The Dragons of Styx

by John E. Siers

  “Truth is,” Lisa said, “we don’t do relationships very well, either, except with each other. We hardly ever go out—we live, work, and play inside this building. We have no close friends. Few people ever see our offices and business space—except clients, and they don’t usually live to tell about it.

  “We occasionally get together with Jay and Nydia for dinner or drinks outside the office, and I guess we could call them friends, but they’re also business associates. Sometimes Mark goes out for beers with Jay—the ‘brothers-in-arms’ thing military veterans do—but for the most part it’s just Mark and Lisa, snug and cozy in our little dragon’s den.

  “But with you…don’t know why, but we just hit it right off. We’re connected somehow, and maybe that’s why you were able to ‘wake us up’ last night when you needed us.”

  “Hey,” Mark wore a broad grin, “maybe you’re a baby dragon who just hasn’t hatched yet. Mommy and Daddy had to come and protect the egg from that nasty old chupacabra.”

  “Uh…” Waters’ jaw dropped, and she stared at Mark with a stunned expression. “I couldn’t be…I never…I…” Her voice trembled as she protested.

  “Relax, Spark. I was kidding…I think.”

  “Who knows?” Lisa gave Sparkling a serious and thoughtful look. “Strange things have happened here at the Ferry, and last night was about the strangest.”

  “Anyway, it’s been a helluva day,” Mark said. “I think it’s time to close up shop. Then you and Lisa can go upstairs and get your room ready, find you a toothbrush, stuff like that.”

  “Uh…I really don’t want you to go to any trouble. I was kind of thinking maybe I don’t need the guest room. I could just…you know…sleep with you, like last night, only…you know, together…”

  Mark and Lisa stared at her, and Sparkling turned a lovely shade of red.

  “OK…maybe you’re not interested—just tell me if I’m out of line, but I thought…” she trailed off, unable to find the words to tell them what she was thinking.

  “You mean like, a threesome?” Lisa said with a crooked smile.

  “Well…yeah, I guess so. Never done one before, but…”

  “Sorry, Spark…can’t do that tonight.” Mark shook his head. “It’s Thursday.”

  “Huh?”

  Mark looked at Lisa and gave her a conspiratorial wink.

  “Do you want to explain it, or shall I?” Lisa asked.

  “Go ahead…” Mark waved a hand toward her.

  “Sparkle, we have this crazy little…call it a rule, a mutual agreement, a tradition, whatever. Mondays and Thursdays are Time-Out days. We don’t have sex, don’t sleep together, don’t even have dinner together. Sometimes we take the day off, close up shop, and go off and do things separately—whatever we feel like doing, but not together.

  “Other times, we keep the office open, but we just do little chores that need doing around here—nothing exciting. We don’t do client terminations, and we don’t interview prospects on Mondays or Thursdays. When quitting time comes, we go to our separate apartments upstairs, and we don’t see each other again until we arrive in the office the next day.

  “We spend a minute or two on a passionate greeting when we get back together in the morning—hey, 24 hours is a long time to be apart by our standards. But when we get done kissing and fondling, it’s back to business as usual. Work to do, contracts to sign, people to kill…just another day at the Ferry.”

  Waters looked at them with wide-eyed wonder.

  “Look at it this way, Spark,” Mark said, “we live together, we work together, we have sex together—a lot. We have meals together, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

  “Sometimes we have sex with clients—you know, the ‘client’s last wish’ thing—and sometimes with prospects to help them decide whether they want to be clients. And of course, we kill people—sometimes in strange and creative ways, again according to the client’s wishes. Hey…client wants to die by having his head chopped off? We can do that—but we’ll charge extra for it.

  “We do all of those things right here in this building, which we hardly ever leave. We’ve both got nice cars parked in the garage downstairs that have low mileage on them. We live life at warp speed, but we don’t go anywhere…and sometimes we have to stop and take a breath.

