Kill Someone

by Luke Smitherd

  A drug dealer and a thief.

  “Yeah, well, that’s about all I have to spend anyway so I can’t go any higher,” I said, the words tumbling out as I marveled at how perfect that sentence was. Acting as if I thought he would try and push things any further, even though I knew he wouldn’t. As it was, I was actually relieved. I’d withdrawn my daily maximum from the cashpoint on the way there—£350—and had cluelessly hoped it would be enough.

  “Yeah, yeah, ok, that’s cool,” said Neil, suddenly more eager, his now-nodding head and rubbing - actually rubbing - hands giving away his rip-off even more. “Let me see it man. Sorry to ask, but that’s the drill.” I fished the rolled-up wad of cash out of my back pocket and waved it at chest height. Neil grinned.

  “Ok,” he said, “pass it here then.” I hesitated. Was this how it was supposed to happen? Then my stomach rolled over as I realized that I wasn’t actually there for any fucking drugs and that this didn’t matter. I unrolled the wad, took out fifty, and handed the rest to Neil. He thumbed through it quickly without a word and seemed satisfied.

  “Ok,” he said again, “wait here then, ok? Gimme two minutes, ok?” If he said ok one more time, I think I would have snapped and done him right then and there. Looking back, I wish to God that he had. It would have made everything so much easier.

  “Yeah, that’s fine man. Take your time,” I said, meaning it. Neil actually smiled in response and practically scurried out of the room, heading back through the lounge. I heard a door open and footsteps going upwards. The drugs were upstairs then, it seemed.

  My throat began to tighten. I actually felt it begin to constrict as if someone was strangling me.

  Breathe. Breathe. They’re going to die if you don’t kill this scumbag.

  Scumbag. It didn’t fit.

  He deals drugs and he’s stealing your money. Who deserves to live more, philanthropists who do stuff for society or this parasite? And he even said that he normally did deal coke! Him not having any is only a temporary thing! A coke dealer! A coke dealer!

  The tightness of the hammer’s solid head in my waistband was starting to make my hip scream in protest, and I realized that if I was going to use it, I had to get it out now while Neil was out of the room. My fingers were weak and shaking so much that I nearly dropped the soon-to murder weapon as I pulled it free. The relief in my hip went unnoticed at my sudden terror that—inexplicably—Neil would appear, magically teleported to the kitchen doorway without any warning footsteps coming from the stairs. If he caught me halfway through pulling a hammer out, stuck at the moment without time to complete the movement, and being unarmed as he responded—

  What would he do? He’d probably be more scared than you! And you have the knife!

  But that was the problem I always had in any confrontational situation with a stranger. The unknown factor, that which always made me second guess the situation and made my heart race, rendering me useless.

  Like the bowling alley guy, the voice in my head reminded me.

  It had only been a year or two earlier. Near to Christmas. My old schoolmate Carl and I had decided to go bowling, something we hadn’t done for years. In hindsight, I think I suggested bowling as something that we could do because it would make up for any awkward pauses in conversation. We weren’t as close as we had been. Either way, we wanted to have a few drinks, and my Mum was going to be over in Wyken anyway at her friend Sheryl’s house, so she’d offered to drop us off and pick us up. Boozing with a free ride there and back? Rare, and golden. We took her up on it.

  We only had a few drinks during the four or five games we played. As it turned out, it had become competitive, and we were both trying very hard to win. It had ended up being a good evening. A nice time. Hurting no one. Mum had turned up a bit earlier than she’d thought—Sheryl had been called to her elderly mother’s house, a small slip in the kitchen had occurred apparently—but she’d been happy to watch the end of the last game.

  We were in a good mood as we approached the counter to get our shoes back, laughing and recounting funny things that had been said and done throughout the evening, all told to my politely smiling but ultimately uninterested Mother (does anyone enjoy those stories). We waited for the guy who was currently being served to complete his shoe retrieval and carried on talking. We didn’t notice the ratty-looking guy who had walked up to stand at the opposite end of the counter. He was dressed in baggy black cargo pants with a matching cap and jacket.

