Get away from yourself
The automated curtains parted at seven on the dot. Soft daylight glowed through the smart blinds, falling on the straight planes and polished surfaces of the wide master bedroom. A laptop shined its log-in screen on a corner end table. The wall-mounted TV displayed weather forecasts, market prices, and email notifications in a tight grid. Bright mirror-reflected light and radiant steam poured in from the open bathroom. The shower died and a gymnast-bodied blonde marched out, throwing a towel around her glistening body.
In the back corner of the walk-in closet, she found a dark leather motorcycle outfit, just barely broken in by a few casual night rides. It was the only thing not fit for a senior staff meeting or an all-management cocktail party. She knew that the person who owned it had been dreaming for years of throwing it on in the dead of night, setting the rest of the clothes on fire, and shooting off down the interstate to anywhere else.
Today was the first day of a two-week vacation, she was as single as anyone could be, there wasn’t a friend in her life she didn’t cc on company emails, and her family, what little of it there was, had long since gotten used to her months of silence and excused absences from all the usual get-togethers.
Lindsey laid the memories away like the corpse of a loved one, and got dressed.
The house was all glaring white walls and polished concrete. Everything in the kitchen retracted into the counters or hid in seamless cabinets. The fridge flashed push notifications as she filled the last wine glass from the rack with ultra-filtered water. In the den, with its enclosed bookcases, exposed beams, and marble fireplace, the other glasses reflected tinted daylight through syrupy slivers of Boudreaux onto the wide flat coffee table and ring of couches, where someone who was almost Lindsey had spent the evening “celebrating”.
A thick manilla envelope stuck out of the mail slot, double sealed with tape and urgent markings. She ripped it in half, enjoying the orange specks that fluttered everywhere, and took out her new phone, the earbuds, a set of motorcycle keys, and her Walther PPQ sub-compact. From half a life away, her teacher reminded her “Every second awake in this place without a gun in hand is time you’re offering up to someone else.”
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
She smiled and put the pistol in her jacket pocket. He had been from that age, somewhere between five and twenty-five years ago, depending on who you asked, where “If you lasted a day in the Hardworlds, you were steamrolling through the gig.”
She raked her eyes over the house one last time and wished that glares could tarnish, then left it all behind with a goodbye door slam that clashed against the atmosphere of not just the house, but the whole god damned neighborhood.
The front lawn was a half-circle of razor-cut zoysia grass with a great sugar maple at the center, surrounded by a crescent-shaped pebble-paved driveway. Shrubs and flowers posed in their beds over lava rocks that crunched under her boots as she cut a direct path to the portable storage pod sitting halfway up one side of the driveway. She opened it with one of the keys, flicked on a hanging bulb, and closed the door behind her.
She threw off the motorcycle cover like it was Christmas. Suzuki Hayabusa, all black, full helmet on top. She squeezed the handlebar and let her heart jump around a bit before moving to the rest of it.
A backpack, a purse, and a plate carrier hung on the wall. Inside the backpack was her custom Galil ACE in .300 blk, with a suppressor, two sights, white and IR lights, and eight mags, all secured in the custom interior. The purse had three mags for her PPQ, a decoy phone, a pocket drone in a faux makeup case, medkit, bump keys, monocular NVG, and other various tools of the trade. She put the low-profile plate on under her jacket, slipped one of the pistol mags in her other pocket, and locked the purse in the seat compartment.
She opened the pod and hit the street at forty mph. For half a mile, she thought about nothing but the electric morning feeling that always accompanied the first few hours of a job. When it had settled in her toes and floated in her lungs, she got to work.
“Call HQ.”
The earbuds chimed twice.
“Morning,” said EP
It had taken EP less than two hours to wake up, get settled in, and locate the target. She wasted no time checking that Lindsey had dropped in clean and sending her the address. Another job that seemed too simple to be true. They had his name and POE, and the rest was surely being scraped into EPs files and databases like so much icing on the proverbial cake. It beat spending days dropped in, staking out old addresses and harassing exes, or waiting for Celeste and Klara to skim enough from some wet dream to put a profile together.
A voice in the back of her mind reminded her.
“It’s never that simple, darling.”