  “Otherwise, we might get too tightly wrapped, go nuts, get up on the roof, and start shooting people down on the street. Or hey…now that we know we’re dragons, maybe we might decide to play Godzilla and burn down Tokyo. So…Time Out days are our tranquilizers—better than pills, booze, or other medicinal remedies.”

  “And it’s worked so far,” Lisa added with a grin. “Tokyo is still standing.”

  The following morning, Sparkling was having coffee with Lisa in the small cafeteria when Mark arrived. He walked up to Lisa and delivered the promised passionate kiss, with a firm fondle of her nicely shaped breasts for good measure.

  “Yeah, I know…get a room, you two.” Lisa grinned at Sparkling. “Believe it or not, that was the toned-down version. We’re not used to having an audience.”

  “Don’t need to get a room,” Mark replied from the coffee bar as he prepared his own wake-up cup. “We own the place, and with the exception of you, Spark, we’re the only people in the building.”

  Waters looked around. The cafeteria was small, just four little tables, a coffee bar, microwave, and refrigerator. The conference room where they’d been yesterday wasn’t quite to capacity with six people, but close. The lobby was spacious, but the small waiting area was obviously intended for no more than a few people. Thinking back over the months she’d known them, she realized she’d never seen anyone else in the building until the meeting yesterday.

  But the building was huge for just the two of them. Lisa’s apartment took the whole fourth floor and had to be on the order of 10,000 square feet, including the spacious outdoor balcony. Mark’s apartment occupied the two floors above, each slightly smaller due to the setbacks that produced their outdoor spaces.

  But the building’s first three floors were all Charon’s Ferry, and it was hard to believe a company with a total staff of two people needed or could possibly use that much space. Of course, she hadn’t really seen the whole place. Nobody had, except Mark, Lisa, and maybe a few deceased clients.

  “How do you manage to take care of a building this big?” she asked. “Do you have people come in to do maintenance, or what?”

  “Only on the outside,” Mark replied. “Window washers come by once a month—and they can’t see in, because all the windows are one-way solar reflective glass. The landscape people come by every couple of weeks to cut the grass and trim the shrubs.

  “Other than that, I designed the place to be self-sustaining and low maintenance. I take a couple of days a month—usually Time Out days—and do what needs to be done myself.”

  “What is it about you, Sparkling Waters?” Lisa asked. “We don’t tell anybody these things, not even how we maintain the place. And nobody—except you—has ever been told about Time Out days. Mark has let Katie Kim from KQXZ News come in here three times for interviews, and she doesn’t know a fraction as much about us as you do. I hope you appreciate how much we trust you.”

  “Oh, I do, I really do,” she stuttered. “I’m not trying to pry or anything. If something’s none of my business, just tell me.”

  “You’re not prying.” Lisa smiled and gave her a hug. “It’s us…something about you just makes us talk freely, say things we wouldn’t with anybody else. We love you, Sparkle.”

  “I love you too…” Waters looked like she was about to cry.

  “Yes, we love you, Spark,” Mark agreed, “but…that being said, there are still some things we’re not ready to share. Today’s a workday for us—Lisa has a prospect interview at 10:00AM, and I have a termination to carry out in the afternoon—assuming the client shows up. We don’t want to banish you back upstairs, and we don’t want you wandering around here by yourself, but that
means you’ll have to spend the morning with me while Lisa does her business. Then you can stay with her in the afternoon.”

  “You’ve got your pad, and we’ll ‘guest’ you into our network, so you can do your own thing while we do boring stuff. Other than that, we can just—I don’t know—‘smoke, joke, and fool around,’ like we used to say in the Marines.”

  “Actually, he’s paraphrasing,” Lisa said. “The way I heard it, the Marine expression was ‘We may smoke and joke, but we don’t fuck around.’ For the record, though, we don’t. That is, we don’t have sex during business hours.”

  “Except occasionally with clients,” Mark said.

  “Right…but that doesn’t count—just providing a service to the customer, per the terms of the contract. Besides, they’re usually dead 10 minutes later.”

