He was not hurting, but only because he’d taken so much oxycodone that he wouldn’t have felt anything less than an amputation. Yet something down there, in his groin, something vital felt like it was coming loose. Without the pills, he thought, he’d have felt like he’d just dropped his balls into a bear trap. Walking two hundred yards down the hill hadn’t helped. He didn’t have much time left, he thought, before he’d be so clouded that he’d be incapable of pulling off any kind of deal, much less one with a Hezbollah agent, two Turks, or a famous TV star. He got to the bottom of the hill, walked across a patch of scrubby grass to the concrete table, had to lift the bowling bag to its surface, groaned as he did it. Not a groan of pain, but of incipient death. How much longer, Oh Lord? Two weeks? The docs had told him that the cancer in his brain would kill his ability to breathe, before it got to his reasoning faculties.
