Not To Point Fingers..

Very much {gore/death/swearing/blood/weapons/you get the gist} warning- if you don’t like, don’t read.  

I appreciate constructive criticism!

2:46 AM, December 18th. 

The police lights were turning my skin awkward shades of blue and red. On this cold night, I stood outside the caution tape, just wondering what the officers were thinking, what they were seeing. They’ve got the middle of the road blocked off, what about the cars? Taking steps toward the caution tape, I could feel the familiar crunch of leaves under my boots. With my hands balanced on the tape, I saw one officer bent over near a tree, I wonder what he’s looking at. The officer calls over someone else and I sidestep to try to get a better look. I step on something hard and stumble a bit.  

It was a leaf. Why is this leaf so hard? I crouched down and observed this leaf. It’s big, it’s brown but it’s darker in some places, like something is seeping through and making it wet. Blood? I reach to turn over the leaf, avoiding the sticky part. “Fuck” I whisper, that’s where it is.  

7:58 PM, December 17th. 

 I tie my combat boots tight. Don’t want to be tripping today. I walk towards my kitchen armed with my duffel bag and grab a water bottle. I look down at my outfit, my black pants with not a spec of lint, my dark boots shining to match, and my unzipped black hood. This almost looks nice, funny the only time I dress up would be for today.  

My dark hair shields my eyes from the low sun as I walk out to my car, I unlock it and drop the duffel in the back seat. It’s contents clink against each other. I start the car and the radio comes on, the song is familiar. I reverse into the parking lot before driving out towards my grocery store. 

I get there and grab a few things I’m going to need. I got vinegar and lemon juice, and I picked up some cinnamon plus whiskey. I paid and left the store as they started closing. I placed everything in my duffel bag and checked it’s contents, all’s there. I got in the front seat and started out of the parking lot, minutes later I was on the highway and jamming out to some old song from my childhood. 

11:29 PM, December 17th. 

I parked my car on the street the opposite side of the woods as his house. The dark night mixed with the trees you could barely see my dark car on the side of the road. I begin my walk through this dense forest, maybe a sixth of a mile. I grab my duffel bag and take out the black gloves, I place them on and sling the bag over my shoulder. 

After walking a bit I could see the lights of his house, I creeped around the side till I could see inside the kitchen. Rich prick has servants so after a butler and the chef leave the kitchen I start trying to pick the lock nearest to the window, I didn’t have time to fully scope the house or it’s contents so this mission is already hardly worth the money.  

I get the lock open and the door swings into a hallway, one way to what looks like a bathroom and the other to the kitchen. I drop the duffel bag soundlessly in the bathroom and keep my back to the wall while I near the kitchen. I hear one set of footsteps and gauging the sound I can tell it’s the heavy-set chef. 

I barely peek my head around the corner and when his back is to me, I grab my knife from his holster and slit his throat before he could scream. He crumples to the ground and I mentally thank the architect who built this house. I drag the big chef around the corner into the hallway and lazily pull a mat over the small pool of blood that was made on the floor, the small splatters on the cabinet will hopefully go unnoticed. I step over the chef and grab the cinnamon and whiskey from my bag, I make a quick drink and pour a disgusting amount of ground hemlock in it, though the upsetting thing about hemlock is you can smell it, thus the cinnamon. I pour a festive amount of cinnamon on top to mask the smell and make this a Christmas-y drink, it’s only a week away. I place the drink on a counter and as I boldly assumed a butler soon came around and grabbed it.  

I didn’t have a lot of time to think this one through but I expected it to play out one of two ways, more likely, or rather hopefully, Mr. Tondle will take his drink to bed- as my research told me he usually does- his servants will assume he’s asleep and will go to their according places, home or their sleeping quarters. The other is he’ll croak in his favorite seat for a butler to find and scream of which is have to kill anyone who heard or saw. Hopefully he’s feeling sleepy tonight. After a few minutes I hear the front door open, a few men say goodbye to the butler from earlier, and the door closes. The same butler stalks around the house turning off the lights and I have to dip into the bathroom for him to turn off the light in the kitchen and hope he’d assume the chef had done it before he left, otherwise he’d come around the corner and spot the very much dead chef and make my impossibly hard job, even harder. He does as I hoped and peacefully returned to his quarters.  

