So Long, Farewell, Adieu...
-
A S/Sgt. Janer Tale
Chapter 5 – There Ain't No Justice
"Mr
Hernandez? Mr Ernesto Javier Hernandez
Ibarra?"
"Wh-Who
the fuck are you?! What are you doing in
my office?! Where's my-" The
somewhat short, balding, and overweight fellow bellowing the demands slapped a
hand down on the intercom buzzer on his desk, "Janice! Janice!
Where the hell is Miquel?"
"Janice
is peacefully asleep, Mr Hernandez, slumped over her desk and, for now,
blissfully unaware that we are having this conversation. She'll have a stinking headache when she
wakes up but I rather think that's a lot better than the alternative options I
had at my disposal. Speaking of which,
Miquel will not be joining us." Her
tone was even, her manner polite, her stance relaxed. None of this served to help Mr Hernandez
relax. Maybe that she was sitting in his
desk chair with a semi-automatic pistol laid on the desk before her had something
to do with this. But then, Ernesto
looked like a guy who was pretty stressed and agitated at the best of times.
"You killed Miquel?" He stopped
looking desperately around the room and focused entirely on the well-dressed
woman seated in his expensive, genuine leather desk chair. If she'd killed Miquel, then that probably
meant she wasn't anything to do with that rat-fuck Jimmy. Jimmy's goons never hurt Ernesto's
employees, just Ernesto himself. And
Miquel knew that getting in the way of Jimmy's boys was a suicide move. Ernesto didn't begrudge him his
self-preservation - he hired the muscly dumb-fuck to look imposing and,
primarily, to drive him places, not to take a bullet for him.
"No,
I rather think gravity and the concrete beneath your lobby's balcony window did
that. I just gave him the impetus. But I'm not here to talk about the late
Miquel, or about the sleeping beauty outside your office door. I'm here, and talking to you, because my
employer made it explicitly clear that you were to be fully aware of your
impending death, and also of the reason for your death’s impendency." A
chubby hand wiped over thinning hair and Ernesto gulped before taking several
stuttering starts at speech. Eventually,
he garnered enough control over his vocal chords and quivering lips to get something
coherent out.
"What? You're gonna kill me? Why? I
ain't done nothing wrong! I'm just a
businessman! Okay, so not a very
successful one, but Jesus I ain't a bad guy!" She sighed, a mixture of boredom and
disappointment. They always said it -
the ones who got the chance, anyway. Oh please, I'm not a bad guy! I've done nothing wrong! Don't kill me! As if they seriously expected her to go Oh, you're right, you're entirely nice and
innocent; sorry to have troubled you!
Sure, there were one or two who'd just nodded quietly and closed their
eyes as they awaited that final, terminal moment, but most blubbered and
begged. It was so damned
undignified. Whatever they'd been in
life, she always hoped that people could at least be graceful and noble in
death. Last chance, after all. She glanced over at the corner of the desk to
her left, just behind a stack of "Payment Due!" letters, then picked
up the box of tissues she'd espied and threw it to him. Startled, and nearly dropping it, Ernesto
gave a tiny nod of automatic thanks and grabbed a couple of tissues to mop at
the sweat on his jowly, moustachioed face.
"You've
cheated on all three of your wives and you never pay your alimony money; you've
twice paid for your secretary, Janice, to have an abortion, against her wishes;
you owe a lot of people a lot of money, and some of them aren't even crooked;
you haven't spoken to your eldest son, Rafael, since the night he tearfully
came out to you and you threw him out of the house; and when you were fourteen
years old you masturbated over your sleeping younger sister and until just now
you didn't think anyone ever found out."
He stood stock-still, tissue box hanging limply in one hand and the
other frozen halfway to his face, clutching a wad of damp tissue. He didn't say a word, but his expression said
everything. "You are definitely not a decent guy, and I would go so far
as to say that you are, by and large, a dishonest and extremely unpleasant man
who has dubious personal hygiene standards.
But that doesn't mean you deserve to die." There was a look of relief on the man's face,
as optimism and hope surfaced against all the odds. "No, I'm going to kill you for something
that, really, isn't even your fault," and back beneath the waves of despair
sank that brief glimpse of hope, "and something that I cannot in all
honesty blame you for. Four years ago,
you lost control of your car, a battered 1986 Buick LeSabre Coupé. The car was in poor repair because you
couldn't afford to go to a mechanic, the brakes failed on a rainy night, and
your car didn't stop in time to prevent the death of a seven year-old boy
called James Hannah. The jury found you
to be not guilty of dangerous driving, and ruled young James' death a tragic
accident that nobody could be blamed for.
Frank Hannah, James' father, felt otherwise, and spent the following
years saving up enough money to go to my employer and pay for my services."
