Andy toyed for a while with the idea of telling Josh. He was a friend and he knew about this kind of close encounters with death. It would be good to have a backup.

He soon let go of that idea for the same reason that he had gone to see Damian on his own. He didn’t want anyone to die anymore. That was the surprising outcome of coming to terms with a long life of crime: he wouldn’t have it. In his heart, he knew he would die before he let anyone take a bullet in his stead. He didn’t feel heroïc, exactly. He didn’t know if there was a God or not, but he was sure his soul wasn’t going to any kind of Paradise. In rational terms, nothing he would do from now on would buy back the lives he had taken. The damage was done for good. That was the basic idea of life: once gone, it was really gone. Andy simply felt determined. That would have to be enough.

First, he had to find a weapon. There was a small chance the guy was just here to talk but Andy wasn’t going to take it. Given the place he lived in, he would have to choose between blunt or sharp. There wasn’t any kind of weapon here and it was good that way.

Farming implements could do a lot of damage, but they were hardly handy when it came to hunting someone down. Plants and soil tended to stay still when you worked on them, so it was no wonder it was a such a chore to run with a pitchfork.

There was plenty of firewood for the winter, but most of the logs were cut in such a way that they would be at the same time hard to carry and difficult to bludgeon with. There was also the possibility that the wood itself would crack, rendering the already shabby weapon completely useless.

Ultimately, one of the best things Andy could go for was one of the kitchen knives, which had probably been a hunting knife anyway given its shape and polish. It now belonged to the vegetarian Nacho. Andy felt a pang of guilt when he thought about what that knife may end up doing. He would do his best not to use it.

Then he prepared his outfit. All he had with him was the delirious costumes Josh had made him buy and some of the farm’s leftover working clothes. He worked together a innocuous black shirt, some jeans covered in holes and dirty grease, a camo jacket and a knit cap. The jacket was loose. It would help him hide the bulge of the knife: he had no sheath to work with, wedging in his belt near his side would have to do.

He went into the woods that morning. It was the day after and he was supposed to meet the guy in barely two hours. He was nervous enough that he felt ill. In the midst of the trees, where he knew no one would see, he practiced the routine that he had refined for over thirty years. Even if no one apart from him had really seen it, the practice was a thing of beauty. It was a fluid series of movements blending together, not really that agressive, but they felt irresistible, like the flow of things that happened anyway. He hadn’t lost much on that, he felt and that constatation put him in a much better head space. He was gonna drive this conversation and not let it go towards bloodshed, on either side. He was a changed man. He wasn’t going back.

Soon it was past eleven and he had to leave. He wanted to go on foot: he would be less threatening but just as deadly. He wasn’t going to drive a point home forcefully, to make Damian fear him. They could always send other people, and they didn’t hesitate much when bloodshed was needed. He had simply no leverage on that side.

He had to convince him to walk away, simple as that. There was nothing to see here. No secrets being leaked, no collaboration with a rival gang, no money to extort. They were not only clean, they were boring and he had to drive that particular point home, so he would keep going and take a Spanish vacation on his working hours. He just had to say he didn’t find them, it was that simple.

The wind was picking up, cold and dry and Andy adjusted his scarf around his neck. Of all the good things you could praise Spain for, its climate wasn’t gentle. It was sometimes hot as hell and sometimes freezing, a strange civilisation build on a rocky desert. He had to walk twenty minutes before he reached the meeting place. Damian was nowhere to be seen.

‘I hope he gets there on time’, though Andy, even though he should have wished for anything to delay that encounter. Truth was, he had a feeling that if he missed his opportunity to talk things out it would get worse. There was no telling what Damian could do to smoke them out.

Something weird happened right then. As he was preparing to face the man, waiting with an increasing confidence that he was getting back in shape, something grew inside him, a dark feeling. He got nauseous. Was it yet another backlash from being sober? In a daze, he raged internally: it was not the time for him to be unable to focus! No way he was gonna be a duck in a shooting gallery. Not happening.

Dizzy, he felt himself reach for the knife he had tucked in his belt and throw it as far as he could. Almost instantly, the dizziness went away and he realized he didn’t even have the heart to defend his life anymore. He went down to his knees and caught his breath.

“Well, that’s it, then,” he thought. “I’m going down.”

As he heard the noise of gravel being crushed under wheels, he got on his feet and turned around. Damian was there, still parking. He had most likely seen the whole scene.

He got out of the car, looked at Andy up and down, bewildered.

“What the fuck are you doing, man?” he said. There wasn’t much of an answer to that question. The cards had been played.

Now it was time to see the game.