I grabbed my duffel and spent a solid 3 minutes opening random doors like an idiot trying to find the master bedroom, I was just lucky not to open the servant’s door. I finally find the room and walk in to find Mr. Tondle ‘sleeping’ soundly. I again thank the architect that this is a one story home and hop out the window onto the side of the house. I scope it for a quick second and recognize he has no neighbors so from here in this should be pretty easy, even considering the idiotic plan I’m running with. I run through the woods back to my car and make sure I already ditched the license plate. I drop my duffel in the passenger seat and drive it around to the side of his house as quickly as I can. I climb back in the same window I climbed out of and spend nearly 20 minutes shoving Mr. Tondle’s fat ass out the window, this man is easily 3 times my weight. I’m-somehow- able to drag him into the backseat of my car and drive back to the same backstreet.  

I can’t be sure why but my buyer has a specific place he wants the body to be found. Lucky for me it’s not a populated area or anything so dropping the body and grabbing my proof can’t be too hard. I make it to the shady backstreet dump spot and stop my car to look around. This street is about 12 miles from anything else and is only really ever used during rush hours-which have passed. Like it usually is the street is it’s own ghost town so I step out of my car and walk over to the other side, I open the passenger side door and grab a few things from my duffel bag: my second favorite knife, and the whiskey- personal use only.  

I close the passenger door and open the backseat. I can only assume Mr. Tondle got scraped pretty bad when I’d dragged him because now my leather seats are plagued with blood. I drag him, with much effort-again, out of the back seat and onto the concrete. I could swear he heaved a sigh so I step back and draw my knife, I watch him closely. He doesn’t move again after a few minutes so I round the car to grab the plastic bags I left in the front seat.  

I return and take the knife to his right ring finger- the last thing I need to deliver in order to get payed. I see the big bulky ring I was promised would be there and I begin sawing. The ridges on the knife breaking through skin and tendons and now bone. Soon the finger is off and I’m on my feet with the bag and finger. Would’ve all been well if the dead man didn’t jerk upward. He yanks his hand back and screams. His left hand comes at me in a swing, he knocks the bag and knife out of my hand. I send one swift kick to the side of his neck and he slumps back down. To avoid any further confusion I slit his throat, of coarse further soaking my car like an idiot, and roll him away from my car.  

I didn’t have much time to think about my dose of hemlock because I see very small headlights in the far distance. I grab the bag and the knife and even the whiskey and jump in the front seat before peeling away from him. I’m out of sight before they knew I was ever there. I pull my phone out to send my buyer a picture of the finger, I pick up the bag- the very light bag. The very much empty bag. Of fucking course. Not the whiskey, not the knife, I leave the fucking finger! Along with mentality scolding myself, I think of the chances I could go back and get it without getting caught. Devil on my shoulder says yes. Distant police sirens say no. Being the successful hitman I am, I usually listen to my little devil friend, but my reflexes pull me onto a backstreet before the cop’s headlights fall on me. I hide my car behind an old abandoned barn about 50 yards away and use the lemon and vinegar to clean the blood from my car while I wait for the news to spread an acceptable amount for a crowd. I need to be there. 

2:47 AM, December 18th. 

How the hell, do I get this bloody finger away from this packed crime scene? I drop the leaf back over the finger to avoid wandering eyes and look back to the crouching cops. They’re standing over Mr. Tondle and I wonder how long before they realize he’s missing something and clear everyone out.  

