Page 2 of The Reaper

“Fuck!” I got up and sprinted to the narrow alley, bumping into people along the way. The last thing I needed was for the local authority to wonder who I was, or worse, detain me for more questioning. For once in my life, I wasn’t in the know—not that I would tell them anything anyway.

One thing I knew for certain: this wasn’t a random shooting. Yet no one knew where I was. So who the fuck was after me?

Two: The Reaper

Boston

Ichose to live my life in the shadows, and one day, it would get me killed. That realization had stuck with me from the moment I picked up a gun. I was the best in the business, and the more times I pulled the trigger, the closer I came to my inevitable end.

It had been three months since the incident in Havana, and it had taken the same amount of time to hunt the men responsible for the strike against me. I would’ve traced them sooner had I not kept a low profile for a month to plan my course of action.

“Lie low for now and we’ll figure this out,” El Jefe, the brains of our operations, had said when I made it to his office, fuming. It was the first place I visited when my feet touched the ground from Cuba three months ago after the attack. It’d been a close call, and if it wasn’t for my vigilance, I would’ve been one of the nameless men from The Firm’s roster who met their peril year after year. He was as stunned as I was about the attack, but that didn’t stop me from grilling him.

“That was not fucking random!” I yelled, slamming my hands on his oak desk. A silver tray containing glasses and a decanter rattled from the force.

The door opened and one of the men assigned to protect El Jefe rushed in, hand resting on his holster. His head mimicked that of a tennis umpire, eyes bouncing between El Jefe and me, but I didn’t give a fuck. Truth be told, I didn’t have a lot of fucks to give at all, and I’d be damned if I gave one then. My fucks were reserved for special occasions and that wasn’t it.

El Jefe raised his hand, stopping him. “We’re okay,” he said, nodding toward the door. “The Reaper just got a little …” He trailed off, pressing his index finger to his lips. “Excited.” He leaned back in his black leather chair, his favorite drink in his other hand. “Whiskey?” he offered when his minion was out of sight. He poured the varnish-colored liquid into another glass, sliding it toward the edge of his desk.

That served to piss me off. I didn’t come here for chit-chat. I needed answers. Now. “Tell me what you know and don’t fucking lie to me,” I said. My jaw was clenched so hard my teeth could shatter.

He looked me straight in the eye and said, “I ain’t got no answer cuz I got nothin’ to tell you, kid.” He drew the glass snifter to his mouth, never breaking eye contact as he polished off its contents. A sigh escaped him, perhaps enjoying the burn of alcohol in his throat. “You sure they’re after you?”

“One hundred percent,” I said before gulping the drink he’d offered.

He was thoughtful for a while, rubbing his graying beard with his hand. What I wouldn’t give to know what was on his mind. The Firm might not have shared everything with him, but he always knew more than he should. And right now, his poker face was impeccable. “That’s not good,” he said after a couple of minutes.

I studied his face, thinking about the first time I met him twelve years ago, on my nineteenth birthday. Days after I was sentenced to life for a crime I didn’t commit. The day I lost faith in the system, the system that failed me when it was supposed to protect me. The day I buried the old me to become the man I was now.

El Jefe’s gaze traveled to the scar on my face. “I’ll get to the bottom of things,” he assured me, and I believed him. He was one of the very few people I trusted. And in my world, trust was priceless. He’d never given me a reason to doubt him. In fact, El Jefe had treated me like a son, and I looked up to him like a father. A void men like us filled for each other because we wouldn’t dare try to have a family. It was a liability. We were the harbingers of death and it snuffed out everyone in our lives.

“Figure it out fast—or I will,” I said. “And I won’t have mercy.”

It wasn’t a threat but a promise, and after months of waiting, I’d had enough.

***

I poured two fingers of vodka into a crystal glass before sliding the pair of leather gloves back onto my hands. After taking a big gulp and another drag of my cigarette, I moved back inside the old shipping container covered with a heavy-duty plastic tarp. I’d never been a smoker, but it had been a ritual before and after every kill. It was a habit I’d learned early on to take the edge off watching the light disappear from their eyes.

The two amateur hitmen’s sloppy job had made it easy for me to track them down. Using a real name to book a rental car was a fucking rookie mistake.

“What do you want? Money?” one of the hitmen asked, mumbling his words through busted lips. He wiggled his body in a lame attempt to free himself from the metal chair he’d been chained to since the previous night. He leaned forward, squinting through his swollen purple eyelids, perhaps to make out who his captor was in the dark. Tears and snot dripped down his blood-covered face. “I have plenty. Whatever you need. Just spare me,” he pleaded before glancing to his right where his lifeless confidant sat, adorned with a single bullet hole in his forehead.

That ridiculous statement made me laugh. It was a lie. He wouldn’t be here, begging for his life, if he had plenty of money. The videos captured by CCTV where the failed ambush took place led me to this dynamic duo with a rap sheet longer than a line at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

“Oh god!” he wailed. Another squirm followed by a hop caused the chair to skid on the floor.

The grating sound pierced my eardrums, but I remained silent. My elbow rested on the armrest, a pistol in my hand aimed at his battered head. My finger curled over the trigger. Waiting for these men to croak was getting old, and patience had never been my strongest suit, especially after vetting Dumb and Dumber here only to find roadblock after roadblock. Whoever hired these two knew what they were doing, and that was making me uneasy.

Minutes passed, waiting for the fucker to break.

“They’ll find you, motherfucker,” he yelled when his cash offering failed.

I thought, until recently, that I no longer existed to the rest of the world. Twelve years ago, I died. Well, not literally, but I was a nobody. These two idiots shouldn’t have known how to find me.

“And when they do, they will—”

A single bang echoed through the small room and I watched as his head fell back, blood splattering the wall and dripping onto the plastic-covered floor. I looked down at my smoking gun, my only friend, before wiping a drop of blood spray from my cheek with my glove.

---