Dangerous Games by Michael Prescott

I bet he stands there even in the fuckin’ rain.”
    They’d been wrong about that. He had better things to do in the rain.
    Finally they’d left him, swaggering into the air-conditioned environs of Jonson’s Food & Drug, a store that contracted him at $10.75 an hour to stand guard, unarmed, in a gray uniform and cap.
    He knew that some of the other guards at Jonson’s had tried to get friendly with the neighborhood kids, learn their names, make small talk. There was Thurber, for instance, the overweight guard who’d arrived this evening at four thirty-seven to relieve him and start the night shift.
    “Hey, Bill,” Thurber said with a smile.
    He didn’t like being called Bill. William was his name. “You’re seven minutes late,” Kolb said.
    “What’s seven minutes between friends?”
    Thurber was not his friend. He had no friends. But he let it go.
    “Any trouble today?” Thurber asked.
    “Usual assholes. Smart-talking kids.”
    “You get to know some of these kids, they ain’t so bad.”
    “Why would you want to get to know them?”
    Thurber shrugged, as if the answer were obvious. “Can’t just stand here all day.”
    “Sure you can. That’s the job.”
    Kolb had nothing more to say to Thurber. Thurber was a fool. He wanted to make friends, wanted to be liked. This was a sign of weakness. Kolb was better than that. He never spoke a word to the kids. He showed no reaction to their taunts. He took the insults. He would not be provoked into any response. Nothing could touch him. He was forged of will and discipline. He was stone, he was steel, he was beyond all feeling.
    But tonight his head sure hurt like a son of a bitch.
    He’d been getting the headaches a lot recently. Bad headaches, the kind that pressed down hard between his eyes like someone’s thumb grinding into the bridge of his nose.
    The headaches annoyed him, less because of the pain than because of the betrayal they represented. He expected his body to function properly. It was a tool, which he kept in good working order, and he expected it to operate as required.
    In the old days he never got headaches. He could tangle with gangbangers and street scum throughout an eight-hour shift, spend another few hours downing beers and telling lies in a cop hangout, get an hour’s sleep, and return to work fresh and strong. He had never been sick.
    But now the headaches would come and there was no way to fight them off, no way to deal with them except to lie down in the dark and make his mind blank and hope for sleep.
    He’d never been any good at introspection, but vaguely he knew that the job had something to do with the headaches. At first he’d been happy to get the work. He’d been given a uniform and a badge, and it was almost like being a cop again.
    Or so he’d told himself when he examined his reflection in the polished steel door of his locker. I’m back , he’d thought.
    But it had been a lie. As a cop, he’d had power. He hadn’t been obliged to take any abuse. The gangbangers and their whores wouldn’t dare laugh at him. He’d enforced his authority, ruling the world defined by the parameters of his patrol. Wearing the blue suit, laden down with the Kevlar vest and the Sam Browne belt and the Beretta and the baton, he had been more than a man. He had been something mighty, something invincible, a lord of the earth, breathing power, inspiring fear.
    Kids who went running and gunning after dark and expected to die before they turned eighteen, kids raised on legends of quick riches and quick deaths—those kids cast their eyes down to the pavement when he went by. No jokes, no mutterings in Spanish, no flashing teeth or indecipherable hand signals at his expense. He owned his turf.
    All of that was lost to him now, and pulling guard duty at a grocery store was not enough to compensate.
    But it didn’t matter. The job was only a stopgap measure. When the security firm eventually ran a criminal background check, they would find