I doubted this information had any current pertinence, either; but it troubled me that the synapses in my brain hadn’t sparked immediately. Christ, I was only in my mid-thirties. How could my memory let me down like that?

Physically, I felt up to whatever came along. I was no muscleman, but swam often, usually daily-it was the variety of physical exercise I preferred, and helped me relax, and allowed my thoughts to either fade or come into focus, as the case might be. Out here, on my back, staring at the stars and moon over Haydee’s Port, clarity was the result.

Maybe it was time to retire the Broker’s list. Maybe I was getting too casual about killing, or cocky or sloppy or whatever. After all, I had an investment opportunity back in Wisconsin, where I lived, and if I could make enough of a killing on this job-again, of the financial variety-it could be the last one.

Maybe a hired assassin has a natural working life, like an athlete or a rock star or a sex symbol…

For some time, I’d lived in an A-frame cottage on small, private Paradise Lake, which suffered few of the tourists that haunted the nearby Lake Geneva vacation center. The scattering of summer homes meant I had very few neighbors off-season, which was how I liked it, and even on-season was no problem.

One business did serve the year-round locals, and in summer attracted a small, tolerable number of tourists: Wilma’s Welcome Inn, a rambling two-story structure that had been a roadhouse back in Prohibition Days, converted in the only slightly-less-distant past to a restaurant, gas station, and hotel (a convenience store was a more recent touch, taking the place of a gift shop). Everything was under one rustic, slightly ramshackle roof.

Wilma had been a beautiful woman trapped in a tub of lard, and one of the few humans I ever really liked, in part because she made a great bowl of chili and also because she was pleasantly chatty without getting nosy. She was dead now, and her boyfriend/bartender Charley was trying to run the place, doing a fairly crap job of it. Her daughter was a curvy little babe in her late teens who wanted to sell the place before Charley ran it into the lake, so she could move to California and do drugs.