Flipper

“I think she’s dead,” Charleston looks over her body. He looks at Friga. “Flipper?”

 “She’s…” Friga looks at the safe in her hands. “That’s...I mean. That appears to be the case.”

 “Well?”

 “Well what?”

 “What the hell are we going to do?”

 “How the hell should I know?”

 “We shouldn’t have broken in,” Charleston grips his head, leaning against the counter. “I mean, she’s gotta have a partner.”

 Friga rolls her eyes. “We’ve been here six hours. I think we would have noticed that by now..” She sets the safe on the counter next to him. “We should retrace our steps.”

 “Huh? Why?”

 “So we make sure we didn’t leave any trace.”

 “Good idea.”

 The pair leave the body of the woman that once owned a house on the floor of her kitchen. They walk back to the dining room, where a puddle of blood pools on the floor. 

 “Damn.”

 “You clean,” Friga says. It really hadn’t meant to go this far. Friga - also known as Flipper - walked to the entryway, where a frying pan lay. Twenty minutes before it had been held by the woman living here, who was shocked when she strolled into her home, only to find that two hitmen-for-hire had taken residency hours prior. 

 Now it lay; bent and broken. Friga picks it up to examine it, her good hand gloved in latex. “Hey, Charles?”

 Charleston grunts. He’s currently bleaching the floor. 

 “How do you think we’re gonna explain this?”

 When she doesn’t receive an answer, she peers over her shoulder. “Damnit, Charles! You don’t bleach the floor! Where’d you even find bleach?”

 Charleston stands up. “Under the kitchen sink.”

 “So you got prints on the handles, is what you're saying.”

 “Hey, what did we say when we got here?”

 Friga thought for a moment. “‘Is Shark Tale any good?’”

 “After that.”

 “‘We’re gonna make outta here with more money than our asses don’t know what to do with?’”

 Charleston nods. “Exactly. So we’re gonna stick to the plan and get our money. Hey, do you know how to get blood off of cherry anyhow?”

 Before Friga can answer, the front doorbell rings. 

 “Flipper, you better not say a word,” Charleston mutters, dropping the cloth he’d used to scrub away the blood. Friga rolls her eyes. “That’s my job to say that to you. I can handle this.”

 She pushes past him. Charleston rolls his eyes, but allows her to peek into the peephole. She turns around, her face reddening.

 “It’s a woman.”

 “Oh?”

 “I’m going to open the door. Let’s just pretend we’re friends from out of town, okay?”

 “Better yet: cousins.”

 “Cousins!” Friga slaps him on the back. “Good thinking.” She opens the door. A neighborly young woman stands there wearing a neatly ironed dress.

 “Hullo,” she says pleasantly. “May I come in? I’m a friend of Terri’s.”

 “Sure,” Friga says in a completely different tone. “I’m Fl-Friga.”

 “Oh! What an old fashioned name. I had a friend named Edith once…” she walked in as if the home were her own. She stumbled upon the crime scene; bleach and blood on once beautiful cherry wood. 

 She gulped. Then she turned to the pair, her eyes bug-wide. “A-and you both a-are?”

 “Cousins,” Charleston says. “From-”

 “Terri never said her cousins were coming over,” The woman says, backing up against a dining room chair. “I-I really have to be going. It was nice meeting you.”

 “Why?” Charleston asks, leaning forward. “What are you gonna do when you leave?”

 “N-nothing,” the woman’s pip-squeak voice stumbles around her words. “So, I’ll just be off, thanks…” before she can take a step, she’s slinking into the chair, her eyes rolling back into her head. 

 Charleston groans. “Flipper.”

 Friga, holding a frying pan, dropped it in resignation. “Yeah?”

 “This wasn’t part of the plan.”

 “What was?” The pip-squeak voice mumbles.

 “Gah!” Charleston jumps back; he glances down at the woman, who, although slumped over herself like a drunk, is still alive. 

 “Flipper, she’s alive.”

 “Alright, I’ll do it,” Friga mutters, lifting up the frying pan. Charleston lunges forward, yanking it out of her hands. “No! Come on, we can still make this happen - we can keep her alive.”

 “She’s going to tell, Charles.”

 The woman looked up, rubbed her head, then frowned. “Where am I?”

