Murder for Hire
"I am not a murderer.
A strange way to start this off, but I feel it is important to get that out of the way. I am not a serial killer, I do not relish in the feeling of blood on my hands, and, god forbid, I do not find sexual pleasure in death.
No, no, none of that describes me or my job.
I am a contract killer. After high school, the realization that I was not actually good at anything came. Unable to get a job, I ended up homeless for a while. I floated between shelters when I could, became a quasi-religious soup-kitchen enthusiast and raider of food banks.
Then, I had the misfortune of I finding out that I was rather skilled with a knife. And a gun. And various other weapons. Which was interesting.
And then I found out that assassin-for-hire was a rather lucrative job market. So, I did what any person with nothing to lose does: I jumped on the bandwagon.
Was it a good idea? No. Did I do it anyway? Yeah. I mean, I was desperate. I only had two pairs of socks. No one realizes how much they love socks until they only have two.
The first time I killed someone was before I stepped into this line of work. It was in self defense. A man tried to rape me, which is not uncommon for homeless folk such as I was. I had a knife which I had stolen from a food bank, and I stabbed him with it. How I felt when I saw the blood bloom from his stomach, when I saw him turn from a person into a thing had no parallel. Don’t get me wrong, it was horrifying. But at the same time, I had never felt as powerful as I did then. The death went unnoticed, which goes without saying. No one has a care for the homeless, especially not law enforcement.
I did a little research at the library (free internet!) and found out how much money killers-for-hire make. And it was a lot.
It should be understandable that I decided to try my hand at it.
I found a website one of the articles had said that the assassins found their work at. I haunted it for a couple of weeks until the library asked me to stop coming, so I moved my operation to an internet cafe (a dying breed). Finally, someone contacted me (@devilmaycare666, which was a little spot-on for my liking) and offered me a job.
It was low-profile, they said. An average Joe that owed some money. He had been warned but refused to pay the loan shark back, and now they wanted someone to take him out. I decided not to tell them that this was my first real time, because I needed the money. The shelters I frequented had barred their doors when they found out I had been stealing from them. I hadn’t slept in a real bed in two weeks, and cardboard mattresses aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
My first kill was pretty sloppy, but I got the job done. Broke in through a window, found the guy asleep in a tornado of chinese takeout boxes. I wanted to slit his throat all classy-like, like in the movies, but I found it doesn’t work that way. Had to hack through his windpipe, which is as messy as it sounds. I threw up in his bathtub after. Then I stole his cash and socks. It was necessity.
That hit paid for a stay in a cheap motel where I researched the real ways to kill a man. My next hit paid for a nicer hotel, and the next one an even nicer one.
I ended up a proper entrepreneur. I had a skill-set that certain people required, and I marketed that skill-set accordingly. I ended up with some job offers from some mafias (the most interesting way I was almost recruited was a letter in some matzo-ball soup. The Jewish mafia has an odd sense of humor), but I always stayed free-lance. Made more money that way, you see.
And money was all that mattered to me, because I had none for so long. When I fell asleep on my memory-foam mattress, I remembered the asphalt of the elementary school that I slept by. When I had shark-fin soup, I remembered the thin tomato that the soup kitchens offered. When I slid my cashmere socks on every morning, I laughed.
Everything fell apart three years ago. By then, I owned a brownstone in Brooklyn with my ex-model wife and our three Persian Greyhounds. My wife grew nationally-recognized orchids since retiring (we didn’t need the extra income). She knew nothing of my line of work and was happy with that. I am ashamed to say that she was a much of a symbol of wealth to me as my dogs were. I’d never met her parents. I didn’t know her favorite place or food or smell or anything. She had told me she wanted to adopt kids, like Angelina Jolie, and I had laughed. We slept in separate beds. She spent of her time relishing in my wealth, not caring where it came from, and I spent most of my time making more of it.
I was efficient in my killings now. No more windpipe-hacking. I aimed for the jugular, wore gloves, never left a print or a hair behind. Still, the police found me.
They took the prints off of my first hit, linked them to a DUI I had gotten (in my bullet-gray Ashton-Martin, gorgeous). I wasn’t that surprised when they came for me. My wife shed crocodile tears as I was cuffed. The dogs shit all over the hand-knotted kashmir carpet.
