Chance Assassin: A Story of Love, Luck, and Murder

by Nicole Castle

  “Very good, V,” he laughed, pulling the blindfold off my head. I pointed the empty gun at him, clicking back the trigger. He grabbed me by the throat, slamming my head against the wall. That was all it took to make me come. Sometimes it took even less. “I warned you about pointing that at me,” he said, a hint of a grin on his face.

  “Prick tease,” I whispered, unable to summon any strength to my strangled voice.

  He released his grip to slap me lightly across the cheek. “You know, I had to ask Charlie what that meant.”

  I laughed. That wasn’t surprising. “What did he say?”

  “He pointed to a girl your age with a very small skirt who would never have sex with him.”

  “I bet you’re prettier than she was,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” he said, “but you are.”

  “Do you think he’s found him yet?” I asked, him being our next mark, and the reason I was learning guns before knife play. Charlie was desperate for cash after paying his dues in Eastern Europe, and before Ernest’s body was cold he’d found another job for Frank. This one was outsourced by the mob, and potentially dangerous. That is, if Charlie could ever find the guy.

  “Soon,” he said. “Too soon.” And then the blindfold went back on.

  Guns made sense to me, once he took them apart and showed me how they worked. It was just like auto mechanics. The parts needed lubrication, touching this affected that, and if you took care of them they’d take care of you.

  Frank knew a lot about guns because he didn’t like them. When he was getting started in this business, his boss had sat him down, and forced him to build his own pistol and fill his own bullets. There wasn’t a gun Frank couldn’t get to work, no matter what was wrong with it. He intended to hand down the lesson to me so he could fill that portion of his memory with knowledge he’d find more agreeable, like another Victor Hugo novel.

  We weren’t the first people to use the old barn for target practice. In fact, Frank had once brought a mark here in the middle of the night to torture information out of him, because apart from being unlikable, the guy allegedly also had a fortune stashed somewhere on his property. Since it had almost been Christmas, Frank had wanted to do something nice for Charlie. The fortune turned out to be, as Frank put it, “a bunch of cards with pictures of men holding sticks on them.” Frank knew nothing about baseball, and figured Charlie had enough playing cards, so he re-buried them and gave Charlie a new watch instead.

  “Stand up straight,” he ordered, giving me a swat with the yardstick we’d picked up at the store along with our new dinnerware. “Loosen your shoulders.”

  I rolled my eyes and obeyed, pointing my pistol at what was left of a rotted and holey door. My five foot eight frame was outlined in dust from Frank pushing me down and then making me stand against it. I aimed, left hand cupping my right, the site aligned on the largest area of the door that still resembled a door. The gun was heavy, and the long silencer made it almost awkward to hold. There was no way I’d manage it one-handed like they did in the movies, aiming sideways and put a cap in your ass. I needed all the support I could get.

  “Arch your back.”

  “That has nothing to do with it.”

  “I know,” he said, running his hand along the curve of my ass. “Put your left foot forward a little. Lean into it. Okay, fire.”

  “What am I supposed to hit?”

  “I’d settle for anything,” he teased.

  I gently squeezed the trigger, trying not to flinch but doing it anyway. Silencers were a necessity, even if they didn’t live up to their name. You were holding an explosion in your hand, it was never going to be silent. “That wasn’t bad,” I said, referring to the much anticipated kick, and not my shooting skills. As far as I could tell, I hadn’t hit what I was aiming for. If I hit anything at all. “I thought it would be…you know, harder.”

  “Harder,” Frank muttered, and I almost got away before he swatted me so hard he broke his stick. It was louder than the suppressed gunfire. At least my throbbing behind thought so, and I slumped to the dusty ground to sulk. “Your gun is loaded with blanks. You couldn’t tell the weight difference.”

  I aimed and fired, and dropped the gun when the kick practically knocked it from my hand. Frank’s jaw dropped just as fast, and he glanced to his left, pulling his shirt away from the side of his bleeding bicep with two fingers like he was picking off a stinging ant. “Not. Fully. Loaded. With blanks.”

