I was sitting with my nine-millimeter in my hand. The silencer was on. There was, I thought, at least some chance of my having to use the gun sometime tonight.

If Turner had lied to me, if the real reason he was staying at Wilma’s Welcome Inn was to watch me and set me up for the kill, he and/or his partner would make their attempt tonight, or not at all. Possibly not at all, since I had seen him and talked to him and would be expecting him. And if they didn’t try tonight, the hit would be scratched and they would have to go back to the middleman who gave them the assignment and say that the mark (me) had made Turner, so the game was off. And the middleman would send somebody else, later, to try again.

If the hit was scratched, Turner would of course expect me to try to follow him home. But I wouldn’t need to do that. I could wait a week or so and then pull Turner’s card from the Broker’s file and go to Turner’s home base and stake him out and wait for him to lead me to whoever his middleman was. From the middleman I could find out who took the contract out on me and do something about it.

Turner didn’t know about the Broker’s file. It included fifty names, fifty entries, with extensive biographical information, current and past addresses, photos and a listing of specific jobs carried out. The fifty people in Broker’s file were the people who used to work through him. People like me. Like Turner. Killers for hire.

I’d inherited the file, indirectly, after Broker was killed, earlier that year. I have recorded all of that in some detail, elsewhere, and won’t go into it again here.

But I should explain what the file had come to mean in my life. The years of working through a middleman-a Broker-had ended in a series of doublecrosses that convinced me I would never put up with such an arrangement again, that I would work for myself, and only myself: my life in my hands… not the Broker’s.