The Devil's Gunman

by Philip S Bolger

  He waved cheerfully as Tash yanked me out of my chair. Her grip was an iron clamp, but I didn’t dare show her weakness, not if I wanted to leave alive.

  “No more protection from the Master, mortal,” she rasped into my ear as she marched me toward the restaurant’s exit. “Trish and I have some scores to settle.”

  “We do indeed,” said Trish, sidling up to me, grabbing my other arm, and sniffing the side of my face. “I am sure you taste delicious.”

  “You can always smell the corruption of the flesh, first,” said Tash. “And this one is as rotten as they come. He will be a delight for when we next host a hunt.”

  “Your mind may be on the hunt, dear sister, but it has been some time since our last feast,” agreed Trish as we walked up the stairs. “We could feed on this one for days. Have a safe trip home, mortal. I hope your home is well-defended.”

  “It won’t matter, even if it is,” said Tash, and the two women broke into harsh, barking laughter as they shoved me out the door, sending the case I’d been given spiraling across the floor in front of the closed restaurant door.

  I regained my balance and picked up the briefcase.

  I walked outside and into what could only jokingly be called freedom, and as the sheets of rain slammed down all around me, I started wondering what I should do.

  * * * * *

  Chapter One: For the Man Who Has Everything

  I returned in the rental and dumped the rifle, driving home to my sprawling place in the posh suburb of Deephaven. If you’re not familiar with the Twin Cities, Deephaven is a suburb on the Minneapolis side, right on Lake Minnetonka. It’s a really lush place that gave you a feeling of being deep in the wilderness, even though it’s only about a twenty-minute drive from the heart of Minneapolis. At that point, in fall, most of the green that accents the place in spring and summer had turned to orange and red or disappeared entirely.

  I should’ve loved Deephaven. I should’ve loved the house I was given—a massive Japanese contemporary mini-mansion, tucked away on its own turn-around, bracketed largely by woods. I had neighbors, but I never had to hear them. I didn’t really love the house, though. I guess I wanted to, but I never really had time to appreciate it.

  The house wasn’t mine when this all started. It had belonged to some guy named Miyoshi. Miyoshi also worked for our Patron. He had the job I had, before I did.

  Miyoshi was my second kill, my first in direct service to the Patron. I’d knifed him while he slept, and even then, he’d still woken up and put up a fight, bleeding all over the floor as he chased me. I’d come forewarned and forearmed, though. Miyoshi’s family was a long line of sorcerers and warlocks, first in Japan, then in the US. They had protection over their own bloodline, but through a powerful curse, they made weapons that could eliminate one of their clan in case they went rogue. The wakizashi I’d stabbed him with had belonged to one of his ancestors, and I witnessed the curse in person. Three seconds after being stabbed, Miyoshi was nothing but a pile of screaming ash. I dumped the ash in the lake and went to sleep, waking up the next day to find the deed in my mailbox.

  The house had always belonged to me, or so the paperwork said. There was no record of Miyoshi. At the time, that seemed odd.

  As I did the job longer and longer, that became common. My Patron had an unusual amount of influence over bureaucrats and paperwork. He explained it was his domain, one that others sneered at, but he knew it drove empires.

  I parked my car, a Jeep Grand Cherokee, and walked up to the front porch. A small Buddhist prayer wheel, along with some chimes and bells, sat out front. I had no idea if it was Miyoshi’s attempt at piety, a desperate plea to higher powers, or something left over from an owner before him. I kept more than a few Christian icons, though none had brought me anything, unless you counted a somber reminder of the faith I’d abandoned.

  * * *

  The house was traditional enough to feel more Eastern than most of the neighborhood, but modern enough to feel like it belonged, here, in the real world. It was a six-bedroom sprawl, a kind of personal castle the old me would’ve loved, based on price tag alone.

  I walked in, shed my coat, and sat down on the couch. It felt good to be out of the rain. As I sat, I thought a bit about what my newfound freedom might mean. Then I turned on the TV for some noise and checked out the briefcase.

