Untitled, chapter one, part one

(Note to reader: this is only a rough draft. I will edit this many times before I start chapter two.)

I sat in silence amidst the contents of an oversize shoe closet. Soon enough, Maria Canters would pass by, but I never call her that. As an assassin, I cannot afford the emotional attatchment that names invariably come with. Rather, I just call her, "the mark". Up to this point, I had done nothing wrong--I rigged the cameras to freeze and even relocked the door to reduce suspicion.

She would be home in only four minutes, and would immediately go upstairs with one of her two bodyguards. The other would go to the fridge and grab a can of beer for her.

As the seconds ticked by, I clenched my Glock C17 tighter. It's custom made silencer provided me little comfort. Why did I accept a mere fifty thousand dollars for such a consequential mark? After pulling this off, though, I would become the most well-known hit-man on the market. Canters was the head researcher for a special branch of the government whose sole task was to find and quietly take out modern criminal masterminds, like myself. Taking her down would mean instant notoriety.

Finally, a key began to fumble in the lock. The door opened, and two pairs of feet shuffled up the stairs. The remaining bodyguard went to the fridge, as planned, and got a can of beer. This was the point of no return.

In front of my steel toe boot was a wine glass I had stolen from her cupboard. I raised my gun. As his footsteps came and went, I smashed my foot against the glass.

"What the heck was that?" he sighed. That was enough. I had been given ample opportunity to analyze the location from which his voice was coming, and I adjusted my aim accordingly. The door swung open. Bang, bang. The first shot, which went through his throat as planned, was enough to kill him, but he would have had to have bled out, which was far too time consuming for my purposes. I had taken the second shot before he even hit the ground, and my amazing reflexes allowed me to nail his moving head right between the eyes.

The clock was now ticking, and I would have to kill the other bodyguard along with the mark before they realized that the first bodyguard was missing. This is where things got tricky. Routines had made it exceptionally easy for me to take out this man, but the only thing I knew about the others was that they were upstairs.

I took each stair slowly, fully aware that some of them creaked. I peered around the corner to see what was going on. The remaining bodyguard was reading a magazine outside one of the doors. Unfortunately, clear as my shot was then, it would appear that the mark was just inside the door that the bodyguard was sitting by, in which case the sound of the bodyguard dropping to the floor would alert her.

I would have to bring him closer to me. An idea flashed into my head, but quickly disappeared as I heard the mark begin to speak.

"Where's my beer?" she asked. In under a second, the bodyguard dropped the magazine which he had been reading, stood up, and cocked his gun to go downstairs, but I had already made it safely to the bathroom, conveniently located right across the hall from the top of the steps. Since he was the last bodyguard, I had more time to deal with him. As he rounded the corner from which I had been peering, I shot him twice: once on each side of his spine, below his ribs but above his hips.

In so doing, I failed to hit a bone, and therefore left less evidence for the police to use. As a matter of fact, once I burned the house down, there would be no sign that he was even shot, because all that will be left over will be bones. I could count on this because of the size of the potential fire. It would be so hot inside the building that all flesh would literally melt.

However, I wanted him dead quickly, so I had to do more damage than that. I shook my left arm. Out of my sleeve came a long knife, with which I stabbed the arteries in both of his arms. It wouldn't be long before he bled to death.

Canters was the last one left. When I arrived at the door that the bodyguard had been reading outside of, the sound of fingers clacking away at a keyboard whispered to me. I laid down on the floor, feet towards the door, which was open a quarter of an inch. A peek under it told me that she was facing away from me and was about fifteen feet away from the barrel of the gun.

I used this information to calculate where I should aim. I lashed out with my foot, swinging the door open, and shot her in the same two spots as I had shot the last bodyguard. Since she passed out immediately, I didn't need to sever an artery. I was only here to retrieve a flash drive and leave her dead. It would not matter that she would likely wake up before she dies. The contents of the flash drive (which was politely left in the computer tower for me to steal) would have ruined me, my client, and all other major league criminals in America.

After pocketing it, I carried the bodies of the mark and the second bodyguard to the third floor, where it would appear that they simply could not have made their way out of the building before it burned. Tired, I used the last bit of my energy to place them in a position which would seem natural for someone to fall into after burning to death.

