The Last One by Cory Flick
from TIGHTROPE: a PUNK NOIR Magazine series
Ed steered his Cadillac into the motel parking lot, drifted easy between two lines. He stopped and switched off the engine, a low rumble lowering softly, smoothly, to silence. He looked around the lot. Just some sedans and trucks, all various stages of beater. This wasn’t a neighborhood drowning in money. Ed waited a moment longer. He saw no movement in the lot, heard nothing.
He stepped out of the Caddy and eased the door closed with a quiet thunk. He waited, looked for and saw no movement in the lot, listened for and heard nothing. The late September Houston air was sticky and warm. Outside of the Caddy’s air conditioning, Ed felt himself start sweating through his shirt.
His back hurt. His knees hurt. During the flight here, he’d felt a prickly little pain in his chest for a minute. Thinking about that made him go cold in the hot dark of the night. He decided to stop thinking about what hurt.
Be back in Minnesota soon as this is done, he thought. This is the last one. Didn’t matter how much money Dalmar or anyone else offered. He pulled the short, heavy rope out of his jacket pocket. The knotted ends settled into the palm of his hand.
He should be knocked out by the time you get there, Dalmar had told him on the phone. Good sex and good weed will make sure of it, she’ll make sure of it, Dalmar had said. And, she’ll make sure the door’s unlocked for you.
Fifty years old, thirty years in this business, taking orders now from a guy like Dalmar, Ed thought. Crazy Somali who sends his own girlfriend to prep the target. Time to get out, for sure. Past time. Everyone in the business was crazy now. They all got high on their own supply and they all wanted to go out guns blazing. Not like when he’d started, when it was mostly Italians and Irish and sure, a few black guys, but American black guys. Regular guys, all of them, just trying to make a living. Just like Ed.
He walked quickly and quietly to number 11, tested the doorknob. It turned easy. Dalmar’s girl Riyo had done her job all right, Ed thought. He eased the door open and slipped into the darkened room.
He sidestepped and crouched at once. He listened and looked, letting his eyes adjust to the near total dark. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Wrong, he thought, all fucking wrong.
No sound. No snoring, no breathing. He saw something lumpy on the bed. Ed stood and crossed the room and looked closely. Just sheets and pillows jumbled up in a mess. No one in the bed.
Ah, fuck, Ed thought. He turned and made for the door when he felt more than heard or saw someone rush out from further inside the room. No, not felt, smelled. Cinnamon. Dalmar’s girl, Riyo, wore cinnamon perfume all the time.
Ed spun and got his arms out in time, not as fast as he used to be but fast enough and he had height and weight on his side, and he threw himself at her. She’d expected a victim in retreat. What she got were hands around her throat and a knee in her belly and then the other knee in her face, and then Ed had the rope looped around her slender neck and the ends crossed behind her head and he hauled her up and twisted from the hips and spun her and he heard a pop, very loud in the dark room, bad things happening to bones.
Riyo collapsed in a heap on the floor, shaking and gurgling. A long thin knife lay beside her, fallen during the struggle.
Ed’s breathing came in hard, ragged gasps, and he felt like his heart was being tattooed.
Just get the hell out of here, he thought.
He heard buzzing. Ed knelt and found Riyo’s phone. He looked at the incoming number and smiled at Riyo. She wasn’t shaking or gurgling as much. He put the phone to his ear.
“Riyo can’t come to the phone.”
Silence on the other end. Then Dalmar’s heavy voice, “Ed, what are you doing with this phone?”
Ed just sat on the floor and watched Riyo go still. Those needles in his chest were still going.
Dalmar said, “She’d have done it quick, old man. You shouldn’t have fucked things up like this.”
“Why?”
“Can’t chance you getting picked up. You couldn’t handle inside at your age. You’d talk. It’s time, man, you got to go. You should have let Riyo do it, girl’s magic with that knife, man.”
“She used to be. I’ll be seeing you, Dalmar.”
A day and a flight later, back in the cold fall nighttime of Minneapolis, Ed sat in his car and watched through binoculars. Dalmar got out of a black Escalade and hustled to the door of a plain brick house. Two heavies walked alongside and one just behind him. Dalmar looked over his shoulder, and the heavies all looked over theirs. Ed smiled, despite the cold.
A month later, wrapped in cold, lonesome October dark, Ed watched Dalmar get out of the same Escalade, with the same hired help, going to the same house. They all did a lot of looking around, not quite as much as before. Ed smiled, despite the cold, the wind, and the little prickly pains in his chest.
A year later, wrapped in a whole new cold and dark, Ed watched the Escalade roll up, watched Dalmar get out alone and head for the brick house. Dalmar didn’t even look over his shoulder.
Ed smiled. The pains in his chest were sharper, harder. That’s all right, he thought. Just one more. The last one. He felt the comfortable weight of the knotted ends of the rope in his jacket pocket. He started for the house.
Cory Flick is a database developer in Houston, Texas. He enjoys hair metal, hardboiled crime, and Lovecraftian horror. Someday he might figure out how to mix the three.
Beautifully written.