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docks he had never heard of me, nor had anyone else in law enforcement. All that was probably true. It always amazed me with the shit I pulled as a kid that I was never arrested, and not only that, never even had any cops harassing me. Once I started working for Lombard, I was kept on the fringes, at least at first. Later when I started doing contracts for him we were careful to keep our association together quiet. For twenty-three years I was on the books at Jack’s Discount Liquor Store on Lansing Street, and sometimes I actually spent my free hours uncrating boxes and stocking merchandise, although more often than not when I was there I would sit in the back room drinking scotch and studying the day’s racing forms. Still, as invisible as I might have kept myself, it was carelessness on their part. The violence I committed at the docks should’ve alerted them to what I was, and then there was the inscription on the back of my Rolex. There was no excuse on their part for missing that, just as there was none on mine for wearing that Rolex out in public. Christ, I had gotten sloppy by then.
    Of course, you can’t always believe what you read in the papers. When I was first arrested, the papers and TV stations got half the shit wrong about what went down at the docks. Given that, I wasn’t sure what to make of a claim the article made that the state had kept the details of my confession secret until six months ago. Maybe it was true. Quotes given in the article from several of the victims’ families supported that. The other inmates at Cedar Junction, as well as the guards, knew what I’d done, but maybe that was just the word getting out from Lombard’s organization. Maybe that knowledge was kept inside.
    The explanation the state gave in that article for keeping the details of my confession secret was an outright lie – that it was part of the deal I made, and that it was only following a recent Superior Court decision that they were allowed to divulge my sealed confession. It was all bullshit. If my confession was sealed, that was done by them, not me. I guess they’d been hoping I’d never leave prison alive, and once they realized that I was going to they came up with this fairy tale to cover their asses. Thinking about it, I was amazed that these state officials were willing to keep the victims’ families in the dark the way they did for so many years, but I guess it showed how afraid they were of the political fallout of having the public find out they cut a deal with a hit man with twenty-eight scalps tied to his belt.
    The paper had talked to families of four of the guys I had taken out, and each of them were made to look like saints. I remembered these guys, and they were all dirty. I’m not saying they deserved to be killed, but they were far from the innocent choirboys they were made out to be. As I said before, you have to take what you read in the papers with a grain of salt. They get so much of the shit wrong.
    By the time I finished with the article, my head was feeling like it was going to split apart. That wasn’t that unusual for me. The last fourteen years I’d had headaches almost constantly, and had learned for the most part to ignore them. Sometimes they were worse than other times, and this time it was worse. Much worse. I fished out of my pocket the bottle of aspirin I’d bought earlier and chewed on a few tablets. When I looked up, a teenage boy sitting three rows up was twisted in his seat and staring fixated at me. His eyes slits, his face a hard plastic mask. There was no question that he recognized me. I stared back, and realized that it didn’t make any fucking difference. I did what I did. People were going to know who I was, and sooner or later they were going to know where I was living. There was nothing I could do to change the past, and it was pointless thinking I could hide from it.
    We kept up this staring contest, me and this boy, until a middle-aged woman who must’ve