Business As Usual
Chapter 1
The sun had been a memory for almost two hours, which meant it was time for the man to go to work. The iguana in his hand, while still captivating and beautiful, was free to go, just as all the countless iguanas were before this one. The man didn’t know what it was about iguanas that compelled him to get to know them a bit better whenever they crossed his path, to chase them back to their homes, and to drag them out (albeit gently), and examine them from tongue to tail. However, there were two things he knew for certain: with iguanas it was strictly catch and release; with people it was catch and kill.
He gently put the lizard back on the sand and stood up. It took a couple of tentative steps then just turned back and looked at him for a long time, frozen. The man always locked eyes with the iguanas when this happened and waited for the moment when they shot forward and ran away, off into the desert. He was ready to get back in his pickup and get to work. It would take some time to get this job ready and the first step was to drive. He loved the drive, the radio, the dry night air.
“Pancho and Lefty” played on the radio, a great story song. As he listened, he thought for a bit about a life, what adds up to a person’s story, which ones are worth writing songs about. As the song went on his mind brought him back to the task at hand, another job, another life not worth writing a song about. He drove and readied himself for what needed to be done tonight.
He made sure to park the truck out of sight of the main road, behind some mesquite trees near the canal. The road nearby had a nasty curve, one you had to be ready for to avoid an accident, it was just right. He knew every road and patch of land for 200 miles having grown up running around and raising hell in this hot and wild place. He was much older now, age was kicking his ass, but he was still useful, productive and strong, much smarter than first glance might let on.
He hopped out of the truck and started measuring. This was the trickiest bit; it had to be just right or the job would have to be done another way. Tonight was ripe, the time was now for this son of a bitch to wipe out. Meticulously measuring and jotting down the figures in his notebook until he knew just where to put the spike strip and then the ramp. If he calculated just right, the truck would blow just one tire, veer slightly to the left and hit the ramp in such a way to flip the car so that the driver's side ends up face down in the canal. Things like this happen all too often after a night in Mexico. Drinking and driving in this area is damn near expected. From what he knew about the target, it seemed almost too easy and definitely far too painless a way to exit this world, considering the lifetime of broken souls he left in his wake. However that was never the point of the job, he was just in charge of making the target go away completely and for good. He put some seeds onto precise parts of the road to mark where to lay the spike strips and the ramp. Chalk could be erased, but erasing took time. Seeds might blow away their own or be taken by some bird or insect. They’d never be questioned at the crime scene.
Next, came the waiting, another part of the job that he did not mind. He loved to listen to the insects as they became more alive in the night. He found a nice, soft place to hunker down and watch the sky, it was a clear night with a million stars brightly beaming. He had set this job in motion yesterday when he walked over the border and had found three of the kid street vendors that were always around and about selling their Chiclets. He gave them each a new lighter, a handful of bottle rockets and $5 US. He showed them a photo of the target and promised each kid another $20 to be paid tomorrow if they lit their rockets when they saw the old man leave the brothel. The hours went by as he waited to see the purple fireworks in the air. If the children did their part, the target would be driving towards this curve in approximately seventeen minutes. It was a weekday, which helped avoid the party crowd of teens that frequented the bars in Mexico every weekend. That helped minimize the traffic, in four hours only fifteen cars had gone by, that’s fewer than four cars an hour, the odds were good that if he placed his trap up in exactly sixteen minutes after seeing the firecrackers go off, he’d get his man.
While he waited he thought about why this man was his target tonight. He’d been preying on little kids for a long time, using his little dogs and the promise of ice cream to use their innocence against them. He was a very old, feeble looking man, a winter visitor in this town, someone who most people would think was absolutely harmless. Hell, some parents actually encouraged their kids to go with the kind old man. However, he knew better now.
One week ago, one of those parents walked into his shop and asked about buying a used double door refrigerator/freezer, but the look on his face clearly said he was not there to buy a fridge.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
He took this customer into his private office and closed the door. Sure enough, he was not looking to buy anything sold in the store, he wanted a man dead. Occasionally, these requests came his way. It was sort of an open secret in these parts that the man provided a pest removal service of sorts. It was even rumored that the police knew about him and did not care one iota. Anything that made their jobs easier was appreciated, especially given the care that went into making most of the killings look like plain old accidents.
