In the Company of Killers Bryan Christy (good books to read for beginners .txt) 📖

what it was. He reached up and felt a lump on his forehead. He remembered the bar, the woman. He remembered getting behind the wheel of her rental car, saying something about all of the more difficult places he’d driven around the world. There had been a problem with the car’s lights or with its windshield wipers. He remembered squinting against the darkness and the rain. She asked him something, and he turned to her, he remembered that. And then she screamed. The sound of her scream in his mind brought it all back. He turned his attention back to the road just in time to see a boy on a bicycle. He jerked the wheel. He felt the thud of the impact in his chest.

The events of that night changed everything. He had killed a boy, Adri had been his name, and there was nothing he could do to fix it. He drank less in public after that. More when he was alone. He told Erin about the accident, leaving out the American woman and the extent of his drunkenness. The omission cursed their relationship, of course.

He tried to be present for her, to overcome what he’d done and who he was because of it. He saw well how he did in her eyes. She had been eager to help him in the beginning, but grew increasingly frustrated. “It’s one thing not to hear from you when you’re gone,” she told him, “but you’re standing right here!” His protective instincts ran too deep, she said. “You protect yourself first and foremost. You know that, right?”

And so, after a few drinks to dull the impact he would forever feel in his chest, he would get up from the couch and do what happy couples do—go out for dinner, meet up with their friends, tour that new art exhibit.

•   •   •

She drove a red Audi. He lowered himself into the passenger seat and she closed his door for him. As he pulled the seat belt across his chest, he noticed a bill from the Congressional Country Club wedged beside the passenger seat and his head cleared. “How’s Grant?” he asked, buckling in.

She turned to back the car out of its space. “He’s good. He’s in Chicago.”

Was that an invitation he heard? It had been a decade since their breakup. It had been almost that long since they’d slept together.

Grant was head of Nike’s government affairs office. Fit, of course. A competitive marathon runner. Intellectual. They’d met while Klay was away. He couldn’t remember the assignment, or even the continent. He remembered all too well the day he returned home. He’d dropped onto the sofa with a beer, switched on the television, and noticed two copies of Runner’s World poking out from underneath the sofa. That was it. No muddy shoe prints exiting the back door. No foreign underwear in their bed. Just two copies of Runner’s World that weren’t current. Erin wasn’t a runner.

“He’s a good man,” Klay said.

“Yes, he is,” she said, and smiled expectantly.

He caught sight of the ring on her left hand and shook his head. “You’re engaged. Wow. Congratulations!” He smiled, pleased to discover he was genuinely happy for her.

“Yeah, we decided it was about time.”

He cracked his window and felt a warm late-morning breeze blow across his face. She steered onto the Dulles Access Road, and the Audi gathered speed. Adele was playing on the radio. She turned down the volume. “Do you want to talk about it, Tom?”

“Not especially.”

She took her eyes off the road and looked at him. “It’s not your fault.”

He didn’t respond.

“Look, it’s not my business, but don’t go to that place. Okay? Bad things happen around you because you put yourself in places where bad people are. The Jakarta boy was a terrible accident. Bernard was not your fault.”

Reductions. The Jakarta boy. Bernard.

“Do you have any Advil?” he asked.

“Look in the glove box.”

He found a bottle and took several.

“How’s it feel?” she asked.

“Comes and goes.”

“You’re not going to like this,” she said as they crossed Arlington Memorial Bridge into Washington, DC. “Porfle has arranged a small party for you.”

“I’d like to go home.”

“I know,” she said uncomfortably. “I gave him the spare house key from your office.”

He sighed. He’d forgotten that he still had a key taped to the back of his top desk drawer.

“Sorry,” she said. “You don’t have to act surprised.”

She pulled to the curb in front of his townhouse and parked. She went first up the wrought iron steps, opened the front door with his key, and ushered him in.

“Surprise!”

Sovereign staff filled his narrow home. Snaps Kennedy. Mitchell Fox. His research assistant, David Tenchant, and Tenchant’s pregnant wife, Maggie. Tom Burkey and Karen Forsythe, photographers he worked with when Snaps wasn’t available. Two senior editors who were having an affair they thought no one knew about. Staff called them Tweedledee and Tweedledum behind their backs. Other faces. A handful of hipsters dressed like summer lumberjacks he assumed were from television. More strangers sipping mimosas filled his hallway, all the way back to his kitchen.

A familiar voice rose above the din. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume!” Klay’s editor, Alexander Porfle, made his way forward from the dining room. Porfle was lean, a few years older than Klay, and British. He had narrow-set blue eyes, sparse hair he parted on the side, and that stiff-legged, terrified posture they appreciate at the Westminster dog show. He wore a navy-blue blazer over an open-collared white dress shirt and penny loafers, no socks.

Porfle thrust out his hand to shake Klay’s, saw the sling, and awkwardly patted Klay’s chest instead. He turned to the room. “We’re all sorry for your loss, Tom. But it is a reminder, a lethal reminder to us all, that it is a dangerous world out there our Mr. Klay inhabits. He is—and I have long said this, so I don’t feel it inappropriate to repeat myself now—a sniper, a man who trains his rifle on unsavory human beings few of