We worked our way up from there. My brothers didn’t have a knack for killing, nor did they like it the way I did. Raccoons. Deer. Elk. Even a bear once, with a perfect shot through its eye. My father seemed pleased with my skill. For years, we honed it, improving how quietly I moved, how long I waited before pulling the trigger, savoring the exhilarating feeling of a perfect strike.
Like all good things in my life, however, it didn’t last. My father didn’t last, either. It took the murder of my family to push me onto the pursuit of the most dangerous game of all: men.
My father had two brothers, Aleksandr and Andrei. Even as a child, I felt the tension. They never stopped by the house unless there was trouble and they needed their big brother to come and fix their messes. Everything with them seemed to be business exchanges, no warmth or familiarity. They always bothered me. I was right to be suspicious of them.
The night they proved that, I was in the hospital with stomach pains. Food poisoning of some kind, nothing too serious. When the nurse stepped in with an officer, I thought I’d done something wrong. But they weren’t there to chastise me. They were there to tell me that my parents and younger brothers had been murdered.
They didn’t say by whom, or why, or answer any of the other million questions I had. They just told me that I couldn’t go home. Police were there investigating. My uncles were on their way to pick me up.
None of it made sense. I was a kid, and in my mind, this was all some weird medically-induced dream. Or rather, a nightmare. But that solemn look on the nurse’s face is seared into my memory like a cattle brand. She looked down at me with pity. And I knew she was telling the truth.
For a long time, I never knew exactly what happened. My uncles comforted me and helped when they could, but at seventeen years old, I was nearly an adult. I could live on my own. For a while, I managed. I rebuilt. I took my shit-covered situation and made it work. That’s how I always was. I got by.
But then I learned the truth. It wasn’t a random act of violence that stole my family from me. It wasn’t some fucked-up junkie looking for a score, or a home invader with the wrong address.
The innocent blood was on my uncles’ hands.
The same uncles who’d picked me up from the hospital on the worst night of my life, who’d been taking care of me in the months and years since ... they were the ones responsible. They were the motherfuckers who ruined everything for me.
So I made a decision, then and there: I would make them regret not killing me too.
A scream across the street from the nightclub yanks me out of my memories.
I see a skimpily dressed brunette giggling and running away from a man. He has his phone out recording her, cheering her on and encouraging her to say something for her social media account. For a moment, they’re the most entertaining thing around outside of this scummy club.
“Knock it off!” she chirps.
“Make me,” he growls playfully.
They end up making out against the brick wall.
It’s sad. It’s pathetic. And yet in some ways, I’m almost jealous.
They’re so naïve, it’s incredible. In the timeless wonderland of their social media newsfeed, every moment is captured forever like a bug trapped in amber. They’ll never grow old. They’ll never die. They’ll be young until the end of time. Untouchable.
They haven’t seen the shit I’ve seen. They know nothing of the underworld vibrating beneath their feet and before their eyes. Oblivious and carefree, this night will be one they remember fondly, or forget entirely. But there’s one man who will never forget tonight—Mr. Joshua Hollis.
The man I’ve been sent to collect.
The back door to the club opens and a drunk man comes stumbling out, patting himself down until he locates his pack of cigarettes. He takes one out and lights it. I watch as the cloud of smoke begins to fade into the night.
Bingo.
I don’t know what my client wants with this man, and that’s none of my fucking business, either. I learned a long time ago that not knowing is better. These are targets. They’re not people. Get too attached to them and it just makes delivering the body that much more difficult. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the couple still making out, giggling and moaning softly. I want to yell at them to fuck off, to go find some cheap hotel to fool around in, but I can’t blow my cover. Besides, it’s go time.
I approach Hollis and in a low voice, ask, “Mind if I bum a smoke?”
He blinks, cloudy from all the booze in his system, but nods and quickly lights another for me. I stopped smoking ten years ago, but I breathe it in and blow it out like I’ve been doing this for years.
“What’re you doing out here?” he asks, glancing at me.
A wry smirk crosses my face. “Undercover.”
“You a cop?”
“Why, you doing something illegal?”
Joshua snorts and shakes his head. “Not unless you consider stepping out on your wife illegal.”
I raise a brow and look at him once more. I hadn’t pegged him as the cheating type. But then again, I’m a hired killer. Not exactly in a position to pass moral judgment on my fellow man.
Instead, I say, “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her, eh?”
“I’d do the right thing and leave her, but it’s just the fact that my kid needs me, man. He needs someone in his life and I can’t do the same thing my dad did. I wish there was a way this could all just work itself out. But I’m sick to death of her ...”
He continues on about his family, how he accidentally
