Nothing Burns Like the Cold

BANG. 

The knife spins out like and his clay pigeon body takes my blade. His body as in Parker Darby's body. A body that covers the snow in O- blood. The blood that attracts mosquitoes most, I think. Blood that trails back through red slush to the cabin. 

Parker Darby was a liability, a jittery motormouth with his pulse on criminal hangouts. A heavy drinker with a snitching streak, he made the rounds in crooked circles as a police informant. Unfortunate for him, one of those officers ratted him out to every top-tier lowlife in the city. Hired guns chased him to the Papillon Mountains in the winter which is my place of residence. “Leave him to the devil” someone said and here he is, dragged inside a distant cabin by the devil herself. 

The cabin is empty of the technological trappings people cling to in the city. No wifi, no electricity in general, no phone service, nothing. Only 750 SQ feet of oak, a half-broken radio, handmade furniture, and miles of silence, snow, forest. Parker couldn't cry for help if there was phone service and he wasn't bleeding across the floor. But he is and when I step over him for the kitchen, there isn't an ounce of sympathy in my eyes or hands. 

“You're that contract killer, Aida Bryne, right? Younger than I expected but danger can come from unlikely places.” 

I can hear the wince in his voice, the booze and ice that clink in a shot glass. The obnoxious volume you could hear outside the pub. The criminals’ annoyance with him changing the jukebox music and snitching to the police about their activity. He's fortunate I stroll over with a bucket and a mop to clean up the mess and not another knife to finish the job. 

“I am her.” 

“You think you could get this knife out of me, hitman? Hitwoman? And maybe hook me up with a drink? Preferably something warm. I need something to whet my palate and then it's like Antarctica in here.”

Arsenic, rat poison smoothie, kerosene. I have plenty to “hook him up with” but something deters me, something holds me back. There's water in a hot spring untouched by the winter, I think to myself. He can drink from there if he shells out more information. That could be why I remove the knife slow and steady, patch up his side, quiet him with a sleeper hold. 

Parker wakes up strapped to the couch and all his jerking doesn't do much but burn his wrists. 

“What about that drink, killer? And I enjoy BDSM as much as the next person but this industrial rope is a bit much.” 

“You drink when you talk. I don't trust blabbermouths.”

His face is a question mark and his resistance stops cold. Cold. This permafrost must have seeped through his overcoat by now. Not like his mouth doesn't keep him warm or police informant coffee and donuts and whatever else he wants. Miles from them though, he doesn't have a hope, a bar on his phone, a choice but to be transparent. 

“Why should I open up if you don't trust me? And I'm not a blabbermouth. I'm more like a conversational lush.” 

Parker's got a point. I live alone here with an assortment of blades and an endless torrent of winter. There's no reason to trust a police informant but why should he open up? Because I can carve him into chunks and feed him to rabid animals? That makes me less trustworthy and I loosen up the rope as a courtesy. 

“Now I don't feel like a hostage on the precipice of death but you know...” 

“There’s a secret hot spring in a cave a mile from here. Two people guard it for me with their lives and in return, I promise them protection.”

Parker sits upright and his eyes widen like someone about to be struck by a car. Or hit by a knife. Go figure.

“Hot spring you say? In this miserable weather?”

“You talk, I lead you there. Said too much about it already.”

He has pertinent information about the men who want him dead and whether or not they want something extra. I have an assortment of blades throughout my house if he cares to see one on a personal level. We can come to an understanding. 

“Judging by the knife you tossed in between my ribs with ease, I'd wager there are more all around here. Some larger and sharper than the one you threw.”

I stifle a chuckle. I'm not known for my stoicism but I'm not known much at all. That gives me the advantage of maintaining whatever persona clients project onto me. He knows I'm not stoic though or he does now. Can't relax though because he would read me and killers can't afford to be read. 

“You want to know about why Chucky Weissman and his crew chased me up here because you're the Boogeyman of the underworld as I understand it. Word is, they plan on killing two birds with one stone as in if they take me out, they take you out too. Then poof, there goes the police rat and the mythical creature of the underbelly.” 

I thought that would be the case. I am an invisible threat, no, THE invisible threat. The “Boogeyman of the underworld” as Parker puts it and only after three years of odd hit jobs for odd clientele. Chucky must have caught wind of me through one of my targets; could have been a sibling, significant other, or a snitch he wanted to breathe a little longer. Either way, I rush Parker out the door because the weather will be the least of his worries. 

“Where are we headed?”

I shove him along in a wordless trudge between snow-capped trees but he whines the entire way. “What are you doing”, “Where’s this so-called hot spring of yours”, and “Do you have whiskey or something because I'm going through booze withdrawals” are a handful of his bottomless complaints I wish I can block out. I attempt to with thoughts of my original life: college freshman, bookish, silent outside of decent sex with half-decent men, environmental advocate, French New Wave movie buff. There is no Parker, no knifed bodies, no bloodshed, no mystery men in suits and doublespeak who yank me out of school and into a deep spiral of assassinations. A branch tugs at my beanie, scratches over my right eye, and the block is done. The two men who guard the cave are aloof but efficient and when I instruct them to watch Parker with their lives, they nod without eye contact. 

