Untitled Future Freezy Novel
This one strikes a nerve.
A guy tries to hire me to whack his brother. I’m supposed to meet him in an alley behind a hospital. I’m careful. And since I’m careful, I got rules. First rule - be there early. Second rule - look like you belong. So when the guy comes by and I ask him for a buck, he tells me to get lost. Tells me I’m screwing with his day. I tell him to sit down if he wants to talk business, and I say it in my uncle’s voice. Just one of the things about me that I can’t help but hate. Guy looks at me like he’s seeing me for the first time. I’m not a bum after all. The novelty wears off a little slow for my taste, but finally he sits down. Tall guy in a business suit, slicked hair, talking to a homeless man in an alley. Nothing about that seems odd, does it? After he sits down I check him for bugs. People hear things, talk to cops, you never know when it’s gonna be hot. Might always be hot, might never be. So you have to treat each rich prick like he might be the fuzz. Of course, when they’re smart they remember to check you out too, but usally they’re calmed by your your paranoia. This guy doesn’t bother.
He pulls out a picture of himself, tells me this is the hit. His twin brother.
My gut goes numb. It’s not anger there, because anger is something I can control. My whole body vibrates for want of ending this man. I don’t know if I can wait. I don’t know if a bum goes to jail for strangling a businessman outside of a hospital. What would I tell Rebecca? A minute goes by and I’m clenching my teeth together. The guy is still talking.
“Make it look casual. Like a drive-by, or a mugging. I can’t have anyone looking at me, wanting to know if I wanted him dead.”
“Why do you?”
He sighs, and looks down. “No, that’s fair. I uh…my brother’s the reason my life isn’t what it should be. I don’t want to go into it.”
It’s about a girl. It’s about money. I don’t care - I tell him my price. It’s too high on purpose. I don’t want him to accept the deal. On this one, I’m going to play for two. He’s not happy with the price. I can tell I’d be cutting pretty large into his savings. He knows he can get the job done for less, somewhere else. So he cuts the meeting short. He goes his way, I amble home to change.
He’s easier to follow than I would have guessed. The guy is an idiot. I see him outside of a cafe just three blocks from the hospital, talking to a bald man in sunglasses. I don’t look like I did before - he woudln’t recognize me if I walked up and said hello. Still, I’m surprised by his bold brainlessness. The kind of single-minded power hungry personality that would have found itself a throne a few hundred years back. Right before it found the guillotine.
They shake hands. It’s going down.
The brother lives alone, and that’s ideal. Means I’ll have time to clean up. Fourth floor apartment, two entrances. Fire exit access, and a balcony overlooking a major street. Not a big deal.
The other guy, the hitman, is harder. I always felt worse about taking care of them, since any good hitman is really only a tool for someone who wants someone dead. Hitmen don’t kill people, people kill people. So I tend to think of what I do as gun control.
What I’m saying is, it’s easier to feel sorry for the gun. Still, when you choose to be something, you have to take what comes with that. Rotten jobs, bad pay, cops. Me.
Today it’s me.
Of course, I don’t have to go to him, if I know where he’s going to be. The brother lives across town in a house on a hill. Wife, two kids. All of this is too much for me. Too similar.
The gun parks his car at the end of the street. Usually I like to get something out of them. Ask them a few things. Not tonight. Tonight he doesn’t even see me. Steps out of his car and I put him back in with a bullet to the temple. Thwip! He ducks in gracefully, almost as if he forgot something in the glovebox. The door stays open. I don’t bother to clean up. The less I touch, the better.
At the other place I’m careful no one sees me. I don’t go through the fire escape - I already have an in.
“Who is it,” he says through the intercom.
“We talked about a thing today. I have some news for you.”
“What do you - oh. Oh, okay, just a minute.”
He buzzes me in.
In the hallway I pull on my new face. Dark red spandex, just thin enough to see through and just thick enough to keep anyone from seeing in, especially in low light. No holes.
When he sees it, he looks confused. “What are you doing here?” He thinks I am the other one, the man he succeeded in paying.
“Let me in, so we can talk.”
We sit on the couch. Before the talk starts I paralyze him. His eyes bulge, his tongue hangs from his mouth.
“There’s something I want to tell you about, sir.”
I pull snips from my bag and pinch his right thumb off. I put it in his mouth.
“And I want you to listen. No interruptions.”
He’s trying to scream. The silence in the apartment is so complete I can almost taste it. I hadn’t planned on giving a speech, but now that I have his attention - the feeling in my chest is like he’s finally in front of me. My uncle. I got him.
“When I was thirteen you killed my father.”
The man’s eyes widen. I can tell he’s trying to shake his head. It’s almost funny. But it’s not, because this has already stopped being an idiot who wants to kill his brother.
“We didn’t know it right away, but that was only because your planning was superb. See, my father never talked much about you, and when he did, he got real faraway in his eyes and quiet. Never told my sister and I you were his twin. It was a fact it seemed you both kept secret. And, since you’d started killing the cops in your unit, having a secret like that was an incredibly useful thing. The detectives assigned to the serial killer case started looking in your direction, and you made your move. You arranged a meeting with my father. A truce meeting. The last “business trip” he’d ever go on. Only instead of forgiving each other for whatever had estranged you in the first place, you dressed my dad up in your uniform and cut his head off.
You dropped it on your desk, along with a note. “Not him. Try harder.”
When you got back from my father’s business trip, my sister and I knew right away something was different. You looked at her and my mom with a wolf’s eyes. You looked at me like I was something you’d left in the toilet.”
I take my cap off, so he can see me.
“I tried to kill you then, to put a bullet in your heart while you slept, with one of your own guns. I carried you off into the woods and dropped you down a well. I told my mother I did’nt know where you’d gone, but I told my sister everything. The next day I rode the bus home from school and they were gone. On the table, you left another note. You and your notes. “Follow us and I’ll fuck Jessica in half.”
The illusion of my uncle started to wear off. This guy was just an asshole. Greedy, sure. But not diabolically evil. Not the kind that kept coming back. I sighed, not caring to finish my diatribe. I was boring myself.
“Never mind. When I catch you, it won’t matter what I say. You’ll just smile at me, because you won. No matter what I do, you’ve already won.”
I leaned forward and pushed the thumb down his throat. While he choked on it I went to the kitchen for some knives and garbage bags.
