A month of psychiatric analysis. I didn’t think that was necessary — as I kept telling them, I didn’t enjoy killing but wasn’t afraid of it — but this was back when The Cardinal was fighting to have the Troops legalized. We were in the public eye, a topic of hot debate, and a lot of people claimed we were no better than hired assassins. Tasso and his administrators had to play things cautiously. Hence the kid-glove treatment.

It was four years until I killed again, in a free-for-all shoot-’em-up with Russian mafia muscling in on The Cardinal’s territory. A hundred of us against thirty Ivans. The fighting raged through an apartment block they’d annexed. I was part of the third phalanx of Troops sent in. Ran up against a teenager in a dark, smoky hallway. He had a sock filled with coins and stones. I had a dagger that could have slit a bear’s chest open.

I started at Party Central a couple of weeks after that.

The third was three years ago. A crooked cop. It was the first time I’d been specifically sent to kill. I broke into his home while he was out. Gagged and tied up his wife and kid. Stood behind his bedroom door when I heard him entering downstairs. When he came in, I stepped out and put the lips of my gun to the back of his head.

Boom.

I nearly quit the Troops after that. It wasn’t the killing that got to me, but his status. He could just as easily have been a straight cop. Could have been Bill. You don’t make choices when you’re in the Troops — you go where told, shoot when ordered. I’d always known I might one day cross swords with Bill, but I only seriously contemplated the possibility after my run-in with the cop.

I came close to packing it in. Life would have been so different if I had. I might have patched things up with Ellen. I won’t say the job’s what came between us, but it didn’t help. If I’d found legitimate employment and spent more time working on my marriage than polishing my guns…