Three Shots

Content warning for: murder-for-hire, suicidal themes, abuse, animal death, alcohol usage, adult language …etc.

David sits alone in a dark corner of the bar, right leg jumping, fingers drumming endlessly on the grimy metal table, regardless of the beat of whatever tune blares around him. He doesn’t even notice the bustle of the rest of the night owls who continue lingering as the hours dwindle. His phone rests inches away on the unsavory, sticky table surface - when he isn't constantly checking the otherwise blank screen. He picks absently at the scabbed, split skin on his right thumb from a knife cut he got the week prior.

"Last call!" the bartender suddenly announces, loudly. David's heart pounds, so hard it's painful; he checks his phone again, examining the time in disbelief. He sets it back down, a lump rising in his throat. His brain barely has time to register the barkeep's announcement and the reality of the late hour before his phone lights up again, the vibration rattling his psyche more than his hand, this time from an "unknown" incoming call. But he knows who it is.

He’s been expecting the call.

Dreading it.

Hand shaking, he presses the answer button and accepts the call wordlessly. The voice on the other end of the line is firm and naturally imposing, cutting through the background noise and offering no room to interject. Not that David thinks he could at the moment.

"Last call. Time to get moving. Get it done, or we don't get paid. He asked for you specifically."

The call ends as quickly as it began, leaving David shaking and rattled in a way he hasn't been in decades of his line of work. He rips the loosened scab from his thumb with his teeth; a little pain to help bring him back to himself.

He sulks up to the bar and solemnly orders another cheap German-style beer, sucking the blood from his reopened thumb as he waits to be served, then walks back to his dark corner robotically. He scans the room as he seats himself out of habit, the juxtaposition of the friendly dispositions of the other bar patrons and his nervous brooding starkly contrasted. Fortunately, no one in attendance knows him, or they would know how uncharacteristically nervous he is. He can't even muster the false bravado he usually dons in public...

The choices run through his mind on a loop.

Either he does this job, which he does not want to do, he doesn’t do it and someone else does, or, more likely, she handles things herself. And he doesn’t like a single damn option.

He’s been faced with this type of dilemma before and still pulled the trigger. He’s also been in the unenviable positions of having to kill his brother, his former wife, and a number of friends in his many decades of this type of work - though he purposefully missed one particular friend recently.

Is he getting soft?

No. It’s because it’s her.

David realizes he’s been staring into his beer, and chugs it down before the barkeep closes up for the night.

He takes any available public transports he can take advantage of at the late hour to get as close as he can to the planned execution site, in the mountains. His gear is cached along the way. He’s done this type of thing thousands of times by now…

He pulls a crumpled gum wrapper from his jacket pocket as he rides towards his mark. Opening it, he rereads the initial statement that kicked off this hit, sent by a disgruntled neighbor who wrongfully assumes David and the target had a falling out:

‘She plans to kill me. Kill her first. I will invite her to the following location for execution.’

Below, the very coordinates he heads towards. David’s chest tightens as he re-crumples the wrapper and tucks it away inside his jacket, then pulls out the second message, written on a carefully folded index card.

‘I know he’s hired you to handle me. I will pay you triple his rate if you let me do what I intend - and then still go through with your initial contract. Still cheaper than the hospital bills.’

The next section hits him like a truck, the same way it’s done every time he’s read the note.

‘You know I’m terminal. And it's time - you’ll see. Let me take him out, then put me out of my misery. I want you to do it - or I will. I can't take living with this condition anymore. I’m ready. Just let me handle that bastard first.’

David’s been there. Multiple times. He was lucky enough to survive his own slim-chance medical diagnosis and recover.

But what she has…

There really is no coming back. Hardly any options for staving death off longer that aren’t as bad as the pain of the condition. She’s already faced a slow, painful wait for the mercy of death; this could be one of the few times he has been hired that it would be a mercy.

He gently folds the index card and tucks it into a hidden pocket of his jacket, close to his heart.

He’s experienced the urge to end himself plenty; some during that bad diagnosis, some from when he thinks a little too long and hard about the things he’s done in his lengthy, sordid career. Some when he thinks about the life he could have had with her if he had just… stopped, and opted for that domestic life she had once offered him...

The one that he is still surprised he wants, even though he doesn't think or feel he deserves it.

Years ago, David had slipped through her mountain home's unlocked door to escape poor weather and the men out for his own head at the time, back when he was as likely to be a mark as he was to be the hired hitman. It looked empty at a glance, but as soon as he was inside, he realized the home was not abandoned. Blackout curtains hid the faint lights inside. Heavy incense burned, thick and fresh. Haunting music played over the thunderous sound of a filling bathtub.