  Opening it revealed an immaculate H&K VP9 9mm handgun. It wasn’t fresh off the assembly line, but nearly. The grips were customized to my hands, and as I hefted it, I felt the weapon hum with energy.

  I put it back in the case and watched the news on TV, where they were covering the brutal slaying of Mahmood Khalif. A talking head from a right-wing think tank was blaming Somali extremists while a Black Lives Matter representative was suggesting it was some kind of hit by rogue cops worried about Khalif’s advocacy. That’s what makes it so easy for supernatural forces to operate—humans are really, really good about building their own narrative, seeing what they wanted to see and hearing what they wanted to hear. That’s not a werewolf, just a guy with rabies. It was swamp gas and a weather balloon. JFK was shot by 15 different people. Vaccines cause autism. The Earth is flat.

  People love being sure of themselves and their beliefs. The evidence is ancillary to feeling good about what you believe. So long as that’s the case, angels and devils will be free to flit about, executing their agendas without much chance of being discovered.

  I could say people are idiots. That’s not it, though. Idiots are better than most at convincing themselves what they believe, but the most intelligent people in the world still fall into mental traps, aided, naturally, by forces like the Patron who are manipulating the data. You don’t need to do a full cover-up, you just need to induce enough doubt to let humanity do its thing, like the newscasters were with Khalif.

  I chuckled to myself and got up to pour a few fingers of Scotch. I selected a lowland single malt and watched as I poured the nectar-like substance into my glass. I swirled it a bit and took a sip. I felt a bit of satisfaction, a bit of anticipation, but mostly, I felt like a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

  For the first time in quite a while, I had a night ahead of me with nothing to do.

  It was great, at first.

  I screamed at the sky. I put on some music and danced for a bit. I watched some TV and some movies. I tried reading a book. It was all so exciting, this sense of being able to do something I wanted to do for a change. The excitement, though, was tempered with fear, with bad memories and paranoia, and in my mind, I had a pretty good way to fix it.

  So I drank. And I drank. I chugged the Scotch and pounded the vodka, doing shots like I hadn’t done since I was in college. I played more music and kept dancing, knocking around my coffee table. I thought about calling a hooker, but I wasn’t sober enough to dial the numbers on my phone.

  I woke up the next day hungover, bitter, and…empty. The fear had come back, now with a pounding headache. Fear, as always, brought his close friends: paranoia and pain. The booze had only temporarily distracted me from the call of the void. The aftermath, if anything, made me more aware of how empty I was.

  I had enough money; I didn’t have to work. I had enough booze; I could keep drinking. For the most part, though, I had…nothing.

  * * *

  I couldn’t call the few friends I had kept in contact with from my banking days, and I was too apprehensive to contact my family. I hadn’t been on social media in years.

  I tried to apply for some jobs, mostly banking stuff. I must’ve submitted my resume about a hundred times. For the most part, I heard nothing back. Occasionally, I received a form letter explaining that while my experience was impressive, I could go fuck myself—no job here.

  I dedicated myself to housework and yardwork for a bit. That was awful. It left me with a clean house and nothing to do in it and an immaculately trimmed front lawn that I never did anything with but trim again.

  I worked out. Started a new re
gimen. Hired a trainer for a bit—found him to be an insufferably upbeat prick and ultimately ghosted him. The gym membership wasn’t in my real name anyway.

  Mostly, I drank, as much as I could, occasionally parsing in some drugs. The weeks after my freedom are a blur. I don’t remember much. I remember neat lines of snow white cocaine in the overly-stained bathroom of a low-rent St. Paul club. I remember cursing at a bank manager in a job interview, then being shown out by security. I remember the soft curves of a woman painted like a succubus. I remember running from the cops at 2:00 AM. I remember trips to the liquor store, leaving with an armful of self-medication. I remember a prostitute explaining, in a nasally voice, that she wouldn’t take “them silver coins” as payment and going for a knife. I remember a fight with a bartender in a country and western bar. I remember waking up in a rest stop in South Dakota, heroin needle in my arm, surrounded by filth and decrepitude. I remember screaming at a homeless man that I knew he was really a Hellhound. I remember knocking over my kitchen table and bracing against it, a bottle of liquor in one hand and a handgun in the other, waiting for a police raid I knew would come through the door any minute.