The officer he’d called over finally comes up to him and gasps, I did leave him a little bloody. I realize I don’t have the bag or my gloves and no matter what this bloody evidence cannot have my fingerprints on it. I look around me and stand back up to avoid suspicion. All the cops have huddled up near the body aside from a few who are lingering where my car was. I look there to see what else my dumbass left behind. They're taking pictures of the tracks, the same tracks that match millions of others. The crowd around me starts to thicken. I need to find a way to get this finger out of here, fast. I see the officers begin to take pictures of everything, focusing on his hand. Shit. I scan my surroundings and I can tell the only gloves or bags I’d get would be on a police officer. My ego and my intelligence battle on whether I could do this. I determine I probably couldn’t steal from/kill in order to steal from a cop in a street full of cops and bystanders. I look to the lady next to me, an older woman with a bag slung over her shoulder. My mom never taught me not to be an idiot, so I reached straight into the bag and grab out some weird little box thing. She doesn’t feel any of the movement so I turn away from her and open it. It looks like a nail kit, nail file, nail clipper, tweezers. I can use those and just stash the finger in the box till I get a better container. There are people on every side of me now, I'm just lucky nobody saw me pickpocket this little old lady. Though I still probably couldn’t bend down and pick this finger without anyone noticing. I need to make some sort of distraction, but I can't leave this finger here unattended. Someone might step on it the way I did or block my access. It starts to smell bad, not to point fingers but I think it’s the dead guy. I smile at my own terrible pun and look around again. The woman behind me is wearing a scarf, might have been useful for something if it wasn’t draped around her neck, the man to her side is holding a beer bottle, Molotov? Might be slightly too big of a distraction, I want it anyways. I still don’t know how to get it from him though. He finishes it, much to my silent dismay tosses it behind him literally throwing glass into a crowd of people. The glass hits a group of teens and shatters on the ground. Everyone looks in that direction and I hop the cops don’t mind me being suspicious for a moment. I drop down quickly and shove the leaf away, the tweezers grab the finger by the bulky ring that’s still on it and drop it in the box thing. I stand back to my full height and look around. If I hurry away from the scene those detectives who just showed up might not like that. I decide to entirely drop the deadly assassin in me and revert to baby. I force tears to well up in my eyes and I pinch my nose red, I tuck the small box under my armpit and start pushing back through the crowd while crying. Once I’m past most of the people some young looking detective comes up to me, this next bit was powered by both bravery, stupidity, and my huge ego, because with me they really can be the same thing.  

“Are you okay ma’am?” he leans down to my level “Did something happen?” he puts his hands on both my shoulders to hold me still from my ‘terrified shaking’  

“I-It’s just too much. This is all so terrible. What are you going to do, you have to catch him.” I almost forget to cry by the end of that sentence, too much blaming this crime on some poor guy. 

“We’re going to catch the bad man who did this. It’s very late, do you have a way to get home?” now my response had nothing to do with getting the detective away from the crime scene, but it had everything to do with me being a ballsy idiot, I gave him the address of the park where I walked from and told him my car is there, he dropped me there like the southern young gentleman he is. Very nice, poor guy is going to drive himself crazy with this case though. Oh well. 

4:17 AM, December 18th. 

I step out of my car, “Mr. Norse, I went through a lot of trouble for this so I better be paid in full.” Standing in this empty car garage with him seems to make him nervous “Yes, Qikinuico,” he uses the only name he knows me by, the same name known as a worldwide kill for hire “I’ve got all I promised so you better have my... package.." he pauses again. 

“Nathaniel,” I see him tense at the use of his first name. “There’s no point in being shy about it, I killed a man because that’s what I do, and you paid for it because that’s who you are.” He sighs and looks to his left. “Trust me, I got this shit down” He passes a large and very suspicious brief case to me and says,  

“Thank you Qikinuico, everything I owe is in there.” He pronounces the name weird again and it makes me smile slightly before watching him walk to his car. I open the case and see the money I was expecting. 

I climb back into my car and pull down my mask. Mr. Norse pulls out of the dark parking lot and I check my phone to find a text from an unknown number, “Qikinuico, dove gracchia il corvo.. È dove può fiorire una fenice” which translates, with my shotty Italian, to ‘Qikinuico, where the crow croaks.. Is where a phoenix can flourish’ I know what that means, and more importantly who sent it, so I pull onto the highway. 

See you soon, stronzo..