  He’d been with a few other guys over in the arcade throughout the evening. Again, we hadn’t paid much attention. Why would we? What did we care what a few chavvy rat boys were doing? They weren’t our problem as long as they weren’t messing with us. The current customer finished being served, Carl stepped up to the counter, and the Rat Boy darted forward slightly and started talking to the slightly surprised looking attendant.

  “Mate, I need…” Rat Boy began.

  “Sorry, mate,” Carl said to Rat Boy, immediately but politely speaking up. “We were next.” Rat Boy stared at Carl for a moment, his face utterly expressionless. That was what was so unnerving about it. There was no surprise, no alarm, not even any real sense of anger, and yet the response was what it was. The delivery was as flat, quiet, and calm as it was unnecessary, unexpected, and outrageous:

  “What you gonna fuckin’ do about it?”

  He’d spoken like he was asking Carl for the time. My attention was utterly and instantly focused on Carl and Rat Boy now, some kind of ancient and internal survival mechanism kicking in even though no punches were being thrown and not a move had been made. What? He’d say that over that?

  I could sense my Mum—my Mum, the guy had spoken like that while my Mother was there—standing to my left, completely shocked, but I wasn’t looking at her. I was seeing the difference between the two of them. Carl was nearly a foot taller, not a big guy by any means and certainly not a fighter. Carl had never needed to throw a punch in his life. He wasn’t a nerd either. He was just an ordinary guy, and I could almost read his mind as the wheels of rapid cognition and situational assessment spun like lightning and came to the same confused conclusion as me:

  This guy has gone from 0-60 just like that, without blinking and without any rage. This is a pleasant family environment, and yet this person is prepared to bring that darkness here at the drop of a hat. Carl is bigger than him, but the sheer effortless confidence with which this stranger is prepared to fight means that one question is desperately important: what has he got?

  “Do? I’m not gonna do anything. I came here for a game of bowling, and I’m getting my shoes,” Carl scoffed, making a good show of the very idea of a confrontation being laughable and beneath him, but I knew better. I could tell by the change in the color of Carl’s skin and the slight shake in his speech. Adrenaline was giving him away. Maybe I could only tell because I knew him, maybe Rat Boy knew too, I don’t know. Either way, Carl turned to the guy behind the counter—who was standing there dumbly watching the pair of them, as shocked as we were—as if the matter was done.

  My mind was racing. What has he got, either in weaponry or skills or backup, that lets him talk like that and do it so effortlessly?

  Rat Boy just stood there watching.

  This is another day at the office for him, and we’re freezing up like virgins. He’s better at this than we are, is used to it, and this feeling is so alien to us that we’re stunned. It is worth it to him because confronting us is natural and easy.

  We handed our bowling shoes to the counter guy, and he handed us our own footwear back. Rat Boy continued to stand there, watching, not staring, but watching.

  Afterwards:

  “He was just fronting up. That’s pretty unnerving though, but if he’d done anything, I’d have hit him,” Carl said.

  “Can you believe that?” I asked. “Just like that? Ready to fight over that?”

  “What kind of a person does that? Says that in front of someone’s Mum in a place like this? I mea
n, I beat him up, and his mates come over; it’s all happening on camera, then the police are involved… you have to swallow it back and just say it’s not worth it, but fuck me….”

  All well and good, and it ended up being a story with a beginning and no real end, but the story was in the beginning. We’d both frozen because there was something unknown. It’s easy on paper to say, Carl, the bigger guy, swings a punch with his bigger fist into Rat Boy’s smaller head, but what if it doesn’t end there?

  What didn’t I know about Neil? Everything. He wasn’t a hard case. That much seemed to be obvious, but I was planning to try and attack him, and I knew nothing about the man.

  No, you’re planning to kill him, the voice said.

  Wouldn’t someone like Neil have a little backup ready in case someone came to his house? Wouldn’t someone—

  Stop making excuses! You’re standing in his kitchen holding a hammer! Hide it!

  I worked the handle with my shaking hand, walking it up and along the inside of my forearm until the head nestled inside my palm. I could easily conceal it like that, then let go of the head and let the handle slide down my sleeve and into my grip.

  I heard footsteps coming back down the stairs, and I screwed up my eyes.

  Think of the girls. Think of the girls.

  Neil came back into the room, grinning.