  “Oh, my God!” I shrieked, covering my mouth in horror.

  “Now, apart from the fact that you dropped your weapon, and that you just SHOT me, that was very good,” he said, terrifyingly calm.

  “Well I wasn’t really aiming for…” his arm, but he didn’t need to know that.

  “That’s not what I meant, V. I was referring to how you instinctively defended yourself. That was good.”

  “It was?”

  “It was. Pick it up.”

  There was never a dull moment with Frank. Things you’d think would piss him off, like shooting him, he was happy about. But if you happen to order him a croissant at a diner because his stomach growled all during the morning’s blowjob, he gets all bent out of shape about it, as if you’ve alerted the entire country that he’s a foreigner, and then he refuses to fuck you in the men’s room after your meal.

  I picked up the gun, attempted a quick mental weigh in, and could only decide on there being more than enough bullets to kill me. Frank plopped down on the ground beside me, as if we were on a picnic and there couldn’t be anything more normal than an afternoon bullet graze.

  “Blanks are useful when you’re learning. You won’t anticipate the kick. Shall we discuss bullets?”

  Bullets, like cocks, came in a variety of different sizes and lengths but were all more or less the same shape. Or rather, the round was like a cock, cartridge and bullet and gunpowder, and the bullet was just the projectile. Like sperm. But Frank didn’t say all that. He just went through a lot of numbers from the metric system, which basically came down to the bigger the bullet the more likely it’ll kill you, hollow points were fucking evil, and blanks had no projectile, or sperm, hence the phrase shooting blanks. Like I said, guns made sense to me.

  “You have strong hands,” Frank said. Getting shot must’ve really put him in a good mood, since he didn’t follow it up with despite appearances. “Hold it a little tighter, and don’t drop it again.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, letting him get to his feet first to show my submission. I allowed him out of my sight for less than a second as dust billowed around me. It was long enough. I’d have a welt on my wrist for a week, but what was left of the yardstick remained intact. I didn’t drop my gun.

  Frank grinned and pointed at the barn. “Empty the clip.”

  I aimed and fired and missed by about a foot, aimed and fired and blank, aimed and fired and bulls eye! Blank, blank, blank, and the grand finale; critical condition, but survivable.

  I held my breath in anticipation, waiting for the verdict. He loved to keep me waiting. “Don’t ever point that at me again,” he said, and walked to the car to bandage his wound. I beamed, smiling until my face hurt. Vincent Sullivan, assassin.

  “Stationary objects are simple,” Frank said, watching from above me while I struggled to haul a box of dishes up to the roof using only a rusty drainpipe. He put his gloves on before unloading the box, even though in the off chance that I couldn’t hit what he threw, dinner plates and salad plates and bowls, place setting for eight, it would end up in pieces on the ground below.

  The fact that picking out china patterns was pretty gay didn’t bother me, since we were picking them out to shoot them. Frank chose the design. Ivory white with solid black borders and real gold edging. Fucking expensive. He made me pay.

  It was a waste of money.

  We should’ve just bought the bowls, and left my self-esteem intact. They didn’t fly very well.

  “I didn’t expect you to hit those,” Frank sai
d.

  “Well, that’s good, ‘cause I didn’t.”

  “No, but you also didn’t get frustrated and give up.”

  “You’re telling me that I just spent five hundred dollars for a stress test?”

  Frank shrugged. “We’ll buy more plates. I want you to learn the rifle.”

  Self-esteem restored. “Really?”

  “Really. I fucking hate sniper jobs,” he said, and snatched my gun from me before I had time to aim.

  I paced around the room, wearing the already threadbare carpet even thinner. I hadn’t been this wound up since before the Goldman job. If Frank didn’t return soon, I’d have to take up smoking.

  He was meeting with Charlie, finding out about the rat. It had only taken him a couple of weeks to track down the hole in the ground he was living in, and now we were in New fucking Mexico to take care of the extermination.

