Half the Money
Installment one of a serial. It ends where the choice starts.
The man hired me in an alley off Kannai, in the rain, and counted the money twice before he let go of it.
Half now. Half when she is across the river.
I looked at the notes. Too much for a walk. Not enough for a killing. That gap was the whole job, and he knew I had seen it, and I took the money anyway.
Her name was Mio. Nineteen, maybe. She came down the stairs with her bag already packed and her shoes already tied, the way people pack when someone has told them to be ready for a week.
“You're not him,” she said.
“He's busy.”
“He is never busy.” She looked at the streak in my hair, then at my hands. “You are the other kind.”
I did not ask what the other kind was. I put her bag in the car and drove.
Two hours of city. She did not talk, and I did not make her. At the third red light she said, “How much did he give you.”
“Half.”
“Half of what.”
“Of the total.”
“That is not an answer.”
“No,” I said. “It is not.”
She laughed once, without anything in it, and looked out the window at the closed shutters, at the puddles going orange under the lights.
Here is the part I keep turning over.
The money was shaped wrong. A walk costs what a walk costs. A body costs what a body costs. What he paid me sat between the two, and there is only one kind of job that sits in between: the kind where nobody says out loud whether the person gets to arrive.
So at the bridge I stopped the car.
“Get out,” I said. “Not far. Ten steps. Stand where I can see you.”
She got out. She stood in the rain with her arms crossed like it was an argument she was winning.
“Are you going to hand me over?” she said.
“I get paid either way. That is what the second half is for.”
“Then what is the first half for?”
The honest answer came out before I could make it sound better. “For the walk.”
She looked at me a long time. Then she said the thing that made the rest of the night mine.
“And if I do not arrive?”
The man was waiting on the far side of the bridge, under an awning, with a second envelope. He raised it when he saw the car, friendly, like an uncle at a station.
I put my hand on the envelope and did not open it.
Behind me, Mio had not moved ten steps. She was standing in the rain, watching to see which kind I was.
Everything after this is mine. That is the problem.
Installment two is the far side of the bridge. If you want it, say so: [email protected]