Roman
I stand in the shadows in an alleyway between two towering buildings, the man who might lead me to Darius tied to a chair in front of me, gripping a knuckle-duster with one hand and holding my pistol with the other. Lester—or Les, as his friends call him—is a ginger-haired, short man with freckles spread over the parts of his face which aren’t permanently deformed with acid. He wears a flashy suit, a gold watch, and he was wearing gold-rimmed sunglasses before I crunched them into the ground with my boot.
I kneel before him. All around us, the sounds of Vegas echo: cars honking; slot machines, the ever-fuckin’-present slot machines; people giggling; a woman faraway moaning into the afternoon air. I lean across and place my hand on Les’ knee. I haven’t touched him yet, and in truth I don’t really want to hurt him. He is a scumbag, or at least he used to be a scumbag. Back in the day he was Darius’ henchman, helped him with a lot of deals. Helped to kill a lot of people, in other words. But he’s got a life now, works down at a garage, got a steady girl. No reason to hurt him if he don’t give me reason to.
“Listen,” I say. “I don’t want to go in on you with this.” I heft the knuckle-duster. “Or this.” I heft the pistol, which has a long tubular suppressor attached to the barrel. “But I will if I have to. Not out of any sense of power, or pleasure; I’m not like the men you used to kick it with back in the chemical-sellin’ days. No, but I’ll go in on you ’cause I’ve got a job to do and I reckon that Darius doesn’t deserve your loyalty. Have you seen your fuckin’ face recently, Les? It’s well known that Darius did that to you because you started asking questions about the killing-innocent-people game. So you see my problem? You’re not a bad man—not a completely bad man, anyway—and I don’t really want to have to go in on you. But I will.”
Les watches me with wide, terrified eyes. One side of his face is a mass of old scars and ruined tissue from the acid, making one his eyes squint permanently. Piss spreads across his crotch, the smell sickly, but you can’t blame the man. I guess I can be pretty damn scary to some folks. I reach forward and carefully remove his gag, making sure to aim at him with the pistol to let him know to make no noise. He gets the message.
I throw the gag aside and stare at him for a few seconds, watching as he musters and then loses and then tries to muster his resolve. “You don’t understand,” he says after a long pause. “You don’t know shit about Darius, man. You don’t know shit about him. You think if I talk to you now—”
“I am so tired of this fuckin’ argument,” I mutter, leaning back on my haunches. “I’ve heard this a hundred times. You’re going to say: ‘If I tell you this now, he’ll kill me later.’ Well, here’s the problem with that. If you don’t tell me now, I’ll kill you—not later, but right fuckin’ now.”
“There’s a hit out on me?” Les says, voice pitched high. He raises his eyebrows . . . well, he raises one eyebrow and one twisted spot of flesh where an eyebrow should be.
I don’t answer right away. I know what he’s driving at. Everyone who’s heard of me knows that I rarely kill people unless there’s a hit out on them: unless I’m being paid for it. But this man just fucked himself, ’cause I hadn’t even thought of telling that lie.
“Yes,” I say. “There’s a hit out on you. It’s not my contract, but I know the man who’s got it. I reckon if I served your corpse up to him, he’d give me a nice cut. Or maybe I’ll just take your body to the man himself, take the whole cut.”
Les looks into my eyes for a long time, trying to gauge if I’m lying, I guess. For a second a strange thought occurs to me: didn’t that woman, Lily, say something about always knowing if somebody was lying? Yeah, I’m sure she mentioned something. Well, if she couldn’t see the lie in a comfortable restaurant with nothing to lose, I don’t see how this man is going to.
“Fuck,” Les growls. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I agree. “So here’s what I need from you. I need Darius’ address, his cell numbers, his aliases, his license number. Anything, everything.”
“You think I have all that?” Les gasps. His throat is turning red, his cheeks, too. His entire face is burning like there’s fire under his skin. “You really think I have all that?” He’s getting way too fucking flustered. He starts ranting, unintelligible words in a long stream. I smack him across the jaw with the duster. That seems to bring him to his senses, if only a little. “I don’t have all that,” he says. He keeps moving his mouth in an odd way, like some meth-heads do, opening and closing their mouths out of time with their words, waggling their tongue strangely. “I don’t have any of that.”
“What do you have?” I ask, squinting at him. His hands are tied to the chair, but his fingers twitch as though playing an invisible piano. His shoes shift as though his toes are doing the same. “What do you have?” I repeat. Is he high? Is he fuckin’ high? He could’ve taken something just before I picked him up, and maybe it’s only now kicking in.
“Oh, I know something,” he says, his voice slurred, eyes rolling back in his head. “I know something very interesting, something positively magnificent.” He giggles, and his voice gets low, and distant somehow; it’s like he’s on the opposite side of a cavern instead of sitting right in front of me. “Do you know what ghosts are, Roman? Do you know what ghouls are? Do you know what mirrors are? Yes, forget the ghouls and the ghosts. Think of mirrors. Do you know mirrors, Roman? Have you ever looked into a mirror?”