He risked getting caught, but he snuck past the bathroom door, slightly ajar. He was making his way towards the back door, out through the kitchen, but he had to cross the hallway beside the occupied room.

David couldn’t resist looking to make sure the occupant didn’t see him as he slipped across the partially open door. And, admittedly, he was a little curious about the occupant once he saw inside the home; odd trinkets and various specimens decorated the main rooms, including a set of earrings hosting what he later found out were the woman’s wisdom teeth displayed at what he would consider a type of altar.

Peering in, candlelight and swirling projector lights illuminated an otherwise dark bath. Quite literally; the water was jet black and fragranced like the heavy incense. None of it felt imposing - quite the opposite. It felt warm. Almost welcoming of the enveloping darkness and heaviness. The music, however, sent chills down his spine.

And there she was. Late thirties, early forties, he guessed, though mostly she was obscured. David looked in just as she had gotten comfortable in the black water and was turning off the tap. A glass of wine rested on the ledge.

David had stopped, frozen, heart dropped, as his step caused a floorboard to creak. The woman didn't react much, though, eyes closed as she leaned back into the warmth of that blackened water, her back to him and the hallway. Instead, she called out, calm.

"Fishy? Come here, baby."

Suddenly, a swift, black shape moved close by David's feet: a black cat with a twice-broken tail trotted over, hopped onto the cleared bathtub ledge, and perched there. The cat began purring and nuzzling the woman with unrestrained affection as the woman likewise lavished the feline with loving praise, unaware of the intrusion.

"There's my kitten! Kitty-kitty Catfish; the itty-bitty bratfish!" the woman sang the rhyme like it was a ritual; David had to bite back a sudden laugh at the cute nonsense as the woman further continued to serenade the cat with off-key caterwauling; she appeared to already be a few glasses of wine in. He then quickly made his way out the back door, unnoticed.

That had been the encounter that had hooked him, and it left him with an odd feeling. A longing; an envy. An enchantment, he even wagered.

He had sought shelter in a dilapidated shack a few miles away and spent a wet, sleepless night there through the storm. That feeling didn't settle, though, and he spent most of the night trying to riddle out just what he was feeling and why. He was seldom rattled, but the encounter shook something loose. Something he didn't like to admit, even to himself.

He was jealous - of the cat.

Jealous that that cat could freely expect affection. Envious of the loving praise the woman smothered the cat with. Of the domestic normalcy that nonchalantly intertwined itself with the woman's darker tastes.

The domestic bond David had with his former wife had been a sham; she had been a traitor, marrying him only to betray him later. A long con; one that ended when David confronted her - and killed her in self defense.

He told himself that, because of the type of man he was, he didn't deserve the domestic life. Didn't deserve softness. That no one could live domestically with his inner darkness.

But she not only accepted darkness; she opened her arms to it and welcomed it like a good friend. Lavished affections on what many would consider a symbol of bad luck and received affections from it in return. Housed unsettling specimens and built shrines to bones and hides and natural decay.

David wished, so badly, that he might be embraced with such admiration as that woman held for that cat. He wanted gentleness and vulnerability, no matter how much he denied himself that fact.

When he did dream that night, finally, he dreamt of sharing that bath with the woman, chest to chest, his head resting against her collarbone while she ran her hands over his head and shoulders the way she had the cat's. Slow. Gentle. Domestic.

David had returned to her home the next day. He told himself it was to make sure the bounty hunters hadn't followed him there to the hermit's sanctuary. That he'd just check the surrounding ground and leave.

Of course, that's not how it went.

A neighbor caught sight of him; an older man who invited him to shower and eat and who teased him about being one of the woman's "strays". David almost turned him down, but his outfit did need cleaning after his mad dashes through the muddy forest the nights prior. When the stew was eaten and dishes washed, the neighbor revealed that the hermit woman often brought him stew on rainy days and asked David to return the clean dishes, a knowing glint in his eye.

David had reluctantly returned the dishes, hoping seeing the home and woman in the daylight would dispel his infatuation.

It didn't. Far from it.

Over the course of a few weeks, he stayed and bonded with the woman and her cat. He told himself it was the bad weather that made him stay, even as he found himself as worked up as an adolescent around her. Despite their growing closeness, they never exchanged names then. It had been one of the draws of the arrangement; she didn’t question his darkness, just made room for it at her table and couch, all parties unnamed.

Eventually, they became intimate.

