The Hit

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Earlier that night a man’s brains had been blown out.

The bullet passed through his forehead and blasted apart the back of his skull in a spray of blood and bone.

Now, clumps of hair and scalp were drying to the wall. His corpse sloshed in ten inches of water at the base of that wall. The corpse, the wall and the water were inside the main cabin of the Sea Dog, a derelict houseboat fighting a hurricane more than a mile out from land.

Above the boat, torrential rain and wind tore open the sky. Below, angry swells threatened to capsize her. She was forty feet long, fourteen feet wide and shaped like a floating shoebox. Smashed windows ran along her length like haunted eyes. A six-foot deck protruded like a fat lip at her stern. She was driven before the squalls of the hurricane like a refugee before the gun butts of the storm troopers.

Back inside, the low ceiling gave her main cabin the feel of a cave. The cabin was smashed, blown apart, with chunks of furniture, shards of glass and the remnants of a marine radio floating in the water. Worse, the dead man was not alone.

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