The Last Hit

There’s always a demand for a guy in my profession. I’m a paid assassin. Doesn’t matter who they are or what they’ve done, if someone wants them wasted, I’m the one that gets the order. It’s a business. I don’t do international stuff, that’s for the Central Intelligence Agency. No, I’m a domestic. Exes are my bread and butter. Ex-spouses, ex-bosses, ex-any things. Everyone has someone they’d like to see popped, and if they really want to get it done right, they call me. This is no business for an amateur. How do they find me? How do you find anything these days? The internet. They never meet me or see me, and the target never sees it coming. Simple. I’m a professional, trained by the best. The United States Army. What’s the difference? Invade a country of no real importance and the army kills thousands or millions. They promise you’ll learn a skill, and I learned it well. Liked it, in fact. Scary, huh? Whatever floats your boat. I’ve applied that skill well over the years and made a lot of money, but now I’m going to do my last hit. It’s time to retire. Besides, this one was different. This one is for me.

I grew up in the rural fringe of King County, not far from Seattle. I remember her crying the day I enlisted, as we took one of our many walks on the river trail.

“I’ll be back,” I told her. “Like the salmon, I’ll always come back. Don’t worry, sis, really.”

There was an old railroad trestle that crossed the Cedar River where we always stopped, a remote and peaceful place, and we’d stand looking down at the shimmering red bodies of the salmon heading upstream every fall to spawn. They return to the very place where they had hatched years before. She always loved the salmon. They would travel for a thousand miles, out into the great Pacific, subjected to many dangers and hazards, and always they returned to the place they were born, in the upper reaches of the river. Surrounded by the forest and the rippling sound of the water rushing over the rocks, the world felt a million miles away.

“You promise you’ll be careful?” she said through the tears.

“You know I will,” I said. “I’ll be back.”

We stood for a long time, the orange and yellow leaves of the trees along the banks fluttering down to the river to be swept downstream. She tugged her coat a little tighter to ward off the October chill. It would be the last time I saw her.

After boot camp and training I spent my military career moving from hotspot to hotspot. I wasn’t the usual grunt, though, my specialty was sniper. The target never saw me, never knew what hit him. I was good at it. It would serve me well in the future. But the day the CO called me in with the news was the day my life would change forever.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” he said. “Your sister is dead.” He was the man of few words and always quick to the point. I liked that about him. But I never expected this. Never. That day my search began.

The body had been found in the brush along the Cedar River trail. A beautiful young woman, she’d been beaten, raped and killed, and left like a piece of litter of no importance. I returned, of course, for the funeral, the weeping relatives, the explanations of the police. The guy had been caught, they said. The first police on the scene had heard a maniacal laughter in the distance and tracked him down. He’d be put away for a long time, they said. Eventually I returned to my unit overseas and went back to my job of killing, but now with a vision of his face on each target. I assumed I’d never see him again, his smirking face at the arraignment would be the last time, and life went on. But that would not be the case.

I got my discharge and started building my business as a civilian. Like most people, the military experience changes you, but in my case, not nearly as much as the loss of my sweet sister. I’d kept my promise and come back, but the killer robbed me of ever being the same again. I still took my walks along the river trail as the years went by, but his face was still in my sights, even in my dreams. Then, last month I saw it again in the daily news. This time it was on the front page of the Times. Three killers had escaped from a work detail. Two had been captured, but one, my guy, was still at large. He would regret that escape. It would be my final hit.

It’s been a year now, and I still walk the trail along the Cedar River, but now I walk it in peace. When I pass the site of her murder, I feel nothing. Some daffodils I’d planted years ago still bloomed at the edge of the trail. She’s in another place now, a better place. There had been a brief story in the Times about the body of the escaped convict found in a trash cart covered in burlap in an area of Seattle known for the occasional random body being dumped. The police interviewed me briefly, as I had the motive and the military experience to do it, but whether they thought I’d done it or not, we all knew a trash bin was an appropriate end for this guy. The case was filed and forgotten.

As I stood on the trestle where I last saw her, the cold October wind again rustled the leaves, and the bright red sockeye were headed back upstream. They spawn, and then they die, and the cycle begins again. I had found my redemption.

 It looks to be a cold winter this year.

END  1007 words