  I slumped onto the bed, rubbing the four finger-shaped bruises on my right shoulder. Frank and I had done things that would make our parents roll over in their graves.

  “What the hell is taking so long?” I said to myself. Frank had been gone half the day. This wasn’t normal. I couldn’t even concentrate on the bliss of finding a new battle wound while he was God only knew where with his handler.

  Frank had told me that Charlie’s preferred meeting places tended to have themes of liquor or nudity, or if possible, both. As long as there was a table to slip his envelope of information under, Frank didn’t care where they met. He’d drink hard with his friend, smoke way too much, and tip the strippers because Charlie wouldn’t.

  Despite how shy he was around people in general, he had no problem having a scantily clad female wave her fake tits in his face. And it wasn’t just because he was on the clock. His mother had worked as an exotic dancer in Soho for years, and he’d grown up in that environment. He and his mom had even lived there for a time in secret, Frank staying hidden during the night and having the run of the place during the day. He used to sit on the rigging amongst the spotlights and watch her while she worked once he got old enough to climb the thirty-foot metal ladder on his own.

  Even I found that to be incredibly inappropriate, and I’d helped countless men live out molestation fantasies about their own sons. Frank didn’t see it that way, regardless of how young he’d been. They were best friends, and she’d treated him like an adult from the moment he learned how to walk. He helped her sew sequins on her outfits because his hands were smaller. Frank was an excellent seamstress.

  That was how Sophie Moreaux met his father. She’d been working at a strip club and he swept her off her fuck-me-pumps. He was the Prince Charming she’d been searching for, only he was already married to Princess Charming. Frank was illegitimately conceived the night they met, and she kept working until she realized she was pregnant.

  At the time, Sophie had been living with an elderly English couple. The husband was a retired doctor, and he helped the undocumented immigrant have an undocumented son. Husband and wife both died before Frank was one. He didn’t remember them, but his mother always sang their praises, and had even named him after the man who aided in his delivery.

  They were left homeless when the owner’s estate settled, and she returned to work with Frank in tow, leaving him in the dressing room closet while she scraped together an income.

  His father started frequenting the place again after the suspicion cleared from his wife’s mysterious death, and Sophie, who really was trying to give her son a normal life, started letting him provide for them. Having sex to pay their rent came later, after Frank’s dad insisted upon meeting him.

  Sophie had accepted his financial support and they’d been able to move out of the strip club, but she wanted nothing else to do with him. Frank was the only man in her life now, and she was terrified that his father would try to take him away from her. So she burned down the place they were staying, and they disappeared. Nobody even knew she had a son until he killed their landlord.

  The sound of the door unlocking echoed through the silence of the room, and I leapt to my feet. Then I dove under the bed in case Charlie was with him, obtaining more rug burn and another couple of bruises in the process.

  I could tell that Frank was in a bad mood just by looking at his feet. Charlie wasn’t with him, but I stayed hidden anyway. Even though we were happily in love, I still didn’t want to mess with him when he was pissed off.

  He tossed something on the mattress above me. “I know you’re here, I can see your shoes.”

  I glanced toward the wall, where one shoe had fallen to its death while Frank was manhandling me. I wasn’t sure where the other one was. “How’s Charlie?” I asked from under the bed.

  Frank grumbled and sat down.

  I crawled out and went to sit on his lap. I knew how much he liked that. “What’s wrong?”

  “Our mark is a recluse,” he sighed dolefully.

  “Not much to see there,” I said, understanding that his melancholy had nothing to do with how long he’d been forced to stay in Charlie’s company.

  Frank didn’t have to put so much of his time and energy into most jobs. There were some, mostly sniper shots from rooftops, that all he would’ve needed was a date, a place and a picture. But he was a rarity among his peers. He didn’t go for the quick and easy jobs, and not just because the money wasn’t as good.

