Inside the pub, Kip scanned the place for his mark. Tycho, was either in the can or a private back room, which every joint like this had. And, he was most likely with Vin O’Malley. How Kip knew of O’Malley was a long story, but the place was pretty empty with what was probably O’Grady behind the bar, dressed in what could have passed for a late 1800s Irish pub master outfit, replete with button up white shirt and puffy long sleeves held back in the middle with black scrunchy arm bands. Kip noticed, off to the far end of the bar, a table with a small Japanese man seated on an elaborately carved three-legged ivory stool with some jade figurine inclusions. On the table were round “stones” of white and black, clustered from the southwest to southeast part of the 19 by 19 square board made of alternating dark and light bamboo columns. The man carefully considered the stones’ placements on what had to be an ancient gomokunarabe board from the pre-WWII Japanese Emperor era.

The game was “Go” or “Othello” depending on who was playing it, but Kip knew it had to be Go for an old timer like that…and he would be playing it with its original rules. Hitmen knew lots of games, or so he had discovered. It wasn’t that he went to conventions for them, he’d just crossed paths with more than a couple of killers and they were all card sharks, gamblers, and half of them terribly superstitious. Kip wasn’t. Maybe that’s why most never suspected he was in their line of work. It wasn’t that he was bad at playing games, he just didn’t do well enough to wager money.

            “What’ll you have?” O’Grady asked as Kip sat down on the barstool nearest the door.

            “Ale,” Kip said.

As O’Grady drew an ale from the tap, the suds perfectly forming a head, the Japanese man said, “There,” with a thick Asian old-timer accent as he placed his white stone on an intersection of the board, making four white stones in a row. O’Grady glanced at the board and after delivering the ale to Kip, glided with purpose to position a black stone, blocking any possibility of getting five in a row.

            “Chikusho!” The old man was clearly angry.

Kip guessed the phrase must at the very least mean dammit. Kip tried not to stare or catch the Asian man’s eye. Kip knew about radar and gaydar, but he wondered if there was such a thing as hitman-dar or hitdar? Something in his brain was going off and he wondered if this guy was an old hitman who didn’t need much of an excuse to go off too. Kip sipped his beer and waited to see what happened next.

            “Calm down, Haru, you’ve still got plenty of chances,” said O’Grady with a friendly smile as he returned to the bar.

            “You lie, Tommy, you lie. You go first, you know that.”

            “Well, then next game you get black,” said Tommy O’Grady.

            “We draw, as always,” said Haru, confirming he was a stickler for rules.

This would make him a dangerous opponent, thought Kip, becoming more convinced by the second that the Japanese man used to be in his profession, especially the way he was gripping his cane. That wasn’t the sort he once saw copiously in Florida for support while walking. If O’Grady bugged him too much, there was almost certainly a pointy end hid by the leg’s rubber stopper. However, would a rule-abider would do such, especially to an old friend, and likely the only one who could play his game of choice properly in Toledo? Kip released his squeeze on a bar napkin and took another sip.

            “Here for business or pleasure?” O’Grady asked Kip. 

            Startled, Kip whipped his head from the Japanese player to the barman. “Business. Just needed a cool one.”

            “Of course,” said O’Grady, “Who doesn’t in July around here?” He laughed in a friendly manner. “You with the software convention?”

            “Yeah, how’d you know?”

            “Just a hunch,” replied O’Grady.

Kip had been wearing a white ballcap that read “Stirling Software” just for the occasion, but uttered the line as if he didn’t even remember that he owned a hat and let the barkeeper think he had just one-upped the supposed salesman. Letting people take him for a dummy had been a strength of Kip’s. 

In the fifth grade, Kip had knocked out the bully’s teeth for an ill-advised name mocking and lunch money theft, but by the eighth, Kip knew how to get revenge without being caught. Twiggy Thompson had dared call him “Shrimpy” during P.E. after failing to clear the high jump bar. So, that kid had accidentally compound-fractured his leg. He never did take the rap for that one, or get eyeballed for anything else from then onwards. Of course, there was that one job in Los Angeles. That was full of mistakes he’d rather forget.