  Mark met the incoming prospect at the reception desk and escorted him to Lisa’s office. Returning to his own office, he found Sparkling looking at the security camera screen next to his desk, which included views of the lobby.

  “Nice looking young guy,” she remarked. “Can’t imagine why he might want to kill himself.”

  “He has his reasons,” Mark said.

  “I guess…but I can’t figure out why so many people want to do it badly enough to keep you guys as busy as you are.”

  “It’s an epidemic.” Mark shrugged. “Three years ago, suicide passed drug overdose and vehicle accidents as the leading cause of death in adults under 30. It’s been the leading cause for kids between 12 and 17 for the last five years, and this year it reached the number two spot for adults between 30 and 55—right behind the aforementioned vehicle accidents. Japan used to be the leading nation for suicide in the world, but the U.S. passed them more than a decade ago.

  “There’s a social media war going on between anti-suicide and pro-suicide groups. You’ve got mystics preaching that suicide is the way to reach a higher plane of existence, and religious fanatics declaring that it’s the true path to heaven. Hell, about three miles down the boulevard from here, you’ll find Preacher Joe Johnston’s Church of the Holy Death—a highly successful enterprise in which congregants are advised to bequeath all their worldly possessions to the church before pulling the plug on themselves. Preacher Joe tools around town in a brand-new Mercedes.”

  “But if they’re so eager to die, why don’t they just do it themselves?” she asked. “Why do they come here and pay you to kill them?”

  “Hah!” He snorted. “Because it’s illegal to commit suicide—against federal law, not just in California. Congress actually recognized there was a suicide problem, so they did what politicians usually do—they passed a law against it and walked away. Problem solved, from their point of view.”

  “Well, I knew that…but it doesn’t make sense. How do you punish people for breaking the law if they’re dead?”

  “You don’t. You punish their heirs, their dependents, and their families. The law allows seizure of the suicide’s estate. Since the Feds didn’t want to bother enforcing or administering the law, they left it up to the local prosecutors—with the proceeds going to the local jurisdiction. They seize money, investments, real estate.

  “The only assets they can’t touch are bequests to tax-exempt charities—like Preacher Joe’s church. It’s been a significant revenue source for the politicians here in southern Cal—because we’ve got so many screwed-up people around here looking to end it all.”

  “So they can get around the law if they have you kill them.” She nodded in understanding. “Then they can leave their estates to their families or whatever.”

  “Right,” he said, “which is why most of our clients come from the wealthier parts of society. People who have nothing to leave behind or nobody to leave it to don’t worry about the penalty for killing themselves. We still get a few who scrape together their last few dollars to pay our fee, but they’re mostly people who don’t have the will to do it themselves or are afraid of screwing it up. A failed attempt at suicide will get you locked up in a padded cell for a long time.”

  “OK,” she said, “but I’m confused about another thing: LifeEnders won’t do it—it’s against their corporate policy to take First-Party Contracts—which means you can’t hire them to hit yourself. But people can hire Charon’s Ferry to do it—and you guys are a LifeEnders franchise.”

  “Ah, but the world doesn’t know that—at least not for sure,” he told her with a smirk. “LifeEnders won’t admit it, and we’ll never tell. LifeEnders got tangled up in a nasty court case when the law was first passed—a case that went to the Supreme Court with a ruling that contract murder did not violate the anti-suicide law. But it caused LEI so much legal hassle to get that ruling that they decided to wash their hands of the whole thing. No suicide contracts, period.

  “And that, my dear Spark, is where yours truly got the brilliant idea for Charon’s Ferry. I pitched it to LEI, and they bought it, with certain restrictions, one of which was that I never advertise or even publicly admit to any connection with LifeEnders—but they get a hefty commission on every contract I sell.”

  “Wow…” She shook her head. “Stuff the world doesn’t know…but who am I to talk? I work for SAD—everything I do involves stuff the rest of the world knows nothing about. And I don’t talk about it, either.”

  “Which is one of the reasons Lisa and I feel comfortable talking to you,” he said, “about things we don’t tell Katie Kim for the evening news.”

