When the Broker approached me, I’d been living in a fleabag hotel in Los Angeles. Drinking is not generally my thing, but it had been then. Still Coke, only with Bacardi. Lots of Bacardi-one Coke can to a bottle of rum, yo ho ho.

He was a handsome white-haired, white-mustached businessman who wore tailored suits and spoke in speeches, and he might have been forty or he might have been sixty-I never asked or bothered to find out. He thought I might be interested in doing for good money (for him) what I had previously done in Vietnam for shit change (for Uncle Sam)-namely, killing people.

I’d been good at it. I’d been a sniper most of the time in Nam, though I did make it through my share of firefights, and I probably caused a couple dozen yellow melons to splatter and send their bearers into whatever their idea of the afterlife was. In sniper work particularly, you find yourself picking off people like a game of Galaga, but with better effects.

None of that got me in trouble. In fact, it got me some medals. What got me in trouble was coming home, finding my wife in bed with a guy and killing the son of a bitch. Actually, that’s wrong-I didn’t kill him till the next day when I went over to the prick’s house to have it out with him, and he was under his car working on it, and said, “What the fuck do you want now, bunghole?”

And I kicked the jack out.

This made it look premeditated (if it had been premeditated, I’d have taken a gun) and made it harder for the unwritten law to kick in. But the papers took my side and I ended up not getting prosecuted, at which point the papers did not take my side. This is the only time I got any publicity for anybody I ever killed, incidentally, and it’s apparently what inspired the Broker to look me up.