On why he enjoys hitman stories, Kent remarked: “Because the people who do the killing do it so cool and so clean. Me, I only want to kill when I’m in a blinding rage, and if I did, I’d do it badly.”

  Visit Kent at www.WilliamKentKrueger.com.

  ABSOLUTION

  William Kent Krueger

  GRIFFIN FOUND THE NUN kneeling alone in the convent chapel. He slipped into the pew directly behind her, and, in the quiet candlelit sanctuary, put the gun to the back of her head.

  “Don’t turn around, Sister. Keep your head bowed. This isn’t a crucifix I’m holding. One sudden move, or if you call out, I’ll pull the trigger. Your head will explode like a melon. Do you understand?”

  At the feel of the barrel against her skull, the nun stiffened. She gave a careful nod. The cloth of her habit slid with an audible, starched scraping over the metal of Griffin’s Ruger.

  “What do you want?” She spoke in a low, hoarse whisper. Whether out of reverence or out of fear, Griffin couldn’t say.

  “It’s very simple. I’m looking for a man. Monk.”

  “There are no brothers here, only nuns.”

  “Monk isn’t his vocation. It’s his name. Frederic Monk.”

  “There’s no one here by that name.”

  Griffin leaned nearer, his breath softly invading her ear. “Let me spell it out for you. Monk used to work for the people I work for, but he wanted out. In my line, nobody gets out unless we say so, and we didn’t. So he ran, just disappeared. We’ve been looking for him. A few months ago we intercepted a letter meant for a cousin, postmarked Able, Minnesota. Three times we sent men to deal with Frederic Monk. They disappeared, too. We never heard a word from any of them. So here I am. Why me? Because I’m the best. I check out this Able, Minnesota, a pathetic excuse for a town, if you ask me. Two-hundred sixty residents without enough brains between them to fill a shot glass. No place for Monk to hide. But on the hill overlooking the town sits this convent, and when I look up here, one word comes to my mind. Sanctuary.

  “So I reconnoiter a little, slip in, have a discussion with the first nun I come across—”

  “You didn’t hurt anyone,” the nun whispered quickly.

  “Relax, Sister. She’s sleeping right now. She’ll wake up with a headache, that’s all. Before I put her out, she told me that I should talk to you and that you’d probably be here. You like to pray late, she said. She also said you could tell me about Monk.”

  “She was mistaken. I don’t know anything. I tend the gardens, that’s all.”

  “Then why would she send me to you?” He nudged the barrel more firmly against her habit and the bone beneath it, driving home his point.

  “The other nuns sometimes tell me things they won’t tell someone else.”

  “Because you’re what? Their confessor?”

  “They find me understanding.”

  “Then understand this. Unless you tell me where Monk is, I’m going to kill you.”

  The nun was quiet for a while. Griffin wondered if he’d scared her so much she’d lost her voice.

  “Would you really shoot me?”

  “Maybe not. Maybe I’d beat you like a stepchild then strangle you with your own rosary. Do you want to die?”

  “Does anyone? But if you’re asking am I afraid, the answer is no.”

  “You’d die to protect someone like Frederic Monk?”

  “To prevent the death of another, I’m compelled to silence.”

  Griffin lifted the Ruger, preparing to give her a good crack across her thick, nonsense-filled head. Then he had a better idea.

  “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. First, I’ll kill you. Then I’ll kill the next nun and the next until someone tells me what I want to know. I’ll waste this whole fucking convent if I have to.”

  “You’re in the house of our Lord. Please don’t swear.”

  “I have the gun, Sister. I’ll say any fucking thing I fucking well please.”

  “What kind of man are you?” It didn’t seem to be a question asked in outrage, but from a sincere desire to understand. “Don’t you care about your immortal soul?”

  “The only thing important to me is the here and now, what I have and what I still want.”

  “What is it that you still want?”

  Was she stalling, or was she actually interested? It didn’t matter; in the end, she would give him what he was after.

  “To know that I’m the best,” he replied. “The absolute best.”