  She was silent for a while, then gave him a wistful look.

  “I still don’t understand why that young guy wants to do it,” she said. “I mean, he’s handsome, obviously well-off—he parked a Porsche out front—seems to be healthy, cheerful, confident. You’d think he was coming in here to sell real estate or discuss investment strategy.”

  “Don’t judge by appearances, Spark. We do deep investigations on prospects before we bring them in for an interview. You’d probably be shocked if you knew what we know about him…”

  Chapter Six: Juan Carlos

  “That covers the contract details and legal disclaimers, Mr. Samson,” Lisa said with a pleasant smile. “Now…is there any particular way you’d like us to end your life? We can accommodate most requests, except that we don’t do anything involving drugs, poisons, or fire—too much hassle with environmental regulations, building codes, medical licensing, stuff like that.”

  “Oh…well, I don’t really care, as long as it’s quick and relatively painless. I’d actually rather not know until it happens.”

  Lisa studied the prospect with interest. DeWayne Samson was a 27-year-old black man—a rich mahogany brown, to be more accurate. He was quite handsome and rather charming. He was obviously aware that women found him attractive and went out of his way to encourage them. He was well-dressed, and everything about his stylish-but-tasteful look said he had plenty of money and knew how to spend it.

  “I’m glad you said relatively painless,” she told him. “Most of our methods involve some sort of trauma that may produce momentary shock or discomfort, but it will be over before you have time to feel much of that.”

  She made a notation on the contract displayed on her screen. “Quick, painless method to be selected by Charon’s Ferry. I think that about wraps it up.”

  She sat back in her chair and looked at him.

  “You know…” she said, “you haven’t yet told me why you want to do this. You don’t have to tell me, of course, but I’m curious. You’re young, good looking, appear to be in good health, obviously successful, so…?”

  His face took on a serious look and he gave a theatrical sigh.

  “Looks can be deceiving, Ms. Woods…may I call you Lisa?”

  “Of course.”

  “Lisa, I’m dying already. Terminal illness—rather not talk about it—doctors tell me I don’t have long. I may look healthy to you, but…well, I just don’t want to spend my last days in a hospital with doctors trying to keep me alive. I’d rather go out quickly.
I’m sure you understand.”

  “Of course.” She nodded sympathetically. “But we do a background investigation on potential clients before calling them in for an interview…there was no indication of health issues.”

  “Oh!” He looked startled. “Well, uh…it’s been kept secret. No one knows that I’m sick, so your investigation wouldn’t have shown it.”

  “Perhaps not,” she said, “but it did show that you have considerable wealth—we have to check to make sure you can afford our fee. In fact, you have much more than enough…millions to be exact. I presume you have your affairs in order, as they say—that you’ve made arrangements for the handling of your estate.”

  “Oh…of course.” Samson relaxed visibly. “As a matter of fact, I’ve arranged a trust to care for my dear grandmother. She’s well up in years, and I want to be sure she lives out her life in comfort.

  “I wish I could be there for her, but I can’t…unless…” he looked at her with a conspiratorial expression, “maybe we can reach some sort of arrangement.”

  “Arrangement?” Lisa’s voice was devoid of any emotion.

  “Ah…yes, well, you see there’s a possible treatment for my illness, but it’s not available in the United States. I can’t go where it’s available, because I’m involved in a legal issue, and my passport has been revoked. Now…if I were legally dead, I might find a way to do that—leave the country, take my grandmother with me, and….”

  His voice trailed off as he saw the stone-cold look on Lisa’s face. Without taking her eyes off him, she touched a button, and a small panel slid open on top of her desk. She reached into it with a smooth and practiced motion, and he found himself staring down the muzzle of a suppressed .45 caliber Glock Model 30 pistol.

  Lisa marveled at the way a deep, vibrant brown complexion could turn pasty grey and deathlike in a matter of seconds. Samson stared at her, wide-eyed, his mouth working without sound.