Stone Junction: An Alchemical Pot-Boiler by Jim Dodge

Author:Jim Dodge
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction, General
ISBN: 9781786893970
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2004-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

Three: WATER

Sensitive Chaos.

—Novalis

In its unbounded state, it's water's nature to seek a spherical

form. That's why rivers meander.

—Schwenk

Gurry Debritto started with the CIA when he was twelve years old. His father, a marine colonel, served as a CIA liaison officer. When they needed a young boy to pose as the son of a female agent, the colonel suggested Gurry.

Gurry trained all winter at Norfolk with Claudia Lord, the woman agent who would be posing as a bitter war widow and Department of Defense secretary with a child to raise and some information to sell. They were hoping to flush a Russian agent.

It went down in a Baltimore hotel. Claudia fumbled pulling her gun. She’d just flipped off the safety when the Russian shot her. He stepped up quickly as she slumped to the floor and shot her again to make sure. Then he turned the gun on Gurry and pulled the trigger, but Gurry was diving over Claudia’s body and the bullet grazed his calf. Gurry picked up Claudia’s gun and kept rolling as three more slugs tore chunks from the carpet. As the Russian bolted for the door, Gurry came up kneeling, the gun held steady with both hands. He shot the Russian in the neck. Hearing his father’s war stories, he’d wondered what it would feel like to kill someone. Now he knew. It felt good.

With his father’s blessings, the CIA put him on salary. His training was thorough, his teachers the best. At sixteen, he performed his first solo hit, a Dayton reporter about to reveal some bad news about cash movements in the Cayman Islands – not that Gurry cared why. But when he was twenty he did ask himself why he was killing people for a loutish bureaucracy he had come to despise for the monthly pittance of sixteen thousand dollars.

Gurry declared himself independent. The agency graciously gave him his leave, sending two men to kill him. When their bodies were found mummy-wrapped in scarlet ribbon at the bottom of a dumpster two blocks from the director’s house, a truce was negotiated: Gurry would continue to take on special assignments for them at a reasonable wage, but could accept or reject assignments as he chose.

Gurry Debritto’s career wasn’t limited to assassination – he did security work and general demolition as well – but assassination, he often said, was ‘the biggest buck for the bang.’ His fees grew in direct proportion to the narrow legend he became. The most he’d received was twenty million dollars for poisoning Jack Ruby. The least was the twenty thousand for killing Annalee Pearse. That one still pissed him off. It wasn’t his fault it was botched.

‘We’re drunk in a Motel 6 in Stockton, California. You didn’t find Miss Rainbow Moonbeam Brigit Fifth Bardo or whatever the fuck her name is, but we know enough already, don’t we? Other people at the party said she wandered back around dawn and announced – it was the sort of thing people remember – ‘I

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