Sharkey is not a small guy and in the heat he smells strongly of folded male groin. Heat is all you get in southern Europe in the summertime anymore because: have you heard? There is a climate crisis. Right now this means not only is the world dying but also too there’s a lot of ambient groin up in my olfactory. So fuck you very much to the petrochemical industry once for the planet and once for that.
I say: “The Demons are open for business give us business.”
Sharkey says: “Jack no one is looking for your kind of trouble right now.”
“That is why they pay you the big bucks Sharkey you got instincts you got what they say you got a nose—”
(He cannot possibly have an actual nose, he would die of himself.)
“Jack I got a nose I don’t got like Vulcan telepathy force powers I cannot—”
“O shit Charlie would kill you right here Sharkey.”
“What?”
“Vulcan force powers?”
“What?”
“Never mind I will not explain it to you Sharkey the only possible way for you to learn is if someone kills you with a cruet. Proceed.”
“You got weird people Jack. Dangerous and weird.”
“They are individuals Sharkey and exemplary professionals in their own fields.”
“That’s your problem. Fred was dull and people like that in contractors Jack. It makes them happy.”
“You are saying no one wants international assassins to be fun at parties.”
“They do not want them to come to their parties in the first place. Not even their families really want that, in case they get in a disagreement and someone has to be buried under a patio.”
“…I would not do that it is fucking suburban.”
“But they don’t know that! Like if you were Fred I would know the cruet thing was a gag man but with you with your Demons I am not sure.”
—
Actually I am sympathetic to this position because I also am just a person who is trying to get along in the world, but regrettably last year there was a kind of a what you would call a misunderstanding, except that there was no actual misunderstanding per se, more like assumptions of questionable value were made by certain parties, and the consequences of those assumptions were really surprising to actually just about everyone involved, and several of those people did not come by their surprise in positive or sustainable ways. We shall call those people the bad guys and they are not alive anymore.
The way it happened was I was conducting my business and getting on with being a citizen, and then Sean Harper—hereinafter known as item 22 for reasons which will become clear—but anyway Sean got all up in my face about a murder that he went and committed in my building. He thereby kicked off this whole convoluted shebang we already know about, and I’m not going to go through the details except to say that it became ultimately a perceptual issue, which flat out had to be addressed for everyone’s sake, because that kind of thing just hangs around forever if you don’t get in there and deal.
In consequence of the measured and necessary steps I had to take to secure my ongoing well-being during that difficult time, I am no longer the owner-operator of a bespoke commodity concern distributing and selling the branded and locally sourced cocaine which was once known as the Pale Peruvian Stallion. That is a tragedy for everyone’s leisure time but there you go. I have a new role as CEO of a global criminal enterprise with deep roots in the community and a justified reputation for unparalleled savagery. I manage five deeply alarming people who are my team, including the Doc, who basically is walking science with whom I am in a Nietzschean and highly charged sexual relationship; Volodya, who is himself a former boss of this same outfit but who had retired and was living off the fat of the land or possibly the fat of his neighbors, we do not ask, in a romantic little shack somewhere up above the Arctic Circle; Rex, whose brother I accidentally got killed and who is largely focused on exploding things and believes we are a deep-cover spy team operating to save democracy from someone I have never identified but Rex probably assumes is either an alien or a lizard or French; Charlie, who is a digital artist and has only ever murdered one person but really seems down with the whole lifestyle; and Lucille, who is a large guy wearing a suit made of sharp edges whose ability to process the world in a rational fashion I irretrievably compromised with a psychotropic drug overdose in order to turn him into a human booby trap for a barbecue-obsessed illegal fight champion. Presently I also hold the voting proxy of my predecessor, Fred the Head, although Fred is exploring a new career as an actual head on a stick or more properly a bleached skull and therefore does not talk much or have opinions except insofar as sometimes when you look at him you can see that he really does not think much of his present situation and I am fine with that.
Fred was an asshole.
—
So I am sympathetic and above all I am a professional so I say:
“Well okay that is legit I guess Sharkey but that is my point is that our next job will go off in total silence.” Which I absolutely intend that it will. And Sharkey says:
“Silence?”
“Total silence. No one will ever know we were there.”
“How silent are we talking?”
“Silent silent.”
“Yeah but there is silent like a silencer, which is kind of a whoop whoop noise, and there is silent like silent, like—”
“Silent silent. Like below the thermocline.”
“The—thermo—what—Jack I don’t know what that is.”
“Like a submarine for fuck’s sake Sharkey did you never watch Das Boot?”
“I’m claustrophobic Jack I don’t watch movies except Westerns and not even those if they spend too much time in the