  * * *

  I burnt out quickly. Within a month of freedom, I didn’t have a lot to do. I didn’t want to admit it, but in some ways, I missed the excitement, the rush, of being a killer. Indiscriminate murder crossed my mind a few times, but it was tempered by fear—without the Patron, I couldn’t count on security cameras being wiped, and it took too much effort to plan that out.

  Real life seemed so fucking pointless, so stupid—an endless series of worrying about bills and traffic and whether the rain would cancel whatever worthless event I tried to convince myself I wanted to attend. Drugs and booze didn’t help, either; they just blurred existence and made me forget, a little bit, about the stakes I knew were out there. They definitely made it less boring—at first, anyway.

  As everything blurred together, eventually, drugs and alcohol became a more damaging version of the same routine. Wake up, fret about minutia, jab the needle in your arm and sedate yourself. Go through your day, buy whatever meaningless shit you think might make you happy, and when it doesn’t, chug a six pack and pretend it does.

  A month after emancipation, I stopped drinking. Not for good. I couldn’t do that. But I stopped the binge drinking, the endless succession of shots I seemed to grasp onto for support and meaning in a world overtaken by void. I kicked the drugs, too. Probably a good thing. I hadn’t been addicted to anything, but I’d brushed by enough hardcore junkies and tweakers to know where that route ended.

  It didn’t help much, initially. My time sober left me largely alone with my fear, with the dreadful knowledge that endless suffering awaited me at the end of my short life. In time, I began to see more clearly. I got myself together. I threw out most of my bar, keeping only my favorite Lowland Scotch. I found some minor tasks to preoccupy me. I watched movies, I read books. I bought a video game console and some games I thought I’d like. It wasn’t as effective as the drugs in blurring everything, but it also wasn’t as damaging.

  On that night, a month or two after the conclusion of my service with the Patron, I was empty…but at least I was stable. The television played the evening news as I prepared to help myself to some of my scotch. I was out of the lowland stuff, and out of the Islay, and out of my various Speyside labels, but I had some blended scotch, and that was good enough.

  My phone rang just as I picked up the scotch, and I checked the number. It was an Odessa, Texas, number one I didn’t recognize. I let it go to voicemail, figuring it was a telemarketer or one of those, “You’ve won a contest!” scams that proliferated, even in the age of caller ID, or maybe another robovoice telling me I’d been rejected for yet another job. As soon as I put it back in my pocket, it started ringing again.

  Same number. Maybe they didn’t get the message the first time. I ignored it again. It wasn’t more than a second before my phone rang yet again with the same number. My curiosity overtook me—I guess the third time really is the charm.

  I took a sip of scotch and answered it.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Hello, Mr. Soren,” a good ol’ boy Texas accent dripped through the line. “You used to work for someone I used to work for. That someone tells me you no longer work there. I wanted to reach out and congratulate you on a fine, fine tour of duty, son.”

  “Thank you,” I said, remembering my manners. “I assume this is about a banking opportunity?”

  “Fuck no!” the voice said back, braying with laughter. “Son, this is an opportunity to join an elite fraternity of those who have tangled with forces beyond the veil.”

  My blood ran cold. The Patron hadn’t forgotten. I had wondered, after all that alcohol, if my life as a preternatural hitman had been at least partly hallucination. This phone call had dispelled that illusion.

  “Thank you, again,” I said. “May I please ask whose calling?”

  “You sure as shit can, my man, when you see me in person! Check your e-mail. I look forward to meeting you at the Barbeque!”

  There was a click as the mystery Texan hung up, and as I put my phone down, I saw the new e-mail. I opened it and found an invite to a place just outside of Odessa, Texas, the home of one Gerald Vinter. I was instructed to meet his airplane in an hour at a small executive airfield nearby.

  I grimaced.

  This smelled like a trap.

  Like I’d go to the airport and get torn to ribbons as I was shoved into a running plane engine.

