I had a body in the trunk of my car.

I hadn’t planned it that way, but then it wasn’t that kind of job. It wasn’t a job at all, really, rather a speculative venture, and now I’d made more of an investment than just my time and a little money.

This was in the summer, and Reagan was still president, early enough that he wasn’t showing his Alzheimer’s yet and late enough that he was keeping a good distance between himself and the Press Corps, waving and smiling and pretending he couldn’t hear them. We’d already had the Chernobyl meltdown, the Challenger explosion, and Pac-Man fever. Disco was dead, which was fine with me, only I wish somebody had paid me to kill the fucker.

I make the above lame joke because I had once upon a time killed people for money-initially for Uncle Sam, but more profitably for a mobbed-up guy called the Broker (more about him later). Right now I was in business for myself, thirty-five years old and looking to make a killing. Financial kind.

Anyway, the body in the trunk of my car. And it was my car, not a rental, a blue ’75 Pontiac with a lighter blue vinyl top, a Sunbird, which was really just a Vega pretending to be a sports car. It had a lot of miles on it and had only cost a grand and change, bought for cash under a phony name in Wisconsin-another investment in this spec job.

I hadn’t known I’d wind up with a body in the trunk, but I was old enough a hand at this to know I didn’t want to use my usual vehicle and a rental would be a bad idea, too. But to tell you the truth, I’d had bodies in my trunk before, so maybe that was a factor, after all.

For around six years in the ’70s I had taken on contracts, and part of why I’d survived and even flourished was my ability to blend in. At five ten, one-hundred-sixty pounds, I’d maintained a fairly boyish look-into my late twenties, I could be been taken for a college student, and now I could pass for twenty-five or — six. I kept my brown hair medium-length because that helped maintain anonymity. I could be a working man in t-shirt and jeans or a salesman in narrow tie and sportcoat or a professional in button-down collar and pinstripe suit.