Dead Reckoning

Thank you to my beta readers and to my editor, Randi for her valuable input. This is a flash story. It's a light-hearted story.

The snacks were on the coffee table, the bottle of Champagne chilling in the ice bucket and the two Champagne flutes were ready.

I was dressed in a pair of slacks, beige if you care to know, a matching short sleeved shirt and some loafers.

My wife was dressed, as per the instructions of her new boss, Mr. Kingley, like a cross between a cosplay hooker and an anime character.

Emily, my wife, grimaced, then grinned and said, "Nick, it's what my new boss wanted."

Before I could say anything there was a pretentiously loud knock on the door, three times. "That'll be him. You'd best open the door for him." Emily glanced downwards. "From what I hear, he doesn't like to be kept waiting."

I walked into the entry lobby of our apartment, I opened the door to be faced with a large man who was well-dressed and who obviously worked out. He was standing on the private outside landing that served our apartment.

He looked good, but just one look at his face showed what damage could be wrought by excesses of any kind, including eating, drinking and the sybaritic lifestyle in general.

Had I not already known a great deal about Barthold Kingley, his face would have been enough to hate him. In that respect his face was just the icing on the cake.

In honor of the occasion, I spoke to him in what I hoped he'd believe were hushed, deferential tones. "Oh, you must be my wife's new boss, Mr. Kingsey? Come on through. Everything is as you asked for it to be arranged."

He didn't speak, but he did sneer at me. Oh, well. I could live with that. Question was, would he?

Emily was sat on the sofa, her plump thighs shown to very good effect by the very, very short skirt he'd bought for her and presented to her earlier in the day at the offices of their employer.

Kingley sat down by her, put his arm around her shoulders in a very possessive and over-familiar way and said: "Cuck, sit down in front of us on that easy chair."

I did so. I hoped the look of diffidence I was wearing was working? Good! It seemed to be.

"This is what's going to happen, cuck. I find your wife very attractive. That is why I gave her the job as my new assistant. In fact, she'll be my new ass-istant!" He laughed at his joke. Yeah, of course he did.

"I'm going to fuck her morning, noon and night. And, because you'll be my cuckold, you'll not be able to do anything about it, do you understand?"

I nodded. "How will that affect me, Mr. Kingley?"

He grinned. "You'll not be getting any sexual action from your wife. Though if I'm in a good mood, I'll let you clean my leavings from her cunt and her ass after I finish with her."

I nodded. I looked upset. Apparently, I looked upset enough as he grinned again. He reached round, grabbed Emily by her neck and went in for a kiss.

He screamed in pain and slapped her face, jumping to his feet. "You fucking bitch! What did you do to me?"

I deftly and quickly removed my gun from the side of the chair and pointed it at him as I stood up. "Asshole, you'll step away from my wife, now."

"The fuck? She stabbed me!" he exclaimed. "And why are you pointing a toy gun at me? I'll kill both of you!"

"This isn't a toy gun, it's a very specialized Chinese Type 64 Silenced Pistol. My father was a tunnel rat back in 'Nam, and he found this thing abandoned in a tunnel. It's quiet, it uses.32 rimless rounds and it'll kill you, but more silently than most any other pistol."

He moved away from Emily and I noticed the patch of blood on his right side. "Yes, she did stab you. She used an ice pick. Not the sort of mountaineering ice pick that was used to murder Trotsky, but a modified barman's ice pick."

He shouted "I don't give a shit about fucking history lessons! I'm going to call the police on you two psychos!"

I shook my head. "Actually, nobody is calling the police. You see, my wife is not really called Ashley Jones and she's not really your new secretary. We are a husband-and-wife assassination team, and we have been given the contract of killing you."

His face paled. "But why? What have I ever done to you?"

I shrugged. "Nothing. But that's not the point. We were hired to kill you because of something you did to someone else."

Whilst this had happened, Emily had lashed his hands with some police style plastic ties.

"Someone else? Who? Why'd they want me dead?"

Emily spoke up. "You remember the job you had as manager at Cranbrook's several years ago? You pulled your cuckold stunt there, too.

"But the girl you targeted, Liz Foster, felt so guilty with helping you make her husband Tim into your cuckold that she had a breakdown and killed herself, leaving Tim to look after their three children who were all below the age of five."

"But I never made her do that! I didn't! And why is Tim having me killed?"

I interjected "Tim isn't having you killed. The father of Liz is a very wealthy man and he is hiring us to kill you because of what you did to his daughter, his son-in-law and the children."

He began to sweat, badly, his fear chemical making the room smell funky. "I'm wealthy! I'll pay you not to kill me! I have a wife and kids! Don't do this!"

"That's not how it works. We have to follow through with our job. If we took your money and let you live, we'd be killed ourselves. Murder Incorporated didn't die out in the 1940s. It regrouped and still to this day governs hits in the USA. And abroad, for the right kind of money. Besides which, Liz and Tim had kids, but you didn't give a fuck about them, did you?"

With Emily's assistance I gagged him and we managed to push and pull him down the stairs to our getaway car without being seen. We'd hired the apartment with that as our criteria.

He tried to resist, but after sapping him, we were able to get him in the trunk of our car with no further difficulty.

We drove to a predesignated location outside of town and I opened the trunk. He'd fouled himself, so the stench wasn't pleasant.

"You want to make peace with your God?" I asked him. Hey, I'm a psychopath, but I'm not a monster, okay?

He said something that sounded offensive, so I shot him through the heart. I checked his pulse, which was only noticeable by its absence. I re-closed the trunk.

Emily took out her phone and sent a text message to the clean-up crew who would come and deal with the car and the corpse. Everyone has their own specialized functions. We'd done ours; they'd do theirs.

We'd stashed a motorbike nearby, which we used to ride back home. Well, to what was our home for this operation.

Obviously, the police were interested from the point of view of a newly appointed manager who had vanished without trace.

They asked his colleagues what they'd thought of him? His newly appointed secretary, Ashley Jones, told them what she thought of him, but she shrugged and said to the police "I'm not really sure. He seemed like many sales managers I've met over the years... a little bit bombastic and very full of himself."

When they investigated him a little deeper, they found that even though he'd only been there for a couple of months, he'd already worked out several ways of scamming his new employer and that the wife and kids "back East" who he'd said would be joining him, didn't want anything to do with him. In fact, several years back his ex-wife had taken out a restraining order forbidding him from even contacting her and the children.

We cleaned the apartment as if we were expecting a visit from a CSI squad, and two months later, Ashley Jones put in her two week's notice, because her husband had got a new job in Florida. And we terminated the lease.

The truth was, we had a new contract in California. That was cool, as we both loved California. In addition to killing someone for a large fee, we'd get some surfing in, do some hiking and make visits to art galleries and museums. Well, even hired killers like the finer things in life.