Chance
I expect to hear men talking the further I get into the warehouse. I’m walking down a narrow corridor, what might’ve once been a place where working men entered early in the morning to go to their lockers and get ready for the day. The wallpaper is peeling, old, the wall beneath damp. I pass what was once a breakroom, with a 2010 calendar on the wall showing a naked Miss February. Surprised HR didn’t have a shitfit about that, back in the day. The rest of the room is a mess: furniture all piled up, sink detached from the wall, but Miss February has survived. I keep on, pistol trained ahead of me, listening. You’ve always gotta listen on jobs like this, ’cause maybe the men know I’m coming. Maybe they’ve got CCTV. Maybe they’re being quiet so they can surprise me. But these ain’t Marines. There are gangbangers, and these kids can’t stay quiet for long.
But the more I walk, the more I start to think that somethin’ strange is going on. This should be a lab of some kind. There should be noise here. Men working. Shooting the shit and playing music and walking around. But there’s nothin’ but silence. This is a big place, I tell myself, a huge place, the sort of place which once upon a time turned over tons of legal shit in a week. There could be something on the other side, quiet, and I wouldn’t hear it. But nothin’ at all?
When I get to the warehouse floor, I realize why there’re no sounds. The sharp tang of blood is in the air, and my boots shift on the floor. Because I’m not standing on the floor; there’s half a hand under my foot. The warehouse floor is wide and long, empty except for a few tables set up like chemistry sets. And a bunch of torn apart corpses, too many body parts to easily be sure how many dead men are in this room. I see a man with his tongue cut out and stuck in his empty eye socket, another with his fingers where his teeth should be. Feet with the shoes still on are piled up in one corner.
Even a hired killer eventually needs to stop looking at them as bodies, and start viewing them as meat. If they were sides of beef, they wouldn’t be disturbing. I make them that in my mind, and I look for signs any of these cattle are still alive.
None of them seem to be breathing, but most of them wear the same “Blood Bandits” brand the kid outside had on his neck. There’s one who doesn’t, and there’s something about him I don’t like. The body leaves a bloody trail behind him as I drag him across the concrete towards a light where I can get a better look at his face. I swear, and kick his corpse, and swear again.
His name is Andrew Phillips. Detective Andrew Phillips if you’re talking to his mama, a fuckin’ detective for the N.Y. fucking P.D. He was working undercover a few years back, and his bullshit got me taken in for questioning. Vice ran a good op, but I saw him heading into the station as I was heading out—they couldn’t pin a thing on me, and Giovanni got a lawyer to bust me out long before things got hot—but I doubt he noticed me looking at him. Fingered him to Giovanni, and we kept an eye out for him, figuring we’d be able to use his ID as leverage if he ever tried to mess with the Family.
It was one thing to leave a million prints and DNA evidence and whatever the fuck else when I was killing a shit-ton of fucking gangbangers. The NYPD would probably give me a medal if they knew it was me. But this; I’m thinkin’ about all the prints I’ve left. On the doors, on the corpses when I was checking ’em for tattoos. On the bastards outside. There’s a dead cop here, a a dead, fuckin’ mutilated cop, with three of his fingers stuffed in his ears like plugs? His other fingers ain’t on his hands, which means they’re scattered around the room somewhere. To make sure the police never knew about this guy bein’ dead, I’d have to find his other seven fingers, and that’s assuming there isn’t an active wire on this son of a bitch.
“Fuck!” I snarl, kicking him again.
As I shout, I hear somethin’, far behind me, a whimpering. I don’t think, just leap across the room toward the sound, gripping my duster so hard it makes my hands bleed. A dead cop. A dead fuckin’ cop, and now someone alive. Fuck. The boys in blue don’t get lazy when it comes to a dead cop. The boys in blue’ll chase you to the end of the earth when it comes to a dead cop. But if there’s a witness, someone who can say it wasn’t me…
The sound came from under two corpses, a kid who fucking hid under dead bodies to try and stay alive. Most people can’t do that and stay sane. I haul the bodies away from him and he starts to scream. He’s a Bandit, I can see the brand through the blood, but I can’t really make out the color of his tank top or his shorts anymore.
I drag him up by his neck and drag him to the light, all whilst he’s kicking and muttering. “I don’t…I don’t…so much blood, man…so much…help…help…”
Holding him by his neck with one hand, I pick up a chair with the other and set it down, and then set the kid down on it. He was damn lucky, and damn quiet. I barely even hear him. It’s those two things which kept this guy alive. Anything else and he would’ve turned up dead just like the cop, just like his friends. Lucky and quiet. But not lucky enough and not quiet enough, ’cause here I am. But if I heard him in five minutes…
Kneeling down opposite him, I say, “I need you to tell me exactly what happened here, without leaving anything out. You might say you’re scared, they’ll kill you, you can’t. I’ve heard all that shit before. You need to be scared of me, I’ll kill you, and you can. So, tell it.”
The kid’s face is covered in blood and scrapes; he looks tired, so maybe he’s been here for quite a while. Maybe this slaughter happened earlier today and I’ve just been sittin’ out there like an asshole getting ready for a mission which was over the moment I stepped into the warehouse. He mumbles, “I…can’t.”
I punch him across the jaw with the duster, sending two of his teeth tumbling to the floor. He coughs, splutters, and I hit him again. “I ain’t in the fuckin’ mood,” I tell him. “Did you know there’s a dead cop on the floor? Did you fuckin’ know that? That means forensics, that means fuckin’ police sniffing around.”
“Okay!” he wails. “Okay! Okay! Just…please. Let me go.”
“Tell me,” I say, grabbing his shirt and bringing my face close to his, “what the fuck happened.”
He nods, sniveling, and then tells me.
“Listen, man. Just listen to me and I’ll tell you! Please, man, please! So we were workin’, just workin’ like we do every damn day, and then the boss comes in and says there’s some new workers, but he looks sort of shifty, sort of scared, and then these four guys come in, all dressed in black, head to toe, masks and everythin’ so I couldn’t see anything about them, not even their eyes ’cause they were wearing glasses. And then one of these guys, he…Jesus, man, Jesus Christ! He takes out a blade and just stabs boss in the neck. The boss looked really surprised when he dropped, like he’d had a deal with ’em, you know? And then the four men just pull out guns with silencers on them and start shooting. It’s crazy ’cause there are only four of them, man, four, but we’re all like chickens just running all over the place trying to get out and then I just jump down and cover myself with my friends, man, my friends, pull ’em over me like blankets and just lie there as they start cutting, cutting up everyone and stuffing them in different places—”
“No,” I say, stopping him. “No, you didn’t hide. They wouldn’t be fooled by that. No fuckin’ way. They knew you were alive, these bastards, and they must’ve known I was comin’, and they left you here hopin’ you’d see me and I wouldn’t see you.”
I take out my pistol and point it at his head.
“Please!” the man wails. “Please! Please!”
“It’s nothin’ personal,” I tell him, and then pull the trigger.
The force of the shot takes causes him to fly back in the chair, legs kicking into the air.
I stand up, look over the carnage, and then make my way back across the room to the exit. I can’t get rid of the cop, so I have to get rid of every trace of myself. I need to retrace my steps and clean up after myself, try and remember everything I touched, try’n remember where I walked. I’ll work quick and then I’ll get the hell out of here.
“Goddamn it,” I mutter, walking into the autumn night. “God fucking dammit!”
This should’ve been a simple job, but now—
At least that girl ain’t here. Saves me a bullet.