  “At killing?”

  “At this art, which is more than just killing. I’m a hunter, Sister, just like Frederic Monk. Man is the game.”

  “So this Monk is what? A trophy?”

  “The trophy, Sister. I bag him, and there’s no doubt I’m the best.”

  Her head shook in a faint negation. “A human life is a sacred thing.”

  “The soul is the sacred thing,” he countered. “The flesh, that’s simply the vessel. We all abandon it eventually. I’m here to send Monk’s soul packing a bit sooner than he’d prefer.”

  “You believe in the soul? You’re Catholic?”

  Baptized and confirmed, he could have told her, although he’d had trouble with his faith from the beginning. His father was a brutal man, a drunk, who’d laid into his son every time he hit the bottle. As a kid, Griffin had often prayed for the beatings to stop. As far as he could tell, God didn’t care. His old man’s brutality finally ended when Griffin was sixteen and the cops found his father lying in a parking lot outside Willette’s Tavern, his head bashed in with a baseball bat, his brains spilled out all over the pavement.

  Griffin still had the bat.

  “Have you lost your faith then?” she went on.

  “Indeed I have, Sister. But that’s not what I’m here to find.”

  “We don’t always see the Lord’s hand as it guides us, but guide us it does. You believe you’re here seeking this Frederic Monk, but, in truth, it may be that you’re here for something else entirely. Absolution, perhaps.”

  He liked the nun’s voice, the low throaty whisper. It reminded him of a woman he’d once been fond of—Vera, a kick-boxer with an IQ through the roof. Smart, quick, and with a voice like roughed up velvet. She’d been the target of a contract, though she hadn’t known it. He’d taken great pleasure in her company, in her body, and eventually in the slow way she died. Maybe, he thought with an unsuppressed smile, he’d do this nun the same way.

  “Anything can be forgiven,” she said.

  “I don’t need forgiveness. I need answers. Where’s Frederic Monk?”

  “I told you, this man is not here.”

  “And I’m telling you he is.”

  “Pray with me.”

  “I’m not here to pray. I’m here for Monk.”

  “I think you’re here for something you don’t yet realize. I think it’s something I can offer. Let me ask you a question. When you lie down at night and close your eyes what do you see?”

  She had him there. He couldn’t remember ever sleeping well. His brain, when he tried to drift off, was a battleground, and his dreams were the realm of monsters.

  “Close your eyes now,” she urged gently. “What do you see?”

  “Close my eyes? You think I’m an idiot?”

  “Are you afraid of me? Or is it something greater?”

  He gave no response, no physical indication, but he did, in fact, close his eyes.

  He smelled the place then, the distant fragrance of roses, the oil that was used to polish the wood of the pews, and faintly the smoky ghost of frankincense. The quiet of the chapel felt comforting. Like an image emerging from a thick fog, he glimpsed the truth of her words, the possibility of peace.

  Then a small squeal broke the moment and he opened his eyes. A door to the right of the altar had been pushed ajar. An old nun shuffled into the chapel holding a lit candle in her hand.

  “Who’s that?” he said.

  “Sister Agnes. She’s deaf. She can’t hear us.”

  “She’s got eyes.”

  “It’s not unusual for visitors to pray in our chapel. Just bow your head.”

  “How about I just pop her instead? In fact, I think it’s time I take care of you both.”

  “He’s here,” she whispered suddenly.

  “Monk?”

  “Yes. Let Sister Agnes go quietly, and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  “If you’re lying—”

  “I’m not.”

  “If you are, I’ll work you over till you’re a bloody lump on the floor, then I’ll go back to that sweet little nun I met first thing and do the same to her. Maybe I’ll have myself some fun while I’m at. I never fucked a nun before. You’re all virgins, right? Or dykes?”

  Sister Agnes smiled in their direction, turned, and left the way she’d come.

  “I’m waiting,” he said to the nun in front of him.

  “It’s not too late. If only you’d let yourself open up to the blessing offered here.”

