Nerve Endings

Ken and Danny were hired killers and were pretty decent at their job. They were given a name, and they more often than not delivered a body. Obviously, the world of contract killing has its ups and downs, and there were always variables that would come up, but Ken and Danny could handle those instances in a professional manner. This is what made them valuable to their boss.

This current job, to kill a junkie and a thief named Cliff, looked to be an easy gig. They had Cliff’s address, a camera-phone picture of the man’s face, they knew he hadn’t left the apartment in almost six days, and they had been given a reliable tip that Cliff would be so goddamn high he’d be nearly comatose. Easy pickings. Now, as pros, Ken and Danny had their faces covered with masks as they entered the apartment building, and instead of taking the elevator, they took the stairs. There were cameras in the stairwells too, but the balaclavas they wore took care of that. Ken walked a little hunched over to conceal his six-feet-three. Danny didn’t have that problem, he was short, like Danny DeVito short. He sometimes wore lifts to make himself taller.

They casually walked down the hallway towards Cliff’s apartment, 3A. The hallway was filthy, garbage was strewn all over the place like someone had punctured a garbage bag and held a ticker-tape parade with its contents. Ken stood in front of door 3A, and with a final glance, pulled out his pistol. At the end of the hall, keeping a watch on the stairs and the elevator doors, Danny nodded, producing his own pistol.

Ken pulled back his leg and gave the flimsy wooden door a solid kick next to the cheap handle with a steel-toed boot. The door burst inwards with a bang. Ken glanced down at Danny, who gave him a shoulder shrug and a “what the hell?” gesture with his hands, obviously upset about the noise. Ken was already inside, though, not wanting to lose the element of surprise.

Not that it really mattered, because there was next to no movement in the apartment. It was small, dingy, dark, and smelled like rotting food and human waste. Ken wished his mask had a filter. He heard movement behind him as Danny followed him in, closing the broken door as best he could. Ken was covering the area with his pistol, nerves on high alert. He stepped further into the apartment and saw a body on the couch. He kept his pistol trained, stepping through the old takeout cartons and pizza boxes. The small coffee table on front of the couch was covered in drugs, both old and new from the way it looked. In short, the place was a mess.

Danny found a light switch and flicked it on, and they saw the full state of the apartment. It was worse than it smelled. But that wasn’t the concern, the concern was now the person lying on the couch. It was an emaciated-looking man wearing soiled jeans and a stained wifebeater t-shirt. Ken produced his phone, turning it on with one thumb and pulling up the picture of Cliff. He kept his gun trained on the body, held the phone next to the man’s face. He looked over at Danny, who was doing a quick sweep of the place (quick was the optimum word since it was such a small enclosure.) “Got him,” Ken said quietly.

He prodded the man with the barrel of the pistol, checking to see if he was already dead or not, but Cliff moaned softly and shifted his weight. Ken poked him again. One of his eyes fluttered open briefly, and Ken saw that Cliff was cataclysmically high. “Hey,” Ken said.

No response. Ken pushed the barrel of the gun a little harder into his cheek, and his eyes opened. “Whoryuh?” He said.

“We’re here for Mr. Shadrach,” Ken said, quietly, keeping his voice level and calm. At the mention of the boss’s name, Cliff regained a little more consciousness.

“Shadrrrrkk…” he mumbled.

Ken lightly slapped his face. “C’mon. Pay attention. You know Mr. Shadrach?”

Cliff started to nod off again, and Ken motioned to Danny, who was standing behind the couch. Danny reached down and grabbed Cliff by the chin and hoisted him into a sitting position. Cliff weakly batted a hand and said “Nurrf.”

Ken waved his free hand in front of Cliff’s face to get his attention. When he thought he had it, he held up the pistol. “You made a mistake, Cliff. You stole from the wrong man.”

Cliff started to droop again and Danny grabbed him by the throat, propping him up. Ken kept speaking. “I can assume the money isn’t here, right? It’s in your arm?”

Cliff licked his dry, chapped lips, struggling to find the strength to speak. “Bedroom.”

Ken raised an eyebrow under his mask. “Really.” He gestured for Danny to stay with Cliff, and he went into the bedroom, which stank even worse than the rest of the apartment. The bedroom was nothing more than a mattress and a blanket on the floor. Ken kicked some trash out of his way, saw more drug works, shook his head disdainfully, and started moving some of the garbage around with the barrel of the gun before he found a box the size of a shoebox under a heap of what appeared to have once been football jerseys but looked more like the bedding you’d put in a hamster cage.

Ken knelt and removed the lid from the box. In it, indeed, was money, stacks of banded bills that probably amounted to close to $20,000, the amount stolen from Mr.Shadrach. But sitting on top of the money was a little black book. Ken picked up the black book and opened it.

Danny, in the living room, was trying his best to keep Cliff in an upright bipedal stance, but the man’s spine had turned to sponge and he kept trying to lay down, even as Danny slapped him harder and harder in the face to wake him up. Danny only glanced up when Ken re-entered the room from the bedroom. “He’s nodding so bad, I can’t hardly keep him awake,” Danny said, not noticing Ken aiming his pistol at the both of them.

The gunshot was so loud that Danny stumbled backwards, feeling the warmth of Cliff’s blood as it spattered across his balaclava, some droplets striking him through the openings at his nose and mouth. Cliff’s body pitched forward, a small entry wound on the back of his head and a smoking, gaping, fist-sized hole in the front. Danny looked up, and watched as Ken pulled off his own balaclava, his eyes wide, staring straight ahead in what Danny had heard called ‘the thousand yard stare’.

“Ken?” Danny said, and without moving his eyes, Ken turned the gun and shot Danny in the face, blowing him backwards, sprawling across the filth on the floor. Ken then turned, rather jerkily, towards the door, walking on legs that didn’t want to bend, moving like a cheaply animated cartoon.

Ken made his way stiffly down the stairs, gun in one hand, little black book in the other, and emerged into the cool night air, still moving like a baby giraffe just learning to walk. He made his way to the end of the street towards the bus station, where he awkwardly sat on the bench, still staring straight ahead, eyes wide, unblinking. In his right hand, the gun. In his left, the little black book, which was open to the first page, and if you were to be so brave as to approach this catatonic, gun-wielding individual, you’d see a list of names amongst gibberish scrawls and drawings so vile you’d want to boil your own eyes to cleanse them.

The list of names, written in what looked to be a child’s hand and surrounded by archaic, ancient text, read:

CLIFF

DANNY

MR. SHADRACH

KEN

Ken clutched the little black book to his chest, knowing he only had one more stop to make before he could end all of it.