Last Job

"It was a dark and stormy night," he thought to himself, chuckling audibly. It was funny because the cliché was true. The driving conditions were miserable: pitch black, clouds hiding even the moon, driving rain, heavy winds. He kept below the speed limit on this winding country road, as logging trucks often occupied the oncoming lane (and, as often as not, some of his) and maniacs hell-bent for their cottages blasted past him from the other direction. The only reason he was out here was that the alternative was worse: his screaming one year old son waking everyone at their cottage, depriving everyone of a Good Night's Sleep. His wife was still back there with their four year old daughter. He wouldn't have wanted her out in this crud, and fortunately, she wanted no part of it either. Eddie had stopped wailing moments after his father steered them onto the highway, the rhythmic thumping of the wipers adding to the already hypnotic combination of road noise and car vibration. Never at a loss for backup, he added a CD of lullabies to make for a knockout punch the little one simply could not fight.
After a while, traffic in both directions subsided, and the road lost its will to snake quite so violently, uncoiling itself to present languid, rolling curves. For a moment he felt truly at peace, happy. He made the mistake of looking at the digital clock in his dash, then cursed whatever sadistic part of his brain it was that chose this moment to remind him that tomorrow, at exacly this time (if all went as planned), he would be killing the Azeri Minister of Information.
He knew that fighting it was useless, so he took in a final breath of the quietude that was, and gave himself over to reviewing his plan. He was going over codes and signals when he heard a whimper from the back of the car. They passed a gas station just then, and enough light bathed the interior of the car for him to see a pair of open eyes in his rearview. Those eyes were themselves reflections in a large, gaudily decorated baby-mirror mounted above the back seat headrest so the driver could see the occupant of the rear-facing child seat. A couple of plaintive phonemes confirmed that "the cargo" was stirring. His right hand located a fish cracker in the coffee cup holder, which he awkwardly snaked behind him to present to his slumber-resistant charge. His contortions were rewarded, though, as he felt small fingers pull the prized snack from his grasp. "He could almost put me in a half-nelson from here," he thought. "God, wouldn't I be proud..."
The absurdity of having these thoughts share the company of the ones immediately preceding was not lost on him. "What the fuck am I doing?" he muttered to himself. Kids had never been part of the plan, but he knew better than anyone that plans need to be flexible. And he had flexed. He had also given himself a timeline for getting out of the business once he knew he would be a father. But that timeline, like his wife's belly, had stretched by an order of magnitude. Or two. Like the pregnancy, though, it had to end.
This would be his last job, he told himself.
This would be his last job.