  Griffin chambered a round. “I’m finished waiting.”

  She sighed heavily. “They’re here. They’re all here. Monk, the others. All transformed, all for the better.”

  “Take me to them.”

  With a note of sadness, she said, “It was working on you. I felt it. Maybe if you stayed just a little longer.”

  “Now, or I start shooting.” He shoved the barrel of the Ruger into the back of her head, making her nod as if she finally saw the light.

  “I understand. You’ve been closed too long and too firmly.” She stood up. “Follow me.”

  “Take it very slow.”

  The nun stepped into the aisle. She genuflected and turned, keeping her head bowed respectfully in the dim light. She crossed her arms, slipped her hands into the loose cuffs of her habit, and led the way out the back of the chapel, Griffin close behind her. They stepped into the night air, which was redolent with the scent of roses. A dim light came from a bulb over the chapel doorway, illuminating the flowerbeds and a tool shed just beyond.

  “My garden,” the nun said with a note of pride that Griffin, remembering his early religious instruction, thought out of place in a religious order. “Flowers are such simple things. They ask so little and give so much. We should all be as graceful in our lives.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Frederic Monk is no more.”

  “What do you mean? You said he’s here.”

  “And so he is. He’s different, however. He understood the grace of this place, its special gift to those who choose to embrace it. The others who came after him, they’re here, too, changed in their own ways by the choices they made.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “It would take too long to explain. There’s really only one thing you ought to know.” The nun no longer spoke in a whisper, and her voice seemed to have dropped an octave. “In a place such as this, a suppressor is an absolute necessity.”

  The nun turned, and the shots came from the cuff of her habit with a muted phht-phtt. Griffin stood a moment, stunned, then crumpled to the grass in the dark heart of the garden.

  Although he heard and saw clearly, everything after that came to him from a distance, from a place he stood outside of and could not feel, as if he were on a boat sailing into a gray sea and looking back longingly at the shore.

  From the stone walkway beyond the flowerbeds came the sound of steps, a measured gait, slow and deliberate. The nun stepped between Griffin’s body and the light. The shadow of her long habit engulfed him.

  “Mother Superior, good evening,” the nun said.

  Griffin heard an old woman’s voice, immeasurably gentle, reply: “You’re up late.”

  “I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d work in the garden. Perhaps put in another rose bed. I was just about to get the spade from the shed.”

  “Another? But you’ve already planted three new lovely rose beds in the short time you’ve been here.”

  “You can never have enough roses, Mother Superior.”

  “They are beautiful to the senses. They so delight the eye and the nose. I believe God must be partial to roses. Perhaps that’s why he sent you to us. I knew you were different from the beginning. Very special. We all did.”

  “Thank you, Mother Superior.”

  “Well, carry on then. And God bless you, Sister Frederica.”

  Griffin heard the tap of soles receding on a stone path. Then he heard the rustle of the nun’s habit and the squeak of hinges as the shed door opened.

  By then he was too far gone to be able to see anything of the world he was leaving behind. But he could still hear clearly the final sound from his old life: the cold chunk of thin metal as the spade bit into dirt.

  PAUL A. TOTH

  PAUL returned to his home state of Michigan after spending eight years in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Denver. His first novel, FIZZ, and its successor, FISHNET, are available from Bleak House. His short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Mystery Stories.

  When asked what is the appeal of hitman stories, Paul answered: “The hitman tale is the first story and probably the last: the race between stalker and prey. We share the fear of the hunted, or take guilty pleasure in the stalker’s shoes, or steal a double thrill by sharing both viewpoints.”

