The baked, cracked mud caked the road like dandruff as they drove the Monte Carlo, engrossed in Jimi Hendrix wailing on Hey Joe from a beat-up cassette in the tape-deck. The sun was a shimmering blur edging on the rear-view, just starting its descent toward the rock outcroppings that lined the horizon. John was driving, window rolled down half-way to catch the hot breeze. Ellis was riding shotgun, rolling a tooth-pick around in his parched lips as he stared aimlessly out the window. The road they were on didn’t have a name, wasn’t on a map, and the place they came from wouldn’t exist until some idiot real-estate developer decided to put a yuppie oasis over the bones it held.
John and Ellis were swapping shifts driving. They had to make it from the middle of the Mohave to New Orleans in a day. Not impossible, but they had to go low profile. With enough heat in the trunk to take out a small street gang, they couldn’t afford a traffic stop.
“We only needed the forty-five,” Ellis said as he pulled the tooth-pick out of his mouth. “We didn’t have to bring your whole arsenal…”
“All I could find was Bennie to hold the fort back home.” John replied. “He knows I’ll nap him if he robs me when I’m in the city, but… I don’t know… Don’t trust him with my collection when we’re this far out, ya’ know?”
“Since when did you have the shakes about Bennie?”
John sighed. “Forever, I guess? I don’t know; I took him on cause of the old man…” John said. “He was a kid back then; got jumped by the local street-scum. Hell, I felt bad for him. Tried to get him into the trade, but…” He hesitated.
“But what?” asked Ellis. “He shoot himself in the foot?”
“Nah, nothing like that… I caught him aiming his twenty-two in the mirror… sideways.”
Ellis laughed. “Sideways? You kiddin’ me?”
“Nope’…”
“Kids…” They drove off the dirt road onto a highway that fed into I-40 East. In a couple of hours, they’d be out of the desert. The setting sun turned the horizon into a desert postcard in oil paint. The red unnerved John a little. This last hit felt wrong, even though everything was above-board, as much as it got in his world.
“Bennie’s balls weren’t in his sack.”
“Never heard that one before…” Ellis chuckled.
“I don’t work with people who don’t have the balls, the brains and the heart… Bennie ain’t got any of that… why I don’t trust him much.”
They were quiet for a while as they drove, occasionally commenting on road-kill as they passed some, idle shit-talk. They had long since hit 287 South, which would take them through Dallas-Forth Worth. With over a thousand miles to drive, the night drove them half the way, cups of day-old gas-station sludge and beef-jerky drove them the other half.
Ellis nudged John when they were passing through Fort Worth.
“Didn’t that one feel weird to you?” He asked.
“A little.” John said. “I mean, a hit’s a hit. It was a custom hit, but still a hit. Old man gave the order himself…”
“Why out there? Like that?”
“Guy used to work Vegas back in the fifties, Ellis,” John said, “That’s how they did things back then.”
“Strange… think he felt guilty?”
John shrugged. “Who knows?”
“You ever feel guilty, John?” Ellis asked.
“Every day…” John replied. The windshield sparkled with the lights of Dallas on the interstate.
“Why do it, then?”
John lit up a cigarette, his first in the whole trip. “I don’t miss. And I don’t leave collateral damage. I don’t hit targets with wives and kids… I do my homework; I make sure they got it comin’… I turn down more hits than I take.”
“So you’re what, righteous?” Ellis stifled a laugh.
“Oh, I’m goin’ to hell, no doubt there,” John replied. “But think about it… We’re killers. The evil, the intent, the true murderers are the ones who pay us. Ya’ wanna’ know how I got started in the trade?”
“Do tell.” Ellis said, trading his pulpy toothpick for a cigarette.
“You know I was born inNew Orleans. I lived in a bad neighborhood in New Orleans East.” He paused, cleared his throat. “A man in the neighborhood, Masterson was his last name, I forget his first – he paid a crack-head fifty bucks to kill his wife… She was cheating on him or some shit… Anyways, that’s when crack was new, the early ‘80s.” John flicked his ash out the window. “Crack-head got his hands on an Uzi, don’t ask me how – and he just sprayed, man. Killed the wife… and my cousin, and sent a bunch of other people to the hospital.” John paused again. “She was four. It took her a week to die.”
“Sorry to hear that John, but… That’s a reason to become a cop, not a hit-man.”
“Thought about it,” John said, “but cops need a warrant to wipe their asses. I get paid to do what cops wish they could do. I never put an innocent man in the dirt… until today.”
“Yeah, that’s what’s bugging me.”
“The old man’s always given me good targets, never had a complaint against him. But with the brain tumor, the prognosis… He had to put out the hit to protect the ones he loved.”
Before they realized it, they were on I-10, a half-hour away from New Orleans. They would crash at John’s for a few hours, and go meet the old man’s wife to help her plan for the memorial service. Not that it would be in the papers.
“So what do we tell her about the old man?” Ellis asked.
John rolled his window all the way down, flicked out the butt and glanced at the cherry spiraling out like a dull jumping jack.
“He went out on his own terms,” John said, “Quick, and painless.”
***
Liam Sweeny is a novelist and flash-fiction writer from Upstate New York. He has two novels and one anthology currently on the market, and his work has appeared in various online flash fiction venues.
I liked the quiet, conversational tone, you gave this story. It was almost meditative despite their profession.
What Patti said. The twist has more impact for being so understated.