Your senses become honed when you do this work long enough. You get to learn if someone’s just ranting or if they really have something to say. My instincts tell me Les really has something to say, even if he is going about it in the most roundabout way possible. He’s dribbling now, too, a fine line of spit sliding down beside the blood from my duster hit.
“What about mirrors?” I say, feeling like a fool. “Go on, Les. What about mirrors?”
“Look into a mirror and you’ll see Darius. You are the same. You pretend you’re different but you’re the same. You are!”
“What is this? Some poetic point about how we’re all the same, eh?”
I’m about to give him a punch across the face again when his eyes roll all the way back so that I can only see the whites. He dribbles quicker, and then begins to froth at the mouth, spittle expanding from between his lips until the entire lower half of his face is covered in a bubbly beard.
“Les?” I snap, dropping my pistol and gripping his shoulders. “Fuck’s sake, Les? What the fuck? What did you take?”
Then the convulsions start, convulsions so violent the chair topples to the ground. That’s when I remember similar convulsions, similar dribbling. It’s a poison, a slow-to-act poison, the sort of poison you give to somebody if you want them to stay alive awhile before the final death knell sounds.
There’s nothing I can do without the antidote, so I just stand up and watch as he writhes and spasms, as the life seeps between his lips in the form of growing bubbles of froth. After around a minute, his eyes fall closed and the froth begins to drip onto the concrete. I close my eyes, massage my eyelids with my thumbs. Either this was incredibly unlucky, or somebody—most likely Darius, the fuck—knew that I was going to pick Les up and got to him first. I open my eyes and kneel down, start going over his body, searching for anything. This is a desperate move because I’ve already searched him, but maybe another once over will turn something up.
Nothing.
“Fuck.”
Then my phone begins to beep, two quick beep-beep beep-beep noises. I snatch it from my pocket, open the police scanner app (the only app which makes that horrible fuckin’ noise) and check the GPS. Jesus Christ. Police, surrounding the alleyway. The alleyway has two exits, and patrol cars sit at both exits. The cops themselves are probably either on their way toward me or tooling up. So they knew exactly where I’d be. And somebody planned to kill Les . . . It don’t take a genius to work out that Darius is trying to frame me. I listen, but I can still only hear the woman moaning, the slot machines, the occasional screech of a tire. Which means that whoever tipped off the cops also told ’em to be quiet. I growl from deep in my throat, and then look around the alleyway. There are no ladders leading to the roofs, no side-alleys, no alternative exits.
For a moment a voice sneers at me in my mind: “Some assassin you are, eh? Choosing an alley with only two exits? What’s the matter with you?”
I push the voice away. How in the name of God was I supposed to know that Darius had—had what? Poisoned Les and then stuck a GPS on him?
I have to move quickly now. I let my instincts take over, not thinking about what I’m doing, just doing it. I move around the alleyway, untying Les from the chair and positioning him as though he fell from standing instead of from sitting, and then I go to my duffle bag and get my cleaning supplies, wiping down everything, including the froth. Finally, I wipe down the duffel bag itself, its contents, and then spill them out onto the alleyway as though somebody has dropped it. Yes, I tell myself, looking down at Les. The man attacked us, and then he fled, dropping his bag—his bag full of killer’s implements. I can hear the cops now, rushing down the alleyway, trying and failing to be quiet. This story isn’t going to be very believable, I reflect as I aim the pistol against my shoulder, but then, there’s no CCTV, there are no witnesses. That’ll be enough, I hope.
I pull the trigger.
I’ve been shot once before, took one clean through the forearm, but somehow this hurts more. It bites deep into my flesh, searing through skin and bone and muscle and exiting out of the back of my shoulder. I collapse onto my knee, but still somehow manage to wipe down the gun and toss it toward the duffle bag. Then I lay on the ground, knees to chest, as though I am so shocked and terrified by the experience I have reverted to a fetal state. The cops are getting close now, advancing slowly, carefully. They think the killer is still here. Already, I am rehearsing what to tell them, even as my shoulder throbs in agony.
The thing about getting picked up by the police is, unless there’s some ironclad evidence, they’ve only got what you give them. Most people crack under interrogation. I never crack under interrogation. So I just lie here, bleeding, and then my mind turns to my mother, a sweet nurse saving a cop and getting a gunshot for her troubles. How did she feel, I wonder, lying there on the concrete, turning it red? And then, oddly, my mind turns to Lily. I haven’t taken another woman since her. As I roll over and stare up at the four cops who creep with their guns raised between mine and Les’ body, I see her face: her sweet, flustered, vivacious face.
I hear one of the cops mutter: “What the fuck?”
But that’s far away now. Lily is calling me. Lily is whispering to me. Her whisper is a song in my head: “Come to me, Roman. Come and share the pleasure of that first night. Come and lose yourself in it. Come, come, my beautiful wild man. Come, come, come.”
I roll over, groaning, no longer needing to pretend. And that’s when I see that Les is alive. Les is twitching.