 “Your house,” Friga says immediately, her face bright. She drops the frying pan. “We’re your best friends.”

 “Really?”

 “So is this how amnesia works?” Charleston asks softly, looking the woman over. Friga shrugs. “Probably just short term memory loss.”

 “You two seem a little familiar,” the woman murmurs. “Sorry, what’s my name again? And yours, no, I don’t remember hearing yours…”

 “Your name,” Friga repeats. She shoots a desperate look to Charleston, then pauses. “Terri. That’s your name.”

 “Terri,” it’s the woman’s turn to repeat. Terri nods. “Oh, my head…”

 “Let’s just get you to lie down,” Charleston says, picking up her heavy-yet-alive body. “Frig?”

 “Yeah, I’m coming.” Friga kicks the frying pan aside and helps him lift the body upstairs. Charleston pushes open the first door they see with an elbow. They lay Terri on the bed; she smiles warmly.

 “Thanks guys,” she whispers. “You’re really nice, to do this for me…”

 “Nice, right,” Charleston says. “So, why did you come over here?”

 “She’s got amnesia, dumbass,” Friga mutters. Charleston grimaces. “Sorry, sorry.”

 Friga’s phone, which is tightly packed between her keys and her pistol, buzzes. She digs it out of her back pocket and accepts.

 “Hullo?”

 “You don’t have my number saved?”

 “I-sir, I would have assumed you would be using a burner. I’m sorry.”

 Charleston and Flipper’s boss is named Big Mac. Big Mac has been around for quite a while, so you can imagine that he does not like the comparison to a certain popular menu item at a certain popular chain restaurant. Unfortunately, Friga didn’t know that. 

 That was the first mistake Friga made when she signed up to be a hit man. Well, at least after thinking about being a hitman and then actually signing up to be one. 

 Big Mac hasn’t liked Friga ever since. 

 “Get me my money, Flipper. I ain’t gonna wait all year for you two.”

 The phone beeps. The call’s over.

 Charleston and Terri look at her; their expressions vastly different. Charleston, having known immediately who would be calling, looks like a whore in church. Terri having no reason to be nervous, only stays silent and confused.

 “We have to blow,” Friga shuts her phone (this being a burner, she didn’t break the bank for it - although robbery would probably go much more smoothly than this) and shoves it back into her pocket. “Come on.”

 “But what about Terri? The safe? The blood on the floor downstairs?”

 “There’s blood on the floor downstairs?” Terri asks.

 “Yes,” Friga says sweetly, kneeling down to meet her gaze. “It’s from your friend.”

 “My friend?” Terri gasps. “Oh - wait...oh, I could have sworn I know who you’re talking about…”

 “Mhm. You hit her in the head with a safe.”

 Terri sits up in shock. “I-I...I did that? Is she alright?”

 “Dead as a doorknob,” Charleston says weakly. For a hitman, he’s never liked killing people. It had started with an obsession with Spy Kids, as many pipe dreams do. “Okay, well, you get better...Terri.”

 Charleston and Friga walk down the stairs tepidly. The scene looks staged, but it isn’t. It’s very real.

 “Now what?” Friga huffs, crossing her arms. 

 “We go get our money.”

 They walk over to the basement where they had been told a black metal safe would be. Terri’s father, a man of fifty, was meant to walk in to check in on his daughter. Having been a high profile launderer, Charleston and Friga were ordered to bring him to meet his maker. 

 “This is bad,” Charleston mutters, pacing the basement as Friga picks the safe. “Real bad.”

 “Got it!” She yelps, a wave of excitement in her voice. “Okay, we got the cash. We can just wait for her dad to come in and then-”

 “But the blood and the prints-”

 “There’s only so much time before she figures it out,” she says sharply, gripping his shoulders. “Then we’re screwed. We can get out before…”

 “I know,” Charleston is currently wishing he’d taken that offer at Burger King when he was in college. “I could be a manager now.”

 “Tough luck,” Friga says as they walk up the steps. She whistles as she counts the money. As they turn the corner from the top step, they meet the mouth of a gun.

 “Damnit,” Friga whispers. 

 Charleston says nothing. He’s watching his life be ripped out from underneath his feet. 

 “Drop it.”