  Or shot by a “coincidental” gang drive-by.

  Or thrown from 30,000 feet by a laughing Tash as Trish piloted the plane out of the mortal realm.

  Despite that, I felt inclined to go. I checked the weather in Texas and packed a quick go-bag. I decided to take my new gun. I’d already had a holster fitted for it, and I had a bunch of Hornady Critical Duty hollow points. I’d want that gun if I got to the airport and ran into something shitty.

  * * *

  I took an Uber to the airport and said nothing as the driver tuned into public radio. There was a panel of three guests, still guessing, months later, about why known community organizer, Mahmoud Khalif, had been so brutally killed. The theories were still running wild, but the authorities didn’t have any solid leads and were asking the public to remain calm.

  The airport was nearly deserted, the rain having apparently put a damper on the private jet crowd for the day. The driver dropped me off at the front, and I stumbled through the small terminal. I checked my e-mail again, verifying that the one plane on the tarmac was the one I needed to get on. After talking to a few attendants, I walked out to it. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, but I still regretted my questionable choice of not bringing wet weather gear.

  At the base of the plane’s ramp, greeting me, was a small woman with copper skin and a brilliant smile, holding an umbrella above her head. Despite her glowing smile, her face was quite plain—her forehead a bit too high and her chin a bit weaker than classical beauty would dictate. Underneath her flight attendant’s uniform, she appeared to be very athletic—muscled like a dancer, or perhaps a martial artist. She wore a red cravat with horseshoes on it and a matching pin on her lapel. Her eyes were pale grey, matching the rainy sky, though flecks of green glimmered occasionally.

  “You must be Mr. Soren,” she said, smiling and offering a hand, which I shook as I nodded once. Her grip held the strength of a shark’s bite, and it took quite a bit of effort to keep any appearance of pain off my face.

  “Fantastic,” she said. “You’re expected. I’m Amalfi. Welcome aboard!”

  She helped me put my bag in storage, then escorted me onto the nicest plane I’ve ever been on. There were only six leather seats, each large enough to comfortably fit two of me. It was easy to walk around. A table in the back had been set up for conferencing, or based on the bar back there, hosting. The plane was empty except for me and her, and whoever was in the cockpit. Sitting on one
of the chairs was a neatly wrapped gift box, red with a golden bow, about the size of a shirt box.

  “A gift from Mr. Vinter,” Amalfi explained. “He’d like you to open it as soon as possible.”

  It was almost certainly a ticking bomb or some pocket eldritch abomination that would bite my face off as soon as the ribbon was off.

  I thought about drawing down on Amalfi and demanding an explanation.

  But for the second time, I remembered my manners and simply nodded.

  I picked up the gift and opened it, revealing a gaudy purple and black bowling shirt with “THE DEVIL’S GUNMEN” on the back, along with a smiling cartoon red devil in a cowboy hat, clad in bandoliers with brass shells, holding a comically oversized revolver. Gun smoke trailed upward from the revolver, and there were some casings detailed at the devil’s feet.

  It wasn’t the most garish thing I’d ever seen, but, considering the only thing that surpassed it was a collection of Prince’s stage costumes I’d bid on at an auction, I wasn’t sure if that was a good metric.

  “Do you like it?” asked Amalfi, her eyes flashing in the animalistic way I was used to seeing from Tash and Trish.

  “Yes, please tell Mr. Vinter, I do,” I said, my natural kissass instincts kicking in at just the right time.

  “You can tell him yourself,” she said, grinning again. “He would be disappointed if you show up, and you are not wearing it.”

  I noticed, almost as an afterthought, that the plane was taxing down the runway.

  “You may change when we land,” she said. “In the meantime, I’m here to please.”

  I expected her to unbutton her shirt as she said it, or maybe flash her eyes coquettishly at me, but she walked over to the bar, keeping impeccable balance as the plane was leaving the ground, and pulled out a bottle of Glenkinchie. She poured three fingers of the lowland scotch into a glass and offered it to me. The glass it was in had a label on it, “Acheron Ranch,” along with a logo of a horseshoe in a pentagram.