  “Ok man,” he said, holding out the bag of weed. I froze, motor functions torn between lifelong instinct (telling me to take the bag with my right hand) and consciousness stopping that motion in its tracks (knowing that my right hand held the murder weapon). I reached out with my left instead and took the bag from him and suddenly it hit me. I knew how to distract Neil.

  “Do me a favour though, bud,” I heard myself say, suddenly wondering what Klaus was making of all this, watching and listening from the car. Was he enjoying it? Was he bored? “Did you count that cash? I mean, properly? I just want to check it’s all there.” Neil did the it’s ok head shake, waving me away with his hand slightly.

  “Yeah, I had a quick count,” he said, amiably. “Look, I don’t normally even let someone I haven’t met come to the house like this, but if Rick’s vouching for you then its ok. If it’s short, he’s sorting me out. I’m in a bit of a hurry, but I can count it again if you want, though.”

  “Yeah, would you mind?” I, amazed at how normal I managed to sound. “I’m certain it’s all there, but I don’t want to piss Rick off after he hooked me up.”

  “Yeah, ok, no problem. I have no issue with double checking what I’m being paid,” Neil said with a light chuckle. For a moment it sounded like something my Dad would say.

  Does he deserve to die?

  He’s dealing drugs. He deserves to die more than they do. That’s the whole reason you picked him. You know that this one person deserves to die more than five do. It’s him. Do it.

  Neil turned his back on me, as I’d hoped, and began to lay out the twenties on the kitchen counter.

  I released the hammer’s handle and it slid down my sleeve.

  It slid much faster than I had anticipated and shot past my hand, bounced off my foot, and hit the bubbled linoleum floor with a loud and very audible thud.

  Time stood still. I remember that very clearly. You may not believe me, but it did. The cliché is sometimes true. I had never experienced a moment like it before or since, even with everything that happened later. I saw Neil’s head from behind, frozen in the action of jerking upright and turning to see what the sudden sound was. I felt the dull but deeply intense pain freeze in the process of exploding in the instep of my foot, screaming where the hammer had fallen onto it.

  There were no thoughts, at least on a conscious level, but in hindsight I think there must have been thoughts going on somewhere, because once time switched back on I reacted in that way that people describe as acting without thinking. The subconscious is a strange, fucked up thing.

  I spun on one foot to put my back to Neil as he turned away from the money. I dropped into a squat as fast as I could, eyes watering already with the pain from my foot, and let out an agonized cry that I did my best to mask. I tried to turn it into something that was half a moan of dismay, half an old-man-crouching complaint, but it wasn’t very convincing. At first, Neil didn’t say anything. Squatting, my long-ish jacket blocked the floor in front of me from Neil’s view; this meant it obscured the hammer. I scooped it up, and it blessedly slid back up my just-baggy-enough sleeve without effort. Cold sweat broke out across my back.

  “Ah, shit,” I gasped, foot yelling at me, and paused for a moment as if I was looking at something.

  “What was that?” asked Neil from behind me. I couldn’t hear anything in his voice that I could read.

  “Hmm, that was a lucky escape actually,” I said, trying to disguise my shaky voice as a lighthearted chuckle. I thought I might have broken one of my toes and my foot was a throbbing block of intense pain. However, it was the cause of that pain that gave my lie any chance of believability. The sound would have been totally different if the hammer had hit the floor. As it was, the hammer’s head had hit my foot, which muffled the sound of the impact greatly. The hammer had then landed on the floor handle first, with the head moving relatively gently from my instep to the floor. What would have been a BANG was instead a thud.

  “Dropped my bastard phone again,” I said, still with my back to him, pretending to put something (my imaginary phone) in my coat’s inside pocket. “I still haven’t gotten a case for it; I’m lucky I didn’t crack the screen. That’s how the last one went.” I turned around, red-faced from pain and fear and absolutely shitting myself. I hoped that Neil took the redness to mean embarrassment. Had he seen the hammer?

  When I turned around, Neil was looking at me, hands paused halfway through counting the money. He couldn’t have seen the hammer, surely? It sounded, to my ears, as if there were another hammer in the room, except this time it was my heart smashing away at the inside of my chest.

  “What kind of phone?” he asked.

  “An iPhone,” I replied.