  Visit him at www.netpt.tv

  NICE KIDS CARRY GUNS

  Paul A. Toth

  I DON’T SPEAK MAFIOSO, I’ve never stalked New York, much less Little Italy. I’ve fired but never owned a gun. I possess no silencer and speak freely, as if drunk all the time. I do not lurk; one could step into shadows and never hear a “psst” from me. Children run not from but to me. I’ve clipped a few hundred flies, spiders and mosquitoes, like any human being, but otherwise my record’s cleaner than a whistle, for whistles require saliva. I’m a hitman, yes, but a different kind: rap records made in Vermont, believe it or not, where if a man isn’t careful, somebody might bust a snowball in his ass. Even here, rivalries emerge. Soon, magazines will trumpet the Northeast-Northwest battle, Montana vs. Vermont and Maine vs. Washington. But that wasn’t my problem. My problem was Harley. Harley had a job for me, one for another kind of hitman.

  Harley—what the hell kind of name is Harley?—said to me, “Uranus. He’s on the take, Chet, and I can’t take him out thanks to my probation. You’ll have to do it, fruitfly. You’re taking Uranus out.” He laughed. He thought I was gay. Lots of people do. “It’s a speesh impediment,” I always explained, but they demanded decorating tips.

  I said, “MC Uranus? He seems like the nicest kid.”

  “He’s not. He had the keys and he stole a bunch of tapes, now bootlegged, everybody making money but us.”

  He tossed a gun in my lap. It might have been a truly-automatic or semi-manual pistol.

  “This is Vermont,” I said, “land of the spiritual, for Ansel Adams, not Billy the Kid.”

  “I don’t know what kind of gay shit you’re talking, but we’re taking him out. We need the PR. We need a worse reputation.”

  “Can’t we beat him up?”

  “Look, I know you like Uranus.”

  “That’s enough.”

  “It’s got to be done.”

  “I’m not killing anyone.”

  “I’ve already considered that, Chet. Fact is, I told Uranus you’ve been talking shit about him. ‘Small package,’ et cetera. He’s coming to your house tonight. It’s you or him.”

  “Coming with a gun?”

  “What do you think?”

  “He seems like the nicest kid.”

  “Nice kids carry guns.”

  He ordered me to the gun range. To get there, I had to drive around the Ansel Adams mountains with my defroster providing the slowest wipe and fade in history. An hour before, I was the not-really-gay-but-get-your-jokes-in-while-you-can guy, and now I was a hitman. A sitting hitman. A hitman for a hitman, in two ways, double-crossed, and I wished for a slick cliff to spare me what security experts everywhere warned: “Don’t pull a gun unless you’re sure you’ll use it.” I didn’t want to use it. I didn’t want to be home that night, but I knew Uranus would follow me, as if in orbit. That day, the next, or twenty years in the future, our planets would align. I was not Mars but Pluto, the disappearing Roman god. Subtracting the “d” from “god” leaves go. Go to the gun range, Chet.

  I shot at targets for an hour. I hit everything but targets. I heard laughing beside, behind and all around me. Guffaws, giggles: A man like me learns to know they’re coming his direction. He also knows that men without speesh impediments feel that the Chets of the world deserve this snubbing, that to speak of sports or any other manly subject in their presence is just not done. I often thought it might be easier to simply turn gay, but I found women who appreciated all things Chet. Lately it was Carol. Carol and Chet. “One day,” Harley had said, “you’ll both wear matching clothes to Walmart. Then you’ll have kids and the whole damn family will match. You’ll keep that house spic and span. She’ll have questions but won’t ask. After all, her husband does the housework. What more could a wife want?”

  Driving to Carol’s house, I turned on the stereo. I was greeted by MC Uranus:

  I’ll fuck you up

  And jack your shit.

  Motherfuckers think they cool?

  I bring it old school,

  With fists of fury.

  Don’t call no jury,

  ’Cause I’ll smudge the judge, Claw the law,

  Scale the jail,

  Steal my time,

  Give myself life.

  MC Uranus,

  God of the sky,

  You fuck with me,

  You bleed and cry.

  That was it. I had to do it. I grabbed my cell phone and called him, hoping I could cut and run. Mea culpa, Uranus. “What the fuck?” he said as someone moaned beside him. “Yo,” I said, and anything else would have sounded equally lame. “I ain’t been talking shit.”