Howling of the Dog

Johnnie Marco, master assassin, is in a little over his head

Johnnie Marko sat at the bar at the Lonely Dog Inn, a glass of scotch in his right hand. That was his fifth round that night. He didn’t always like to get buzzed before a job, but this was different. It was Christmas Eve; he never worked on Christmas Eve. Except for tonight.

            The bartender behind the bar walked over to Johnnie. “Hey buddy,” she said, “we’re gonna’ be closing up in five minutes. You’re going to have to leave.” She was young, with strawberry-red hair and dark blue eyes. Johnnie thought she was either pretty or the booze was taking a heavy toll on his perception.

            “I was going to go anyways,” he said, trying not to sound too drunk. “The scotch was beginning to taste bland.” He steadied himself as he stepped off his barstool. The bartender dropped the check on the counter in front of him. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, dropping a fifty-dollar bill on the counter. “You have any plans for tomorrow,” he said, signing the bill, “cause if you don’t, I might have a bottle of brandy just waiting to be opened.”

            The bartender laughed. “Judging by how many drinks you’ve had, I don’t think you’ll be in the mood for drinks tomorrow.”

            “You’d be surprised,” Johnnie said, walking down the hall “Well, if you are working tomorrow, just stop by room 5A.” He stopped just in front of a stairwell. “Merry Christmas,” he yelled to the bartender.

            “Merry Christmas to you too,” she yelled back.

            Johnnie turned and walked up the stairwell. Each step seemed to rattle his brain around like a loose screw, a sharp pain pinning into his head. This was going to interfere with the job, definitely. He was going to have to take some Excedrin when he got to the apartment.

            He walked off the stairwell, turning down a hallway. He turned to the room to his right, room 5A, taking out the room key in his right pocket, fitting it in the keyhole, turning it to the right until a sharp click rattled his headache. He cringed; the pain now like a hammer was being driven against his skull.

            Johnnie entered the room and flicked the light switched on the side of the wall, light shining immediately out of the bulbs in the cheap, flimsy ceiling fan. The apartment was small and run-down, much like the rest of the inn. The walls’ white paint was beginning to fade to a light yellow color, slightly peeling at certain points. A cheap wooden table with matching chairs stood in the middle of the apartment. A rectangular package lay on the table with two latches closing it together. A yellow file lay on top of the package.  He walked to the rectangular package and took the file of the top, setting it off to the side.

            He opened the latches on the box and flipped the lid opened. Inside was a Barrett M98B sniper rifle, with the scope, silencer, and four magazines surrounding the rifle. Johnnie pulled out the rifle, sliding on the scope and twisting on the silencer with his left hand. He cringed as the pain in his head came back.

            Johnnie looked around, trying to find the bathroom in this joint. He walked over to a closed door to his left, what he thought might be the bedroom; maybe there would be a bathroom in there, he thought. He twisted the doorknob and entered the bedroom, a faded dive like the rest of the place. An old mattress with folded white sheets on top sat in the left of the room. A medicine cabinet was attached to the wall in front of him. Seeing it, he raced towards it, opening the mirrored door. Inside was a bunch of pill bottles, most were empty prescriptions from druggies who OD’d before they could clean out the cabinet. His eyes focused on an aspirin bottle, which he grabbed and uncapped in seconds, downing three pills in a single gulp.

            Johnnie turned and flopped onto the bed. His head rattled a little, not the sharp needle-stabbing pain as before, but more of a tiny five-second prick. He just shut his eyes and drifted off…

 

☻

            Johnie woke up forty-five minutes later, the headache gone completely. He felt refreshed, like his slate had been cleaned. But what he was going to do would dirty it up again.

            He got off the bed and walked to the table, grabbed the yellow file, and pulled out a chair. Carefully he opened it, trying not to let the papers fall out on the floor. To his surprise, there was only one piece of paper and a few photographs. He took the photographs, laying them out on the table. All of them were of a woman in her early thirties with fair skin and dark-strawberry"almost brown"hair. In one picture she was sitting on a park bench in what looked like Central Park, reading a paperback copy of The Catcher in the Rye, a book which Johnnie had read over and over again. If he hadn’t have had to kill her, he would’ve thought she was pretty.