"But...! You said it yourself! It was an accident!" The tissue box fell
to the floor, and so did the sweating and rightly terrified Mr Hernandez as he
went down on both knees before the
suited young lady sitting where his butt had made itself comfy for a fairly
significant portion of the past few years.
"I
did. And if it were my call, I would not
even be here this evening. But it's not
my call, so I am. And, please, don't
beg, or try to reason with me, or offer to double whatever I'm being paid. I wouldn't be a very good assassin if I was
so easily swayed, would I? Now, before I
end this, is there anything you'd like to say?" His tanned, rounded, and fat-creased face
looked up to her, pleading in his tear-wetted eyes. "It won't make a difference to the
outcome - at some point in the next couple of minutes you're going to be
fatally shot. But everyone's entitled to
a last few words." His shoulders
sagged, his face fell, and Ernesto Hernandez looked at the worn, faded, and
grimy carpet of his small, dingy office.
"I..."
He looked out of the window; the sun was starting to set over the bay - the
view was the only thing that made this office worth the rent. Someone, somewhere, was having their first
cocktail of the evening. Ernesto looked
again to the person who would be his killer. "Tell Janice I'm sorry. For everything. Tell her I know she's been stealing small
amounts from me; I never said anything because I... okay, I don't love her but I, y'know, I care for her. A bit.
She's put up with a lot of shit for me.
From me. I'd have been fucked
without her. Tell her that the rest of
my money is hers. She knows where I keep
it. Hell, she might as well have the
car, too; not like I can leave it to Miquel.
An' tell Mr Hannah that I'm sorry about his son. It was an accident, but it was still my fault. Hey, if I could go back, I woulda walked home that day. So just... just tell him I'm sorry,
kay?" She nodded once, politely,
and continued to sit there, clearly not in a rush.
"Is
that everything?" A hand hinted towards the chunky grey/black gun on the
desk and two slightly bloodshot brown eyes followed the movement.
"Yeah. Just don't shoot me in the face. I'm an ugly sunnuva bitch, I know, but my
mama would wanna see me one last time before she said goodbye. " Another
nod, and then she stood slowly from the leather chair, brushed a crease out of
the leg of her pinstripe suit trousers, and picked up the gun from the desk.
"Understandable,"
she took a suppressor from an inside pocket of her tailored jacket and screwed
it onto the end of the pistol's barrel, "This won't hurt, Mr
Hernandez. Close your eyes." Ernesto closed his eyes, never to open them
again, and two muffled whispers followed immediately after. His body barely shook from the close-range
impacts and, after a few moments, the late Ernesto Javier Hernandez Ibarra fell
slowly sideways to land with a quiet, corpulent thud onto the floor of his
office. Were his eyes still open, and
had there been life left to see through them, Ernesto would have watched the
sun kiss the ocean one last time.
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Janice
Ridley (née Simmons; she'd kept her husband's name even after divorcing his
drunken arse) opened her eyes and immediately regretted it as two cold bolts of
pain shot through her temples.
Whimpering quietly and screwing her eyes to slits, and even then peering
between the fingers of her left hand, she stumbled to her feet and staggered
over to the window for her "office", yanking the blinds shut. Leaning against the wall for support, she
moved her hand to her mouth as a wave of nausea courses through her, and
successfully fought back the urge to expel her supper onto the floor. Jesus, what the fuck had happened? Groggy as all hell, she made her way back to
her desk and collapsed into her chair as she waited for the fog and dizziness
to pass, or at least fade to something she could cope with. Right now was like all her worst hangovers
rolled into one, and without even the decency of having had fun earning
them.
As her
vision swam in and out of focus, she noticed an envelope on her desk, left open
so that the lip acted as a stand, and with something written on the back. It took a little effort and time, but she
managed to decipher the blurry symbols enough to realise it was her name. One hand clinging onto her chair's arm as if
life depended on it, she reached unsteadily forward to take the envelope, and
pull out its contents. The very effort
of focusing her eyes made them hurt even more, but she persevered, and slowly
made sense out of the contents of the hand-written note. Whoever had written it, they could have
benefitted from some penmanship lessons, but the writing was intelligible and
large enough for her to just about read, even in her state.
She
read it, at length, and then read it again.
It was from Ernie, but it wasn't his handwriting, and it wasn't his
signature. Heck, didn't look like
anyone's signature, just a single letter - "T". Janice set the letter down, puzzled, then
looked over to the door to Ernie's office.
*********************************************************************************
The
scream was heard from across the narrow harbour, and the few people enjoying
cocktails at the outside tables of the Tiki bar looked up from their drinks in
surprise. All except for one, who simply
nodded, took a sip of her drink, and then tucked a twenty dollar bill
underneath the glass before getting up and exiting the bar, straightening the
jacket of her pinstripe suit as she went.
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