Author's Note: Expect long lapses of time between updates. I'm lazy, you know? Sorry, I'll try to update sooner and more often.

Brothers and sisters,

Hope still waits in the wings,

Like a bitter spinster

Impatient, lonely and shivering, waiting to build her glorious fires

It's because of our plans, man

Our beautiful, ridiculous plans

Let's launch them like careening jet planes!

Let's crash them into the river

Let's build strange and radiant machines, at this Jericho waiting to fall

Built Then Burnt (Hurrah! Hurrah!) by A Silver Mount Zion

The sky outside stretched onwards for an eternity, gray and flat with scalloped clouds. The kid sitting across from me in that little pea-green painted interrogation room was young, and black, and he had a weird little haircut that looked about twenty years out of date. He'd gotten picked up on a string of armed robberies in the Bronx, hitting drug stores and liquor joints, that kind of thing. The powers that be assigned me to talk to him, find out if he had any partners.

Detective Max Payne. NYPD. Detective Sergeant, if you wanted to get specific.

After that fiasco fifteen years ago, all that shit with Lem, all that shit that killed Mona, they upped me and gave me a desk job. I guess the brass decided that I'd killed enough guys, and I guess I'm with them on that one. I just got tired of it. Revenge and pats on the back from government officials just don't turn me on anymore.

You could say that I maybe have some sympathy for the mob hitmen now. The hitmen and I, we're in the same line of work, up to a degree. Maybe that's why I liked Mona so much. I think about her now and again, when I can't sleep in my crummy Hell's Kitchen apartment, when the hoods outside blaring rap from the parking lots are making too much noise.

I looked at the kid. He looked back. His face was round and the nose was big and wide nostriled and had a lot of bumps on it. It looked like it'd been broken before. I said, "You want a cigarette?"

His reply was instant and robotic. "Fuck you, faggot." I wasn't surprised by what he said; if I had a dime for every punk who'd called me a name I'd be Bill Gates. No, it was it was his tone of voice: no emotion, no passion. Dead. Only the inherited ghetto accent was there.

"Listen, pal," I said, leaning over the old scarred and burned table, "I don't want to prolong this shit. We need names, right? You killed four people, heisting those stores. You roll on your buddies, you can get a plea, you don't, and they'll be taking you apart at Sing Sing for the next millennium."

The kid spat at me. No hesitation. I slapped him in the face and pulled his face down on the table and when I saw my reflection in the two way the anger dissipated like it had never been there and I stood completely still for a minute.

The kid started crying. He must've only been...what? Sixteen? I shook my head and lit a Marlboro and walked out of the room, feeling dirty and disgusted all over.

Redfield, a middle aged dick who did Homicide and Robbery, came out of the two-way and said, "What the fuck was that, Payne?"

I looked at him. Redfield was short and thick, not fat at all, with a sparse tangle of brown hair atop his square face. His mouth was small and puckered, his eyes were big. He looked funny when he got mad but I didn't feel like laughing and I told him, straight up, "I can't do this today. I'm going home. You wanna bitch to the brass about it, go ahead. I'm two years from retirement."

I walked away from him, listening to his breathless curses. Other cops looked at me and I could see the contempt on their faces: me, just another old-timer living in the past, striding out in those glares like a sea of jaded hate.

My car was outside, in the snow. Winter. Made me nostalgic. I got in and started it up and drove home, listening to Coltrane on the radio and chain smoking.

The apartment building was maybe two steps up from my lodgings fifteen years ago. I'd lived in the place forever, and the doorman--a nice guy, Ralph something or other--said, "Evening, Max," when I strode past him.

The elevator was broken and so I took the stairs, going slowly. Breathing hard. It depressed me. I used to be able to take stairs two at a time, firing pot shots behind me at eye-tie gangsters. All without breaking a sweat.

I was getting old.

No denying it.

My apartment was at the end of the hall, a crooked door with a gold colored "18" on it. I put my key in, stopped, looked at my reflection in the window overlooking the courtyard.

Black hair, graying on the edges. A wrinkled face with too many scars and too harsh eyes. I looked like a villain. I felt like one. At least I wasn't fat.

I opened the door, stepped inside, closed it, and turned on the light.

A man was sitting on one of my easy chairs, in the living room that was directly across from my front door. He had a big shotgun in his lap with a makeshift silencer: a spray paint can, somehow colored matte black, filled with insulation. The shotgun was a classic pump. I knew without checking that a round was probably already jacked into it.

The man said, "Sit down." Fifteen, ten years ago I would've gone for my piece and shot him in the face. Tried something. But I felt tired, and scared, and out of breath, and so I sat down in the chair across from his, across the coffee table, and lit a cigarette.

He was tall, this man, with straight black hair graying on the edges that he wore longish. He was wearing a light gray suit that fit him tight around the shoulders, with thin lapels. His shirt was gray. Both looked expensive. He was slim and looked very fit, even under the suit. His face was round and he had high cheekbones and a strong jaw and crow's feet around the eyes. If he hadn't of been so harsh looking, so dangerous, he would've been handsome.

His eyes were cold and dead, yet strangely glistening.

They were piercing blue.

Like turquoise under water.

I sat there, studying him. "You're Max Payne," he said. It was more of a statement than a question, but I nodded anyway.

"Yeah," I said. "I am."

His stratched his nose. Both of his hands, I noticed, were scarred heavily and the left had several mottled black burn scars on it. They were thick. His skin was dark and he looked vaguely South American.

"It wasn't hard to find you. That didn't surprise me. You aren't scared of much."

His voice was cold and dead and completely accent-less. Like a radio announcer's.

"You're here to kill me," I said.

He nodded, smiled thinly. I licked my lips. "Why?" was all I could muster to ask. I felt a hot spurt of anger at my fear. How many times had I been in this position? With how many other men?

He shook his head. "We're similar," he said. "I respect you. That's rare, for me. I've been on the opposite side of the law, of course, but...still."

I dragged off of my cigarette, tipped ash onto the floor and mashed on it with my foot. "Are you some kind of...assassin, hitman? Or what?"

"Or what," he said. Smiling, still. Who the hell was this guy? I went through my mind, trying to think of any criminal I'd hurt or killed or arrested in the past fifteen years that could've led to this.

I came up with a blank.

"It doesn't matter," he said suddenly. "I killed seventeen people on my way here. I was involved in a...an altercation at a hotel in Nevada a week ago. I killed most of them there. It's funny. I think I've murdered more than three hundred people in my life. Maybe. In all different settings, all different countries. Wars, streets, et cetera."

I had to keep him talking, so I nodded complacently. A 'continue, please' kind of a nod.

"I got hurt last week. In Nevada. A Mexican dope dealer shot me in the thigh. I stayed in hotels for days afterward, watching horrible things on television, drinking water, recovering."

He grinned at me suddenly. His teeth were very white, very clean.

"I thought about you. I decided to come here before heading home, to pay you a visit."

My throat was very dry. I knew right then that I would probably die at the hands of this stranger.

"Who are you?" I croaked. "Who the fuck are you?"

He raised the shotgun and I turned and the buckshot all caught me in the back. The chair shifted under and fell away and I scrambled to the floor, crawling, trying to stand. I wanted to roll onto my back, to look at his face before I died.

I heard him pump the shotgun. I heard his footsteps. He was beside me now, breathing.

"It wouldn't've of mattered," he said. My breath caught.

"If she'd of lived or died. It wouldn't've of mattered."

It coughed up blood.

The world swam away.

Author's Note: Well, there you go. Should I leave it here, or continue the story? Drop a review, let me know.