In prison, the guards brought me some of the tabloids. My wife, splashed across covers (I didn’t know he was a killer!, etc.). I tore the pages out and used them as toliet paper. She would have done the same. We were both opportunists.
I suppose it’s fitting, me sitting here, waiting for the fatal injection. A sort of poetic irony. After years of fighting it in court, the police linked my prints and methods to hundreds of murders around the country. They missed some, too. I was sentenced to death.
And here I am, waiting to die.
Still, I maintain that I am not a murderer. I did not kill for fun, or for sport. I killed because it was the only choice I had. The blood of those I killed lays not on my hands, but on those who paid me. I am not a murderer so much as a knife or a gun is. I am a tool that was put in the wrong hands.
I suppose it is not my choice to make. Though I believe that I am an innocent, the law disagrees. That’s fine. I guess those I killed felt they were innocent as well."
Noah Lablos, on his deathbed, 16/9/2018. He leaves all his money to his dogs, in hopes that they grow to be as fat and rich as he was.
Course One
Tick tock, tick tock. Stop ticking, you clock! I’ve never needed more than an hour for a test before. I cannot believe this is happening to me.
I’m quite the genius, you see. I’m taking Course One math in only grade three. Never a check mark or wrong answer all year long. Straight one hundreds. Only A pluses. And for my final exam, I predicted perfection. I called it like that old timey baseball player, told my teacher I’d ace it for sure. I zipped and zoomed my way through in a jiffy, almost to the end, until I hit a snag on the penultimate problem. I finish the last one, no big deal, but shuffle back to get stuck yet again. A tough cookie, a real zinger, an algebraic enigma. I just couldn’t figure it. Something about Ray and what he buys on grocery day. Hot dogs and hamburgers, however many per which. I think my brain is starting to twitch. I’ve got to get in there and give it a fix.
My brain is full of files. Tidy, shiny pocket folders lining the narrow hallways, like a longhouse made of cards. I’m looking and looking for the one with Ray, emptying their contents cartoonishly, arms and papers flailing every which way. I work my way down each hallway, still empty handed and looking over my shoulder at the mess I have made. I should clean it up, I think, but then I can feel the quake of the ticking and tocking. My time is running out. At the end of a hallway, I find a green file in an upside-down V, like a teepee. Underneath is a lamp, like the one from the movie. Aladdin, I think it was. Open, says me, and all that jazz. I give it a rub and out he swizzles. He doesn’t need to say a word, I tell him, I know the drill. And by the way, I only need one. Genie, how many hamburgers?
He swizzles my way and holds his green fuzzy hands up to his face and whispers. Forty four.
I toss the lamp back under its teepee and make a break for it, slipping on the mess I have left all along the way. I dive forward and slide out of my brain, back to the test. Forty four hamburgers. Pencil down, hand up. I’m still the first one to finish.
Absolutely Nothing.
It has been a hundred years since something interesting happened. Experts and scientists mistakenly predicted that humans would continue to evolve and become more creative with technology by their side. They have, instead, turned into dull creatures. Predictability and monotony are the proper characteristics to describe our modern human being. Their quality of life turned into something disappointing, as they slowly stumbled down from their pedestal of epicness into their current aridity. They abandoned their curiosity and abruptly turned into indifferent beings with purposeless lives.
By November 2018, the last human achievements were carried out, among them the discovery of immortality - the one cause for human’s decline into their insipidity. Humans were blinded by their abusive nature. One peek - one scent - of immortality, and they were inescapably drawn by its dangerous beauty, its wholesomeness, its promise for a life-changing adventure. By the end of 2018, humanity had already yielded to immortality. It was spread like a disease - a curious one, as a fact; an epidemic that didn’t kill, but kept you from dying. Which was worse, in so many ways.
2019 was the first year in which absolutely nothing happened. No more scientific discoveries needed to be made - they were not of immediate urgency anymore. Diseases required no cure, for they were no longer a threat. Funnily enough, when humans abolished death’s unpredictability, they turned the rest of their lives into a predictable set of events.