Asking For Trouble Read Online Free PDF Page A

everyone to have their fun and take him home.
    They dropped Matt off first. Harry followed him up the walk to his apartment complex, under the watchful gaze of the other Taskmasters. He stuck out a hand for Matt to shake.
    “Now, you’re cool with this, right?” Harry asked.
    “Yeah, of course.”
    “You went a little quiet on us.”
    “Well, you know.”
    “Yeah,” Harry said, nodding. “It’s a big step up from bar brawls, but this will be good for you. Put some meaning in your life. Look, don’t worry, son. It’ll be easier than you think. You’ll see.”
    Matt attempted a confirming laugh. “Yeah.”
    “Remember, this guy isn’t innocent. He’s as guilty as hell. You’re just doing what the law can’t. You just have to keep telling yourself that.”
    “That helps. Thanks.”
    “So the Taskmasters can trust you? There’s no going back after tonight.”
    “You can trust me.”
    “Good man.”
    ***
    Matt sat at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee in his hands, watching the dawn creep up on the city. Sleep hadn’t come easy, not while a loaded gun and a picture of the person he was meant to kill sat out on the kitchen table. He had to kill a man. If he failed to follow through, his imagination didn’t have to wander too far to know what the Taskmasters would do to him.
    He’d made such a hash of his life. The really embarrassing thing about it was there were no excuses for his predicament. He wasn’t a total idiot; in fact, he was reasonably smart. His parents had been good people who’d only wanted the best for him. So how come he couldn’t hold down a job or go for a drink without eventually bruising his knuckles on someone’s face? Questions without answers, he thought—not that he could answer, at least. He picked up the gun and examined it.
    “Time to answer some of those questions.”
    ***
    Terrance Robinson left his bank job twenty minutes after five, having had a pretty easy day of trying to arrange bank loans at the Hilltop Mall branch. Matt knew this because he’d spent the day watching Robinson. He’d even gone into the bank to ask about opening an account, just so he could get a close-up look at the man he was supposed to kill. Matt didn’t get the impression that Robinson’s child-killing escapade weighed heavily upon him. He was easygoing around his colleagues and then negotiated rush hour traffic with infinite patience.
    Robinson pulled up in front of his home, choosing to park in the street to let two boys—Matt assumed they were his two sons—continue playing a little one-on-one in the driveway. Pulling his tie off, he even jumped into the fray, snatching the ball away to attempt overambitious layups.
    Having blown by the Robinson home, Matt got out of his car and wandered back up the street for a closer look. Excited giggles and shrieks carried on the air. Robinson exhibited no signs of remorse about his deadly action and the lives he’d wrecked. He got to enjoy his children but had robbed other parents of theirs. A man like that deserved to die, didn’t he?
    “Hate is the key,” Chalmers had said during their meeting, as he had tapped Robinson’s file. “To kill him you have to hate him. Read what this man has done and hate it. Stare at his picture and hate him. Do that and this will be easy.”
    Matt watched the man at play with his children. Did he hate Robinson? He’d let that girl die instead of doing the right thing. He despised Robinson for that, but did he hate him in the way Chalmers and the Taskmasters wanted him to hate him?
    Lingering, Matt found himself staring at the kids and not their father. Killing Robinson meant destroying those boys’ lives too. Devastating another family didn’t make up for what had already happened. Matt couldn’t kill Robinson. He returned to his car and drove to the one place that would end this game.
    ***
    As he climbed the steps to the police department, Matt didn’t know what he was going to say, other than he was