In the Company of Killers by Bryan Christy (ebook reader for pc and android .txt) 📕

“Oh, honestly, Alex.” Hadley Porfle pushed her husband aside and kissed Klay lightly. “We won’t stay,” she whispered into his ear. “I am sorry for your loss.”

“That’s what he is,” Porfle continued, for everyone to hear. “And you all should know it. Mr. Klay, our Good Christian Soldier, identifies targets with me on the scope, and he takes them down. This was a small setback,” he said, turning to Klay. “We’ll get that bastard, my boy. Your pen and my pencil. The old Sov is behind you.” Porfle raised his glass. “To Tom Klay, master of the upright pronoun!”

“Hear! Hear!”

Klay thanked Porfle, drank his champagne, greeted colleagues clustered in his front room, and then made his way deliberately down the crowded narrow hallway to the kitchen. He didn’t recognize a single person nibbling catered Greek food, sipping white wine, talking across his granite island, leaning against the stainless refrigerator.

Klay didn’t cook, but shopping for this house he’d liked the idea of himself as a cook, with a wife like Erin who liked to cook, too. She’d had the same idea. And though the house needed plenty of work elsewhere, they’d walked in, seen the farmhouse sink, the gas-fueled Viking stove, and the Sub-Zero refrigerator, and they felt sure this would be their home.

They talked about throwing dinner parties, their many interesting friends laughing together in the living room, pouring really nice, full-bodied cabernet using those big-bowled glasses actually designed for drinking cabernet, while he and Erin, wearing amusing, insider-joke aprons they’d bought for each other, served dishes discovered in Bon Appétit. Although none of that had remotely come to pass—not Erin, not learning to cook, not matching wineglasses, not a single dinner party—it had been that idea, and this kitchen, that had sold him on the house.

“Going to get some air,” he muttered, squeezing past his guests. He slid open the kitchen’s glass door and stepped onto the small deck. He was closing the kitchen door when Erin stepped onto the deck with him and slid the door closed.

“Hey,” she said. “I’m sorry about the party.”

“It’s fine,” he said.

“Everybody was worried about you, you know. Even Porfle, no matter what he was talking about in there.”

“I get it.”

She waited a moment, then sighed. “You’re already closed down, aren’t you?”

It was what he did. No distractions. He wanted Botha.

“Look,” she said, finally, “I’m going back to your party.” She looked at the deck’s back gate. “Wherever you’re off to, don’t blame yourself, okay?”

He unlatched the gate, walked down an alley to the street, and hailed a cab.

“The Sovereign, please,” he said. He didn’t need to say more—every cabbie in the city knew the famous magazine’s headquarters. The driver took East Capitol, turned right past the Supreme Court, and headed up Constitution. It was about as impressive a commute as one could ask for, Klay guessed. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.

He’d had only one good relationship in the years since Erin.

Hungry Khoza was brilliant and funny and stunningly beautiful. They’d met at an Interpol conference in Lyon, France, where she was leading a panel on balancing the power between a state and its citizens. As a South African, she spoke with captivating authority. He raised his hand and asked what difference rules made when the state in question was corrupt. “American, right?” she responded. It was the beginning of a conversation that seemed destined to last forever.

But Hungry lived in Pretoria. “Geographically challenged” was how they explained their eventual breakup to friends and family. Anyone who knew them could have offered a hundred other reasons why they hadn’t worked out: Hungry was too dedicated to her career as a prosecutor; Klay was too dedicated to his as a journalist. One was steady; the other transient. One black; the other white. One outgoing; the other quiet. One upbeat; the other, well, Tom Klay.

The truth was their many differences had made Klay love Hungry even more. And he was pretty certain the same had been true for her. When Hungry discovered the walls he had built inside of himself, walls Erin, despite valiant efforts, had been unable to break down, Hungry had not given up. She had picked up a hammer and chiseled away at those barriers, working patiently. And she had been successful in ways no woman ever had.

He told her about the Jakarta car accident—all of it—and how it made him feel. He told her about his childhood, his parents, and the loss that had laced his adulthood with despair. He told her about his fear that no matter how hard he tried, the world would simply absorb his efforts and get worse. He told her he wasn’t a good person; he was a bad person who did good things to hide the truth. He was afraid, deep down, that he liked to hurt people. Feelings he didn’t know he had. Fears he had never shared.

But then, on the verge of what felt like true intimacy, he would pick up his duffel bag and leave. Erin thought he was repeating his same sins. She encouraged him to try again. “This woman is good for you, Tom,” she said. “Go back.”

Hungry was good for him. She knew how to love and be loved. She was willing to go more than halfway in their relationship. She understood him, and loved him anyway. “Don’t you see?” Hungry said to him. “You never take a case you won’t win. I am that case, Thomas. Your unwinnable case. You have to commit to love, and risk losing it, to find happiness.”

Commitment wasn’t the issue—he wanted a relationship with Hungry—but he had made another commitment years ago, and that commitment left no space for her. And so he would disappear again, and months would pass before his heart drove him back to South Africa. And when he returned their cycle would begin again: she chiseling away, he pretending he was an honest man struggling to make a