Epilogue — Gunner
Monday morning. The family is back in their corners. I leave La Sirena on foot at ten.
The Miami light in late January is clean and white. Too much of it. August is better. People look at the ground in August.
The errand is two miles south. I walk it.
The woman with the stroller sees me at thirty feet. Her eyes do the small calculation — distance, trajectory, intercept time — and she swerves the front wheel to the curb side. The toddler doesn't notice. The mother smiles at no one and keeps moving and doesn't look back.
Two girls in sundresses cross the street mid-block.
Sixteen, maybe seventeen. They have been laughing at something on a phone.
Then one of them sees me and her hand finds the other's elbow and they cross without looking at the cars.
A taxi brakes. The driver mouths something at them. They keep going.
I am not insulted. I have a face. People look at it.
Outside the coffee cart on the corner, three men are in line.
Two are tourists. The third is local — short, dense, neck thick enough to take a bullet, prison ink crawling out of his collar.
He clocks me at twenty feet. I watch him do it.
The recognition: another bad man. He measures me.
The measurement takes him longer than the women's did because he is doing it properly.
Then he steps wider in line. A full half pace.
He doesn't look up at me as I pass.
That one I file.
I keep walking.
A man in his sixties has a small dog on a leash, the kind of dog that is mostly hair. The dog growls. The man tugs the leash and crosses the street. The dog growls all the way across.
At the next corner, a mother is talking to her son.
He is maybe seven, school uniform, on the way somewhere.
He sees me first. He goes very still. His mother glances down to see what he is looking at, finds me, and her hand goes to the back of her son's head, fingers spreading wide across his hair.
She turns him into her hip. She keeps her voice the same. She is good at it. Practiced.
I pass them at six feet.
The boy watches me go past with his face still pressed into her side.
I do not think about it. I have done this walk a thousand times. The thinking was finished a long time ago.
Outside a juice place a woman my own age is on her phone.
She is leaning on the door. She is wearing the kind of clothes women wear when they are trying.
When she sees me she lowers her phone an inch and looks at her own shoes until I am past. She lifts the phone again.
I hear her resume the call. Her voice has the bright recovery in it. The lie of fine.
It is twelve more blocks.
What I made my peace with a long time ago is that they are not wrong. The face is the face. The body is the body. The work I do for the empire shows on me. They sense it without knowing. The street is reading me correctly. I would not pretend otherwise.
I pay for women, but not because I want what they have.
It is what they don't have. They don't have the look.
They don't have the swerve. They look at the face.
They take the meeting. They are not afraid to put their eyes on me without flinching.
Money buys it. Money is clean. The contract is short and ends cleanly.
The address is on a side street off Brickell, second floor of a residential building with a tasteful facade. The kind of place that does not advertise. The button on the panel is unmarked. I press it.
A long second.
The door clicks.
I push through into the lobby. The elevator is to the right. The doorman is behind a desk and he is reading something on his phone and he does not look up. He has been paid not to look up. He is good at it.
Second floor. The hallway has three doors. I go to the one at the end.
I press the bell.
The woman who opens the door is in her thirties. Dark hair. A robe over what I assume is her work clothes, something skimpy and lacy. She has been told to expect me. She has been shown my picture. That is the protocol for clients like me.
She looks at my face.
She does not flinch.
She steps aside.
Inside, the door clicks shut behind me.
Thank you so much for reading Logan and Wren’s story.