  “An iPhone five or six?”

  What?

  “Uh, five.”

  A pause.

  “You can have my old case if you want.”

  “… sorry?”

  Neil stopped what he was doing and put the rest of the money on the counter. He leant over to his right and pulled open a drawer with a rattle that only ever comes from a kitchen’s Odds n’ Sods drawer. He fished around in it for a moment, and then pulled out a cheap-looking piece of rubber.

  “I just upgraded,” he said, holding it out to me. “Had a five and sold it last week. Don’t even know why I still have the case, but you might as well have it if you need one. It’s only gonna go in the bin.”

  There was an awkward silence as his hand remained suspended in mid-air, offering me—a stranger—a gift, and I felt ready to faint with relief.

  “No?” he asked, slightly confused. “It’s a five case.”

  “Oh. Oh, yeah, yeah, thanks very much,” I said, utterly confused, and took it from him. The gift was an act of mild kindness. It was an unneeded item, certainly, but it was thoughtful and well-meant, and it suddenly brought into clarity that which I had truly known from the moment I walked in through Neil’s front door. I could not kill this man. Drug dealer was a label, and a career that, on paper, ruined lives. When confronted with the reality, however, here was a scruffy man selling drugs on a small scale to consenting adults who wanted to get high. This wasn’t a guy getting kids hooked on crack. This wasn’t a guy killing people who owed him money. Did hard drugs ruin lives? Yes, some lives. Was Neil a part of that world? Ultimately, yes. But the simple fact was that the drug dealer tag was not—in Neil’s case and in my eyes—enough to warrant his death, and I needed a reason that left no room for argument.

  Plus—even though it was only a five quid iPhone case—it said something.

  Hey, a weak, questing voice spoke up, you know that alcoholism and a
lcohol-related incidents kill way more people in this country every year than drugs ever do, so you’d be better off killing a bartender—

  I shut the voice up and looked up from the case in my hands to meet Neil’s eyes.

  Worse still, the voice spoke up again, putting all that bullshit aside… you’re right. You couldn’t have done it. No matter what the reason, no matter who you’re going to save. You already knew this. You’re an ordinary kid. You’re not a killer.

  But I had to become one. Somehow.

  You just need to find someone worse.

  “Thanks, Neil,” I said, stepping forward to offer a fist bump and wincing as the pain in my foot screamed afresh. I didn’t normally fist bump, but I had a feeling that Neil did. I guessed right.

  “No worries, mate,” Neil said, and checked the rest of the money. “All good here, as I thought.”

  “Ok dude, thanks. I’ll see myself out, man,” I said hurriedly, turning and heading for the door, needing to be out. I’d gone from fear to blind panic to relief to confusion to back to square fucking one, and I needed to breathe.

  “Oh, ok bud,” Neil said, following me but far behind already as I hurried away, crossing the front room. “You all right, you’re limping a bit?”

  “Uh, I uh, I just really need a shit,” I said, not turning around as I reached the door. “See you around.”

  ***

  I opened the car’s passenger side door and threw the keys to Klaus. He’d taken off his headphones as I approached, and the handheld device was being placed back inside his jacket. Although the throw of my keys was sudden and at very close range, he caught them in his right hand, his head only moving slightly to track their flight.

  “You drive,” I said, through gritted teeth. “My foot’s fucked.” Klaus didn’t respond for a second, and then he nodded slightly and got out of the car. His huge frame moved past me, and I slid gratefully into his recently-vacated seat. I pulled the door shut and gripped my foot, moaning… and then realized that I was shaking, hard. Worse, it wasn’t because I’d nearly killed someone, relieved at the close-but-no-cigarness of committing a mortal sin. Yes, I was full of adrenalin, my nerves and senses were firing as a result of almost getting busted with a weapon in the kitchen of the person I had come to murder; and it was a weapon, those of you thinking that it was just a tool. When a hammer is in a toolbox, it’s a tool in a stranger’s eyes. When it’s the only tool you have on your person, when you have it hidden, and you’re in the kitchen of someone that you’re giving money to for illegal goods, that someone would see that tool as a fucking weapon. But it wasn’t that wow, that was a near miss shaking, nor was it horror at the bleakness of my situation.