When these jobs came his way, he had only one question he needed the answer to before deciding to take it on…what did they do? He’d look in the customer’s eyes, size them up, and figure if they were lying or telling the truth. Of course, he’d always do a good amount of digging on his own before deciding whether a particular pest needed removing. He understood that even he could be lied to. If he felt the target needed removing, he took the job. If not, he refused and did not worry himself about it a moment further.
Over the past thirty plus years, he’d turned down far more jobs than he’d ever taken. He learned that there were a lot of reasons a person may want another one dead, but one man’s reason might not amount to much compared to a man’s life. Anger, jealousy, and revenge were most often cited as the reasons to seek the man’s professional services, but he found that these reasons were rarely good enough to get him out of bed at night.
The strangest job he never took was to kill a woman who kept stealing a guy’s grapefruits. She’d creep up his back alley and use a little hook to snatch his grapefruits right off of his trees and then run off giggling. Sometimes she’d brazenly use a golf cart and flee the scene with a little honk of her horn.
In any case, unless he deemed the target as truly evil, one who has and will continue to cause pain to those who cannot stop it, he would just say no and walk away. Yet, when he took a job, he’d make sure to get the job done come what may. These jobs became his singular focus until done as cleanly and simply as possible. Most of his targets were never missed, and if they were, what their loved ones did not know couldn’t hurt them. It never mattered that the world knew about the target’s crimes. It was enough for him to know and to make sure they were put to a full stop. Once a job was done, for him it was out of sight, out of mind, no need to ever think about it again. There was just too much still to do, like figure out how to keep his used furniture business in the black without firing any of the help.
His thoughts were interrupted by the distant sound of pops and booms and bright purple lights shooting into the air a few miles away. He started his timer. As minute sixteen approached, he ran out and carefully placed the spike strip and ramp where he’d marked the road with the seeds. When he was sure of their placement, he went back into the bushes across the street from the canal and waited with strong resolve. The world would be free of one old piece of shit in a few minutes, but then the minutes dragged on.
The piece of shit was late. He must have been held up at the border crossing. This happens sometimes with such frequent visitors as the target was. He waited, stoic until after about ten minutes later, headlights appeared. A slight moment of wonder, what if it’s not him? he thought. Nah, it’s the old weasel, he told himself as he got ready for the impact.
In the movies, cars have an annoying habit of exploding on impact. Balls of flame leap toward the sky in dramatic fashion. Reality is much less exciting but far more satisfying. The piece of shit’s car hit the ramp as expected and veered toward the canal. Thankfully, the bastard’s gin-soaked brain hadn’t been working on all cylinders, and he never hit the brakes. Nobody would be wondering why there were only three skid marks on the pavement instead of four. The car, an old gas guzzler with plenty of room in the backseat, was still accelerating as it plowed through the scrub and finally flipped onto its back and slid down the embankment into the waters of the canal.
The man quickly and efficiently collected his tools from the road. He hid them out of sight quickly and ran over towards the wreck. Why bother sneaking? If anybody were to come across the scene, he’d simply be a good samaritan who got there first and was trying to help the poor soul who lost control of his car.
Standing by the side of the water, the man watched. Waiting was his bread and butter. The deed itself never took long, but making sure it was done properly meant lots and lots of waiting. When enough time had passed without any sound coming from the car, no calls for help, no pounding on the door, the man was satisfied that the driver within had fully expired. He’d know for sure when he read about it in the morning paper. The only thing left to do before turning in was to make an anonymous tip to the police from one of the few pay phones left in Arizona as a concerned motorist who thought they may have seen a car in the canal. It just so happened that one of these phones happened to be right outside his favorite greasy spoon about a mile and a half down the road.
Now one last pass to make sure there were no footprints or other incriminating evidence. Once that was done, he hoped back in his truck and it was off to the payphone. The man spared a single look in the rearview mirror before pulling onto the road (he wasn’t really a fan of looking backward) and saw only a roadrunner chomping down on the seeds. It wasn’t often that the man smiled, but this instance was an exception.