”

  “So I address my skills to the advertising man?”

  “Oh, no. The man might be dead, but his illegitimate daughter would still be alive and ready to compete again. I hate to admit this, but she’s a very good looking girl. And not bad in the talent department.”

  “So I direct my attention to her.”

  She leaned forward. “Yes, but not the full thing.”

  “The full thing?”

  She nodded. “Right.” Her voice dropped even lower. “I don’t want her killed. I just want her disfigured. Permanently.”

  I SPENT THE REST of the day deploying all the things I’d need for a perfect strike. Access would be the first problem. While the girl would be in her hotel room at various times, her floor would be shared by other contestants. A whole lot of problems there. She would be at a banquet tonight. I could get the security uniform I’d need, but again, the contestants would be everywhere. A clean getaway was dicey. My client had given me an itinerary that the girl followed every day. Up early for a quick jog around the hotel pool and then fifteen minutes of swimming before showering, eating a light breakfast, and then her singing and ballet lessons. A star in the making. The only problem was that this star seemed to always be accompanied by another woman, an older one, perhaps her mother or aunt or someone. It didn’t matter to me; she was an inconvenience, nothing more.

  I disguised myself for a quick tour of all the hotel sites that were possibilities for the attack. Late in the day, I went downstairs to where the maids and the bellboys check in and check out. They each had their own small locker room. I always carry a few elementary burglary tools with me. In one locker I found a bellhop uniform still in its dry-cleaning plastic. It wouldn’t fit perfectly, but it would fit well enough.

  Tonight, coming back from the banquet, the girl and her escort would probably walk back to her room via a wandering garden-like area that led directly to her entrance. My client said that this was the route they had followed the last three nights. She also said that the two never joined the other contestants in staying out a little longer. They went right back to their room. They would be virtually alone on the garden walk. Neither one would be startled by seeing a bellhop.