  More than anything, he liked the pursuit. He would follow the hit, learning everything about them from where they liked to get their morning coffee to what brand of toothpaste they used, following them so long that he could practically be claimed as a dependent on their taxes. When Frank was working, their lives were his.

  He said that a lot of the time, he could do without the killing part altogether. He’d be just as happy to be a paid stalker, and sometimes, when the person was exceptionally interesting, he would’ve liked to follow them for free. But there were some jobs, the ones where the individual really deserved what they had coming to them, and hadn’t just pissed off the potential client. Frank did get pleasure from ridding the world of them.

  It was strange, but I could tell that part of him missed Ernest Goldman. I wondered whether that was the real reason we moved around so much. Frank could be very compulsive about things, and maybe after forming the habits of his marks, he’d keep haunting the area as if they could carry on their routine from the morgue.

  “Charlie got all the information he could,” he said, and he pulled a very long list from the envelope on the bed.

  For not being a real doctor, Charlie certainly had bad handwriting. It was barely legible, sloppy and smeared, and there were stains from at least one greasy meal. I read what I could, having Frank look at the words that were completely unrecognizable to my untrained eye.

  It turned out that a good deal of it was written in French. Charlie had known how disappointed Frank would be, and not only had he tried to make it up to him by lovingly butchering his native tongue, he’d gone back to the client to get as much information as possible. There were things on that list that only close friends, or meticulous stalkers, would’ve known; his great grandparent’s names, his favorite foods, even when he lost his virginity.

  “This was sweet of him,” I said, focusing on one line of data in the center of a brown coffee cup ring. Kid brother died, struck by car, siblings were close.

  “He knows how I feel about watching,” he said, lighting the last cigarette in his formerly full pack.

  I set down the list and dumped the rest of the envelope onto the mattress. The picture was an old one, a wedding photo with the bride trimmed out. Our mark was wearing a white seventies style tuxedo that made me physically ill. He had greasy hair and an even greasier mustache. I flipped it over so I wouldn’t have to look at it again. I’d seen enough.

  The hundred dollar bills were not much newer, dated long before I was born. They looked fake compared to design I was used to seeing, but the smell was genuine, and stale like it had been stashed in a mattress or burie
d in a basement. This money hadn’t been near a bank since it was printed. Mob money.

  “How?” I asked, turning to Frank with a mischievous grin. I could feel his cock stiffen under me as our game began.

  “Violently,” he said, watching my eyes. “The client wants him to feel it. To know why we’re there.”

  “Can I shoot him?” I asked.

  “That remains to be seen,” he teased.

  “May I shoot him?” I clarified.

  “Yes, you may.”

  I flashed him an angelic smile. “And may I kill him?”

  His ears glowed red and he nodded. “Yes, you may kill him.”

  I slid off his lap, kneeling between his legs. “You were gone a long time. I was worried.”

  “Charlie grilled me about my sex life,” he said, leaning back on his elbows. He liked to watch me while I sucked him off. He was astounded by my lack of a gag reflex.

  “What did you tell him?” I asked before pulling down his zipper with my teeth.

  “To mind his own business.”

  I licked the head of his cock, looking up at him to see all intelligent thought vanish from his face. His eyes shut for just a second, like there wasn’t enough room left over from his huge dopey grin. They flickered back open as I started to go lower, and I smiled at him from around his cock as I took his full length into my throat.

  The sounds he made were exactly what I’d imagined when I believed him to be mute; guttural groans, sharp intakes of breath, a complete lack of words in any language. It pleased me to no end to have this effect on him.

  I lifted my head, slowly jerking him off as I asked, “Did you get a lap dance?”

  “Eh?”

  I froze mid-stroke to repeat myself, speaking slowly in case he’d forgotten English again. It tended to escape him when his brain was otherwise occupied, and he always spoke French after he came, sometimes for several minutes like he’d blown a fuse.

  He shook his head. “Good,” I said, and finished him off, making him come in my hair because he got so uptight about getting me dirty, and it would force him to shower with me before we went to work. I’d been too busy pacing to take my bath this morning.