I recently read a book, Bleeding Hearts, by Ian Rankin, and shorly after, this one by Stephen King...remarkably similar tales involving self conscious hit men who are so scarred by what they do that they are trying to leave their professions behind, along with their lives. Both are set up for betrayal by mystery employers, both take off trying to find the cheating bosses, both have supposedly shadowy abettors who are in reality rather flamboyant characters, and both take a young girl along with them, for no apparent reason to the reader other than to force a love angle into it....there are distinctions, to be sure, in the assassin/girl relationships; Rankin makes them lovers, which is at least plausible since they knew each other from the start, and the love developed naturally...but King's story line was a mushy mixture of dirty old man meets addled, clinging co-ed...
the protagonists, the hit men, do provide an interesting counterpoint to each other; one is a hemophiliac, which adds a needless risk to a profession based on bloodletting, and the other is a literary critic, who like most of us thinks he has a novel inside of him...Rankin's Weston is more believable as a world class assassin than King's Billy, but that is just my opinion...one other thing, about King's annoying habit of appeasing his political bete-noires, it is awkward, gauch, petulant and childish, to name just a few adjectives...