            His eyes shifted back to the piece of paper. On it were detailed instructions on how the hit was supposed to go down. The target’s name was Cynthia Hayward, a twenty-nine year old med student. Jonnie was supposed to open the window to his hotel room, aim at the room across from him in a neighboring hotel, and kill her and anyone in the room. After they were dead, he was to pack up the gun in ten seconds or less, burn the file and all its contents, and leave before any suspicions are made. The hit was supposed to be done at 12:00 at the latest; the client would call Jo

            Johnnie got up from his chair and opened the blinds of the windows. He picked up the bolt-action P98B, loading one of the magazines inside, and peered through the scope.  Looking across, he saw what looked like Cynthia Hayward sprawled out on her bed, reading People magazine. Her thick strawberry-red hair was tied in a ponytail. She looked so beautiful, so innocent. But he had a job, and he had to do it. He flicked the handle to the bolt up, pulled the bolt out, pushed it back in, and flicked the handle back down. His finger lay apt on the trigger. He aimed the gun to her head, and began to squeeze the trigger, when…

            A young man walked in through the front door. He wore an open leather jacket over a greased-up white t-shirt and greasy jeans. He held a box wrapped in red and green wrapping paper, topped with a yellow bow. Cynthia jumped up off the couch and leapt into his arms. She seems happy to see him, Johnnie thought to himself. He turned a knob on the scope, zooming it in to where he could read the two’s lips, a handy trick he learned on the job.

            “Merry Christmas, babe”, the man said to Cynthia, whose short head was buried in his broad chest.

            “Merry Christmas to you too, Danny”, she said back. So, Jonnie thought, his name’s Danny.

            “I got you a present”, Danny said, releasing Cynthia from his grip and pulling the present out from under his arm. Johnnie saw her face light up in happiness.

            “Oh my god, thank you!”   She yelled, her face lighting up like the star atop a Christmas tree. She gave Danny a huge hug. “Hold on, let me go get you yours.” She ran over to the bed and reached under. She pulled out a wrench with a small red bow wrapped around it.

            Danny’s face lit up just as Cynthia’s had. “Thanks babe; I needed one of these.” He bended over a little and gave her a kiss. They stayed like that for at least thirty seconds.

            Johnnie sat patiently, waiting to see if more people would come. He waited for ten minutes; when nobody else had come, his finger began to tug on the trigger, when he saw something.

            “I’m so glad I didn’t spend Christmas with my husband,” Cynthia appeared to be saying, “He’d just go on one of those godforsaken temper tantrums. God, sometimes he acts as though he wants to kill me.”

            Kill Her? Johnnie thought.

            He saw Cynthia lift up her blouse halfway, revealing an almost black bruise and a red scab stretched like a spear on her stomach. “This was for not having dinner made when he got home from work."

 He began to fit the pieces together: Cynthia was having an affair with this grease-monkey named Danny; her husband apparently was abusive. Then he had a theory: what if the husband found out about his wife’s affair, had enough, and paid Johnnie money to kill her and whoever she was with. But Johnnie felt something flutter inside his stomach.

            Guilt. Guilt fluttered around in his stomach like swarms of vicious butterflies, willing to kill Jonnie if he tried to kill Cynthia and Danny. Johnnie’s face went white like a sheet of ice. He threw down the gun and ran over to the medicine cabinet mirror and looked at himself. In the mirror, he didn’t see Johnnie Marco, a young handsome man from Brooklyn with dirty-blonde hair and blue eyes; he saw a cold-blooded, heartless killer with a white face who was going to kill a girl and her lover just because she didn’t love her husband. Johnnie didn’t understand it: he had killed drug kingpins, street thugs, even a defense attorney who purposely lost his case. But then he understood: this was wrong; this wasn’t just. Those he had killed before were evil, violent delinquents who needed to die. Cynthia and Danny didn’t need to die.

            Then his phone rang. A loud ringing began to emit from his right pocket. He pulled out the phone and answered.

            “Is it done?” the man on the other end asked. Johnnie took awhile to answer. “Hello! Anybody there?”

            “Why does she need to die?” Johnnie asked.

            There was two seconds of silence on the other end. “Because she needs to, that’s why! I didn’t pay you seven k for you to ask questions; I paid you seven k to put a bullet in her skull!”

            Johnnie thought of a reply to the man’s rude comment. “Just humor me, okay; assassin-client confidentiality, I won’t tell anyone.”

            “Why should I trust you?”

            “You’re trusting me to kill someone, aren’t you?”

