You Are The Assassin
The phone rings. You leave it for that extra few seconds, you are cool. You put down your Marlboro cigarette (told you you were cool!) and rest it on your Mickey Mouse ashtray.
Voice: “Is that the Assassin?”
You: “Yes”
Voice: “I have a job for you”
You: “Good”
Voice: “Usual arrangement?”
You: “Yes”
Voice: “I’ll email the details now. You don’t talk much do you?”
You: “No”
Click. Called ended. (Bet you didn’t know you were THIS cool!)

You open your laptop computer, your Jules from Pulp Fiction screen saver glares back at you, cool, calm, stereotypical. You hit the enter key, the mail icon flashes, cold, generic, functional. You open the mailbox. 24 messages. 12 of them strongly urging you to have your penis savaged by a Hungarian butcher in a back alley of your choice, ‘to increase your girth and enhance her pleasure’. There is no ‘her’. You press delete.
10 of them either offer you Viagra, porn for $2.95 a month, free Spam for life, or a combination of all three. You hit delete. The next mail is a notification that your spam filter is functioning perfectly, would you like to fill in a survey? You hit delete, hard. The last mail is the one. You scan the information, open the attachment, acknowledge the picture, commit all detail to memory. You delete the file. The system immediately scrubs all trace of any mail. No connections.

You are driving North. Your black sleek 4x4 reflects your persona. Dark, stealthy, unforgiving, mysterious, 20% fibreglass. Your CD player massages you with Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, Bob The Builder. You regret buying Classical CDs from car boot sales in Slough on a wet Sunday in November. You are still cool, ‘Can we fix it?’ Yes. You can. You are the man. The SatNav asks nervously if you wouldn’t mind turning off at the next junction. You throw the device a grimace. That was a tough expression of Eastwoodesque proportions. You make a mental note to see the GP about these worsening facial ticks. The wind howls through the dark, complemented in its gloomy totality by raindrops the size of babies eyeballs, spattering your windshield. You put the wipers on ‘High Annoying Squeak’ setting. You are nearing your targets location, his final destination, the place where you will apply his life cessation. You are still cool. And wet. You reach down and press the button to close the sunroof.

Your target, he wanders aimlessly around the overlit lounge, alternating his fury between a cordless phone conversation and an unfortunate cigarette. He is too animated. Margin of error. You need to be closer. You set your boots to anti-squelching mode and proceed to advance on the house via the muddy flowerbeds, sheltered from sight by overhanging willows. The tree weeps rain and sap down your collar. You don’t flinch, you are used to weather. You have experienced weather all of your life. You are at the gable end of the building, the isolated farmhouse, no neighbours, no witnesses, no calls to the emergency services (with the additional dilemma of asking ‘could I have police AND ambulance please, or do I need to call back again?’) You try the back door handle. It opens easily, smoothly, silently, like a wet fart in a vacuum. The kitchen, bathed in blue moonlight, the lounge beyond. A crack of light beneath the door. A raised voice. An asthmatic cough. Element of surprise. You wrench open the door, in the same movement raising the silenced pistol, ‘whap!whap!whap!whap!’ 4 shots, 2 head, 2 heart. Mission accomplished. You scan the room, the bloodied dead victim on the floor, face of eternal recognition, your photograph on the mantelpiece. You never did like your father.

Copyright – Brendan O Sullivan - 2007