So I devised a way of making that file of Broker’s work for me. I would choose a name from it-the name of someone else like myself, who murdered for hire, by contract-and I would go stake out that someone, follow him to his latest assignment, and, once having determined who his potential target was, I would approach said target and offer my services.

That was the tricky part: approaching someone and saying, “Somebody’s been hired to kill you.” But such people tend to lead the sort of lives that include the possibility of violence, or they wouldn’t be on the receiving end of a contract: nice, quiet, respectable people seldom are assassinated. The potential targets also tend to be the sort of people who like my solution to their problem: that is, killing the killers, and also finding out (and presumably taking care of) whoever hired the killers.

All of which is not entirely relevant to the story at hand, but it is hard for me to explain my state of mind, where Turner was concerned, without discussing the file. Because it seemed to me possible that someone had found out-or figured out- that I had the Broker’s file; I had made an effort to lead the Broker’s associates to believe that the file was destroyed, but perhaps that effort had been less successful than I thought. If someone knew I had the Broker’s file, that, in itself, was good enough reason for Turner being sent to kill me.

Anyway, for now there was nothing to do but sit with gun in hand and wait and see if Turner was going to try and kill me. If he blew up my house or set fire to it or something, he could possibly get the job done, even now. Only he wasn’t imaginative or bold enough for anything like that. He’d come plodding in, about half an hour before dawn, probably, and I’d kill him, after getting the name of his new Broker out of him. Or maybe he’d come with his partner. Burden, wasn’t that the name he’d used? In which case I’d kill them both. But Jesus I hated the idea of that happening here, at home. It could be a messy, unpleasant business.