The first bodyguard was different, though. Since I had shot him in the head and it hit bone, it would be a red flag to the police, screaming out to them that this was murder. But if his body were never to be found, they could not eliminate him as a suspect even if they did come to the conclusion it was arson. I would have to hide his body, but before that, I had to get him out to the van, so I radioed my client.

"Mark down, flag captured, but I need help carrying out a body."

"I'll be in in a second."

We took the body outside together, and I loaded it into the trunk myself while he returned to the driver's seat.

"I'll be back," I said aloud. I had everything set up, but I still had to start the fire. This was the part that I spent the most time planning. It had to look like an accident. I returned to the second floor office in which I found the mark to find a paperclip, then promptly made my way back to the first floor kitchen, knowing it was only a matter of time before she woke up.

After bending the paperclip into the precise shape I needed, I hesitated but then shoved it into a wall socket so that the ends went one into each hole and turned away. My insulated gloves would keep me from being electrocuted, and my leather jacket kept my torso from being burned, but a few stray sparks still hit the back of my neck.

Regardless of my injuries, it had caught the carpet on fire almost instantly, and my only remaining job was to get out alive. As I ran to the van, I was extremely grateful that the mark had chosen to live in the middle of a large wooded area where no one could watch me leave--the only downside to this was that we would have to escape before the trees caught fire and we were engulfed in flames. But that would require several setbacks to keep us there long enough.

As I sat down in the passenger seat and turned to face my client, I immediately recognized the famed Colt .45 that was staring me in the eyes. Being far from proffessional, he had failed to use a silencer, so even if I wrangled the gun from his hands, I couldn't use it for fear that someone would hear it go off.

"Hand me the flash drive," he whispered.

There was a loud shatter followed by a whoosh. When I turned to see the house, the entire first floor and parts of the second were on fire. The only quick way out was to pretend to cooperate, but I had a gut feeling that he was feeling anxious--and therefore trigger happy--with the house burning down so rapidly.

"Okay." I lowered my right hand into my jacket pocket, at the same time shaking my left arm ever so gently so that he did not notice the knife drop. I continued fumbling in my pocket to keep him distracted while I brought the knife around and stabbed him in the wrist, just below his palm. This caused him to drop the gun and within seconds I had shot him in the heart.

In the brief moment between the time that I pulled the trigger on my Glock, which he never even saw me pull out, and the time that the bullet hit the artery, I saw something in his eyes. It wasn't him that wanted me dead. I could tell by the regret that showed so well on his face. At least I knew who he represented.

Before I had any time to further evaluate what had just happened, the flames reached the garage and a car exploded. It took me ninety seconds to move his body to the middle row and start the van. At this point, not only was the house on fire but the first leaves were igniting too. I would have to have been a fool not to know that the leaves would catch more quickly than everything else. As a result, I would have to maintain excellent control of the van as I sped along the gravel road, one side walled by trees, the other a near vertical hill of about thirty feet.
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An hour later, I was sitting at my dinner table. The girl who sat across from me had always seemed so superhuman to me. The way her black hair waves just before it tumbles over her shoulder and comes slowly to a stop about four inches later. Her light blue eyes were so mesmerizing that when our eyes meet, she can hypnotize me just like that. her lips were so intoxicating that a kiss goodbye could leave me with the hangover of a twelve pack of beer, but a kiss good night was just enough to feel the buzz. Her face almost as round as the Earth was my whole world.

But whenever I looked in the mirror I would remember how different we were. Even though I was 23, exactly one year older than she, I still looked 16 with my pale skin and swooping black bangs that so many people associate with being 'emo'. I had my share of scars, but they came from my line of work, not from attempts to inflict harm on myself. The most noticeable scar was the semicircle chunk of my earlobe that a stray bullet took with it.

On that night, I had been working with an inexperienced partner. In the near black of the night, I signaled him with a flash light. Completely on edge, he took a shot at the light, which narrowly missed my head from about a hundred yards, but the bullet managed to take out a piece of my ear. By taking that shot, he had alerted the enemy and also forced me to take to flight. They soon caught up with him, took him into custody, and killed him.

Despite differences on the outside, I married hope because of what was on the inside. We both had a deep loathing for the world, and we shared a passion for silence.

As a matter of fact, we rarely spoke when we were together, because, as outsiders, language meant very little to us. Although we enjoyed each other's company, no one could guess it because we never spoke or even smiled when we were in the company of anyone other than a colleague of mine.

To be continued...
(Note: this is not the end of chapter one.)