7. “He’s gonna be a tough one,” Kurt said, squinting his piggy eyes in the glare of the sunlight. “Always has been,” I said. I wore dark glasses, not only because of the sun shining overhead but because I didn’t feel like having people look me in the eyes right now. “Why should it be any different when the time comes for him to die?” There was a grunt of almost-amusement from the big man, and he nodded toward a building in the distance. The air was cold but not bitterly so. The sun had warmed it, and temperatures were back above freezing. We stood in a vacant lot, the ground soft beneath our feet as we stared at the ramshackle brick building across the street. It was a bar, an old one, and it looked as though it might fall down at any given moment. The decaying red brick looked as if it had been built a hundred years ago and repurposed into a bar in the last twenty or so. My eyes swept the street and found more of the same.