            “Another?” said the barman, eyeing Kip’s empty glass.

            Kip looked down, not having noticed he’d gulped it down so fast. He somewhat sheepishly said, “Uh, yeah. It really is hot.”

            As O’Grady drew a new ale with frothy head, Haru shouted, “Dere, kono yarou! Beat that!”

            “That’s not very nice, Haru,” said O’Grady with a chuckle as he delivered Kip’s ale. He moved to the board.

            While O’Grady considered his next move, Kip stood up and moved toward him and the back table asking, “Head?”

            “That way.” O’Grady thumbed behind him.

Kip took the opportunity to walk past the two jousters and see if there was anything besides the head and a kitchen back there. There, in fact, was a room marked “Private” in gold and black over the burnt orange painted door. Light filtered out of its tiny diamond-shaped window with gold lattice work. Although too tiny to see inside, at least Vin and this Tycho character were occupants.

Vin wasn’t just your run of the mill local thug. No, he had a national reputation in some circles. This was, unfortunately, how Kip came to know of the man. Lucky for Kip, though, Vin didn’t know him. Kip was actually on vacation in Bend, Oregon going fly fishing when he came across Vin’s nephew. In a fly shop, the two exchanged about what’d been biting in the Deschutes that morning. The nephew was okay as fishermen went, but looked out of place. Too urban for Bend, but not really bright. The next time Kip saw him, he was floating face down, ostensibly “snagged” by a tree limb in the river. 

Kip was smart enough to not fish out the nephew, Peter, but he waited to see who would find him. It turned out to be Vin, driving a Chevy Tahoe. Kip had armed himself with his Glock 20 on silencer and was hiding behind a hill covered in thick green grass that late May three years ago. At first, Kip thought Vin was the killer come to retrieve his mark. However, he could hear Vin weeping as he waded in and dragged out the starting-to-swell body. He’d later learned that the nephew had robbed the wrong crew and payback had come on this fishing trip while his Uncle Vin was having cocktails with a girl from Rio at the hotel bar. The story goes that Vin O’Malley never forgave the crew for his nephew’s snuff out and each one had wound up dead in some horribly unnatural way over the course of the next seven months. No one knew if he pulled off all the hits himself or if he’d hired help, but this is how Kip had learned of Vin’s reputation nationally. This is how he knew that he operated out of O’Grady’s pub, another one of his sister’s sons (she had five in all) and this is how he knew that if Tycho was into anything in the Irish mob part of Toledo, this is where he’d be and who he’d be talking to. In short, Kip would be an idiot if he didn’t know who was in the room marked “Private”.

            But the real question was, “Why did ‘Elvis’ want Tycho scared if not dead if it had nothing to do with the mob when it was clear that Tycho did have some involvement in the Irish mob? Not knowing could prove deadly to Kip and he didn’t like threatening, to say nothing of killing, people when he didn’t know all the facts and how they might prove to come back to haunt him in a future encounter. He wasn’t going to walk into a noose he had tied himself, thinking he was making it for someone else. He was good at pretending to be dumb, but his own mind was functioning at top form most of the time, even after a couple of slugged down ales.

            As Kip exited the bathroom and took a final glance at the “Private” door, he passed Haru at the Go board just in time for the old man to say, “Kutabare!” which meant, “Drop dead,” because O’Grady had just placed a fifth in a row white stone into place and replied, “Oh c’mon, Haru, you need me alive or you’d have no one to play with and bitch about.”

            Kip left a $20 bill on the bar and said, “Keep it,” to which O’Grady replied, “Thanks, pal,” as he strolled out of the pub. It was happy hour and on taps were $6 a pint. Kip, however, wasn’t very happy with the prospects of his latest job on hold for God knew how long. He checked his text messages again. “Wait” stared back at him. Wait for what?This was going to be trickier than he thought. But, then, every hit was more complicated than it seemed, just some more than others.