I admit he was having a better time than I was, but that was largely because he was a man who thought he had a gun in a nearby dresser drawer and didn’t know that gun was still nearby but now in the possession of somebody in a closet a few feet away, waiting to possibly put that gun to use. Ignorance is bliss, all right, but it’s also a good way to get blown away. And that’s no pun, either.

The only reason I was sitting this out, of course, was the girl. Turner alone I could handle, no problem-or anyway not much of one. Turner in the company of an innocent third party was something else again. Particularly when that innocent third party was Wilma’s niece, whose honor I was here on the pretense of defending, even though from my occasional glimpses through the keyhole I could see there wasn’t much left to defend.

Contrary to what you might think, assuming you’ve read some of the bullshit fiction books written on people like me, or seen some of the ridiculous movies or TV things done on us, a paid killer is not usually a person who will be careless about killing, who would go out casually, heedlessly mowing down anyone who crossed his path in the course of a job. The killing of one person, if it’s handled with some intelligence and care, generally causes little commotion, unless the town is exceptionally small, or the mark exceptionally well-known. A murder is likely to be buried in the back of the papers the day it happens, in a major city, and on the front page and on TV for a day or so in a secondary-size city, and in either case consigned to the unsolved file of the cops after a few weeks of fruitless investigation.

But kill two people and the shit will hit the fan. Kill an innocent bystander, indiscriminately, without the planning that went into hitting the mark, and suddenly it’s on TV constantly and in the papers continuously and everybody’s hollering “Mass murder!” and the cops will have to go after it for however long it takes, because the media and the media-manipulated public will demand nothing less.