Page 16 of A River Red With Blood
“Yet you came in here with backup, and more on the street.”
“Consider it an understandable excess of caution, given what’s just gone down.”
“An excess, after picking up a paper with my name on it?There isn’t enough caution in the world for that.Did you really think you were going to make bank on the deal?”
“No,” said Kade.“I figured you’d hear.”
“And still you picked it up.”
“You haven’t asked why.”
“There can only be two reasons,” said Louis.“One is poverty, and you don’t dress poor.”
“I’m not.”
“Then give me reason number two.”
“I picked it up so that no one else would.”
Louis regarded him thoughtfully.
“You know it’s true,” said Kade.
“Do I?”
“If I was going to follow through on the contract, I’d have shot you in the head from behind, up close and intimate.You wouldn’t have known a thing about it.”
“Assuming you could get up close and intimate with me.”
“I’d rate my chances.”
And Louis thought Kade might have been right, but whether he could have followed through was debatable.
“It didn’t sound like your scene,” said Louis.“Last I heard, you were a contractor of a different stripe.”
“I still am.I like government work.It pays surprisingly well.”
“Depends on the government.The worse they are, the better they pay.”
“I’m not greedy,” said Kade.“And I have a conscience.”
This had always differentiated Kade from Louis.The former’s morality had barely flickered from the start, while the latter’s only slowly incandesced.
“It’s what confused me when your name came up,” said Louis.“Worried me, too.”
“Because you wondered what might have been bad enough to cause me to pick up the paper,” said Kade.
“If I had to guess, I’d say it was from way back.”
Louis had left wreckage in his wake—it came with the territory, and with Parker—but anyone clinging to that flotsam wouldn’t have attracted Kade’s interest, not for any sum.He’d have been more likely to stamp on their fingers and watch them sink.In the right hands, morality was a double-edged sword.
“Because now you have a conscience as well,” said Kade.
“Don’t believe everything you hear.I’m a work in progress.”
Louis picked up his glass, tapped it to Kade’s, and both men drank, Kade more deeply than Louis because his nerves required more steadying.
“Did you really believe I’d accept money to kill you?”