            The man cleared his throat. “She’s my wife. She’s been cheating on me with some grease-monkey, I guess, I’m not exactly sure. She’s a terrible wife anyways; she can’t do anything right: She can’t clean right; she can’t cook even stupid Kraft mac and cheese right; and she can’t even get pregnant. Pregnant for crying out loud…”

            The man talked on and on about how horrible his wife was, but Johnnie didn’t listen. His free hand clenched into a fist of rage. “You know what,” he said, interrupting the man’s disgusting rants, “If you hate her so much, why don’t you just kill her yourself?”

            The man sounded astonished. “What did you just say to me?”

            “You heard me,” Johnnie’s voice was gruff with anger. “From what I hear, you only want to kill your wife because she’s not perfect; because she’s not good enough for you, is it? Well, how about you just solve your problem on your own, for a change.”

            The man in a slow, fearful tone: “You do your little job, or I’ll kill you and her, understand?”

            “Come and get me,” he said, hanging up.

 

☻

     Jonnie sat in the chair, the rifle across his lap. At the angle he was sitting, he would easily be able to kill anyone that walked into the room or the room in the building across.

            Fifteen minutes passed, then forty-five, then an hour. But Johnnie just waited.

            Then, just as Johnnie was about to fall asleep, he heard footsteps outside. Johnnie turned the chair around to face the door, prepared to put a bullet in the face of whoever walked in. He could hear the lock turn slowly.

            It seemed like a half an hour until the lock-churning stopped. The door opened a hair. Johnny raised the gun, his eye peering on the door. He waited.

            The door flung open. The man walked in with a .38 Special revolver in his left hand, pointed at Johnnie. He was older than Johnnie had expected; the man had scalp-buzzed gray hair, short stubble, and beady blue eyes that made Johnnie want to pull the trigger twice, one for each eye. The man wore a black trench coat over an expensive gray suit and tie. His face was lit with an expression of surprise; he hadn’t expected Johnnie sitting there, the sniper he had paid an arm and a leg for in his hands, pointed at his head.

            “Guess I didn’t surprise you, did I?” the man said. “Doesn’t matter; hand over my gun.”

            “On the ground, NOW!” Johnnie yelled. “If you don’t, there’ll be a mural of your brains in the hallway.”

            The man wasn’t scared by his threat. He pulled the hammer back on the revolver. “Last chance.”

            “Pull it!” Johnnie replied.

            The man did as told; the gun snapped back with more recoil than he’d expected, flying out of his hand. The bullet flew astray, barely grazing Johnnie’s leg, a trickle of blood apparent. But that didn’t hinder the man at all; he charged at Johnnie, arms spread out like he was going to give him a hug. Johnnie was surprised somewhat, his finger not wanting to pull the trigger.

            The man pulled on the rifle, but Johnnie didn’t let go. He flew up with the gun and swung a spur-of-the-moment jab at the man’s side. The man returned the gift, dropping the rifle smack on his foot. He let out a loud scream that almost broke the lights on the ceiling fan.

            This gave Johnnie the chance he wanted. He grabbed the gun off of the man’s foot and smacked him square in the chin with the butt end, the bone emitting a loud crack. He flung the man across the room, the table crashing to nothing more than splinters. A splatter of blood stained the wall behind his head.

            Johnnie ran over to the .38 and picked it up, running over to the man. The hammer was already pulled back; all he had to do was pull the trigger.

            But the man leapt up off of the ground and reached for the gun, only getting a pistol-whip in the side of the head. He began to stumble backwards and grabbed onto Johnnie’s free arm. Johnnie staggered foreword with the man. He closed his eyes.

            A shatter rung out and Johnnie opened his eyes. The man was holding onto Johnnie’s free arm, dangling out of the window, snow covering his bloody glass-stabbings. A desperate expression was stretched across his pathetic face. Johnnie looked over to Cynthia’s hotel room, only to see her and Danny staring in awe. “Run,” Johnnie yelled, “RUN!” They did as told.

            Johnnie looked down at the man. “Please,” said the man, “help me, pull me up. I’ll pay you twice our original salary; I’ll pay ya’ anything, I swear!”

            Johnnie pointed the revolver to the man’s forehead, and pulled the trigger. The man fell to the ground, splatting on the ground.

            “Merry Christmas,” Johnnie said.      

Author's Note

What do you think?

Reviews

[roarke]

Clean bit of writing. Fast paced noir, can't ask for more than that. An assassin with a conscience, lots of material there. Nice touches sprinkled throughout. Enjoyable read.