In time, the weather cleared. David had no further excuses to stay; nothing good to offer the woman. Only trouble.

Like the head hunters who came looking for him, who attacked the woman and her cat after he left. David made sure they paid for it personally, but the incident only proved to him that he couldn't have that domestic life, no matter how much either of them might have wanted it.

He'd returned, time and again, as the years passed. A week here, a week there; small reprieves that both nourished him and wasted him.

He hadn’t been back in two years.

David arrives at a secondary shack on her property around 4 A.M. He finds a warm bath drawn for him and a hot meal cooling in the oven; just how she has always done for him ever since he spent that first week gathering wood in the storm.

Like nothing has changed.

Except that David is to execute her in three hours…

A long list of disputes arose when the old neighbor passed away and his nephew moved in. He put up high fencing that blocked views the woman had enjoyed for years. He complained to the county about the hermit's well-kept livestock. Cut her laundry line down multiple times. And he generally made disgusting comments about and to the woman, even spitting on and hitting her in a few instances.

Even after she fell so ill, the younger man continued his petty disputes, going so far as to unlawfully claim her property as part of his own, hoping to dig up the space for metals and hunt the creatures the woman had fed for decades. He has since dug up her herb garden out of spite and killed a family of foxes who had visited the hermit for three generations.

That is why David assumes the woman wishes to end him; he is a menace to the land she's loved. And once she is gone, no one will stop him.

David bathes while the water is still warm, soaking in guilt as much as he is in soap. When he dresses and exits, he finds her sitting at the kitchen table, bottle of whiskey and shot glasses set.

She’s a shadow of what she used to be. Gaunt and emaciated beneath her favorite black dress. Her body trembles involuntarily as she pours the shots - muscle spasms that have only gotten worse with time. She does her best to hide to pained grimaces that arise.

David doesn’t even recognize his own voice when he speaks, words cracking around the sudden, painful lump in his throat. He downs his shot to cover it up, once the lump has ebbed enough.

“You should have told me sooner. I would have come. I would have taken care of you through this…”

She shrugs with a small, broken smile. Even in his own mind, it’s easier to keep her nameless. It’s how they’ve always been.

“I couldn’t let you do that…” she replies softly. Immediately, she breaks into a long, hard coughing fit.

“So, what was the final straw? With him? Why now, when you’re… like this?” David asks, handing her a glass of water as he plates himself up the food from the oven. She ignores the water and pours another round of shots.

Her face hardens; darkens with such ferocity, David nearly forgets the woman is on death’s doorstep.

“I’ll show you after you eat,” she answers venomously.

David savors his meal; meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Comforting and familiar. When he’s finished, the hermit leads him down a thin path through the woods to an old, overgrown garden she always meant to fix up but never got around to, bottle in hand.

David sees the small, fresh mound before he even notices the headstone.

Catfish.

David’s chest tightens realizing the cat - the woman’s most loyal and loving companion - is gone. They finish the whiskey straight from the bottle.

“He killed her. Shot her when she was following me out to the laundry line three weeks ago… It wasn't clean...”

David stares at the headstone quietly, rage growing to a boil. All of the nephew’s attacks had pissed him off, but knowing how much Catfish meant to the woman…

“I should have put a round in his skull the first week he arrived and I found out he hit you…” David mutters bitterly.

“I’ll do it today,” she replies, matter-of-fact, “And then…”

“…What if I can’t do it?” David’s asks, voice hardly a whisper. He can't even look at her.

“I’ll do that too, if I have to. I know it’s unfair of me to have asked you…”

She turns to face him, hands cradling the back of his skull as she pulls him down for a long, lingering kiss.

“He’ll be here soon. You should get ready. Leave my body for the forest.” she states, smoothing out her black dress as she heads to meet her neighbor one more time.

They all take their places. The neighbor arrives, feigning remorse for killing Catfish, even as he glances behind them, where he knows David is positioned. The woman’s hand dances along the weapon David watches her pull from folds in her dress. David takes a deep, steadying breath as he takes aim, the heaviness silencing everything.

Shots ring out in short order.

First one.

A short pause.

Two.

Three.

Thank you for reading! Here is the associated playlist for this piece.

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Other recommended dark fiction pieces by me, all equally, if not more, brutal and graphic as this piece:

“Unwise Gossip”

“Jaguar Eyes” *Personal favorite that hardly gets views.

“Swallowed Screams Aboard the Screaming Agony” **Written before proper content warnings were available on Vocal: this is arguably my most brutal fiction piece on the platform to date! Reader beware!