“Why don't you stay in the cave?”

Parker's question comes as I grip one of several knives in a halfway step back for the cabin. It makes sense to hunker down and stay warm in a hidden hot spring but Chucky will have his goons sweep the area at some point. I need to attract and hold their attention. 

“I need to head back.” 

And I do without a rebuttal, with minor noise because heavy snow and heavy steps make for a smooth transition to death. 

When you're hunted, the birds and trees exist as inessential objects in a deadly landscape. Before the hunt, they're gorgeous parts of the scenery; the chirps and branches of both take center stage in beauty that feels obvious but unnatural with a second glance. I pause and breathe in the pine for a change, the birds that zip from one tree to the next, the frigid film of breath that slithers out of every exhale. I slip, for a moment, into the student I once was: the English major, unfazed, bare-faced, cheap date, permanent 4.0 GPA resident because once some bulletproof SUV roars in front of my cabin, I have to return to now. I have to be the lone assassin who doesn't maintain anything but the trademark bare face and penchant for silence. 

The SUV comes packed with cronies right on cue and if I'm not mistaken, the vertically challenged and stout guy who leaps out is Chucky Weissman. Metropolitan mobster stereotype, big into pizza and not into people unless they have money to offer. Voice like he eats cigarettes for breakfast. The face that introduced me to the world I'm wrapped in now. 

“You know the deal. Comb the cabin and kill that quiet killer bitch. Leave that rat Parker to me. I'm gonna skin him alive.”

I count five burly men armed and in single file like third grade kids. I shake a tree and the snow leads one of them away from the group. In my direction among the trees. Come on, venture a little deeper, you big oaf. 

I stab his throat and cover his mouth and that's one down. 

“I'm missing an idiot. Which one of you buffoons separated from the group?”

Chucky lifts and stomps his feet in a circle. The temper tantrum can bury him if it continues which is fine with me because I distract and stab another bodyguard. The remaining bodyguards either scour the area for me or stick their face in their phones for God knows what and one of them is familiar in a vague way. Could be my position in the shadows of these trees that face the cabin but one of them is potentially a one-night stand, a hazy Friday night that invites a gasp out of me. 

“What was that?”

Chucky waddles toward the trees with a shotgun half his size and crows like a rooster into the forest. I don't respond, I can't respond. Not to the one-night stand with a flashlight approaching my general area and not to Chucky’s outrageous faux-rooster cries. Right as the flashlight exposes me, I hear “go choke on a snowball, Chucky”. 

Parker, you idiot but the cave guards are with him and put bullets in two of the bodyguards while Chucky shoots into the trees. There go the birds, the silence, the blood. It isn't Parker's or it isn't yet. The other bodyguard shines his light into my area which isn't mine anymore and I jab him several times in the throat because he called me “fat” after sex, launched into a tirade about how predatory men make those like him look horrible, all the more reason his blood-curdling scream is delicious. 

“Chucky, you're outnumbered. Drop the gun and we'll consider sparing you.” 

I'm confident in my words, my stroll out of the darkness, my knife thrust toward him. We have the upper hand until Parker stumbles into the light bloody like my first sight of him but in far worse condition. The two guards I ask to watch him trail behind in equal agony. Chucky's grin follows him and the shotgun to my chest because my arrogance brings me here. 

“I pulled you out of school, raised you in this lifestyle to be a respected killer but a gut feeling told me you wouldn't erase him from the face of the Earth. In spite of the countless marks you sent to the grave over the past three years, this didn't do it for you? A police informant? That's when I decided to take you both out myself, him because rats don't deserve oxygen and you because your myth terrifies grown ass men twice your age and size.”

Parker is dead, the guards are dead, mine and Chucky's, and I'm next. It takes one shot to end the mythos that surrounds me, one shell through my chest. And that's when my saving grace comes in the form of a click. No matter how much he pulls the trigger, the shotgun is empty. 

“My turn.” 

I slice both his arms and they fall limp by his side. He shrieks and backs away terrified not unlike the men who fear me before they experience me. Stumbles over the corpse of a bodyguard and proceeds to sob because he's next. I slice both his legs and the shriek is higher, panicked, horrific, and I feel no pity. This is the nightmare people envision, this is the being who strikes terror into hardened criminals, this is the pinnacle of viciousness. 

“Please, Aida. Y-you can spare a p-police informant, you can sp-spare me, right?”

The same one who “raised me in this lifestyle to be a respected killer” pleads to be spared by said killer. Plenty of blood in the snow already. What's a bit more? Then a bird sails in and perches on a tree in my line of sight and my knives drop at Chucky's feet. I inhale that bookish freshman college student, exhale the cold-blooded killer, pull the keys off one of the bodyguards, and drive the SUV back down the trail to the city. 

I know contract killers don't leave without a punishment, without a personal sacrifice. I could be yanked away from an outdoor café and murdered in an alley or lose a finger or an eye. Given my reputation as a silent horror though, few people know what I look like and those few are dead, save for Chucky who is on his way there. I will vanish unscathed, untarnished, unheard of again except for urban legend. That is fine with me because this urban legend misses fiction and movies in a dorm room and decent sex with half-decent men.