Portrait of a hitman
Tea room games
Sometimes when I’m out and about with my teenage kid, we play a little game.
We pick out someone we see. Someone who looks kind of unusual will catch our eye. In a cafe, in the line at the Post Office, or waiting for a train. And we give them a fictional back story.
We’ve played it dozens of times. She always starts it. It inevitably begins as a fairly normal, straightforward narrative. Before long, it descends into a tale as black as midnight.
An imagined life of criminality unravels before us based entirely on a snapshot of some poor soul’s appearance and their behaviour while we watch them.
She always starts it. She’s kinda dark.
We were at the tea room on Castle Street. I’d been here a few times before. The tiramisu is really good here. But I was in a coffee and walnut kind of mood. She stabbed at a slice of carrot cake and sipped a cherry Pepsi.
A man walked in. Heavy-set, shaven-head. Younger than he looked. Mid-twenties at a guess. Tattoos across every visible patch of skin. Kind of twitchy.
He stood at the counter with his back to us.
“Credit card neck.” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“He’s got that thing that big, bald guys have where they get a dip in the skin where their neck meets their head. It looks like a terminal where you swipe a credit card.”
She made a swiping motion with her fork.
“Imagine the sweat that gathers there.It’s disgusting.”
I sniggered.
“What do you think he does for work?”, she said. And just like that, the game that had killed so much time for us in the past, began.
“Construction worker.”
“He’s too clean. He’d be covered in dirt.”
“Maybe it’s his day off? Doorman at a biker bar.”
“No. He’s big, strong, but not tough. Not face-to-face. He doesn’t like confrontation.”
“I’m more interested in his tattoos. What’s the story with those?”
“He has a name running down his inner forearm from his wrist to his elbow. The font is barely legible. It’s tough to make out.”
She squinted, and tilted her head, tracking his arm as the guy moved.
“Laura? I think?”
“But the ‘L’ and ‘r’ seem to be a bad cover up of a ‘P’ and an ‘l’.”
“Wow. I wonder what happened to Paula. Lucky escape, do you think?”
“No. Paula’s gone.” She slathered the cream on the carrot cake with the back of her fork, into the shape of a headstone.
“Gone, gone. She’s underneath the patio in his back yard.”
“There she is! Hello Sunshine.”
The guy was a unit. He ordered a black forest bagel and a pistachio latte and waited in line, nervously.
“He’s a bit antsy? Isn’t he?”, I said.
“He’s waiting for the cops to track him down. That’s a guilty man, right there.”
He sat down a few tables away, making it easy to continue with our game.
“Hmm. His clothes are clean, but his fingernails are dirty. Really dirty. Like he’s been in soil,” I remarked.
“I told you. He’s been shovelling. His hands are blistered and dirty. It’s no small effort to bury an adult body.”
On his right arm, there was a tattoo of a pile of skulls. It had been added to recently. One skull was distinctly newer than the others. It glowed red around the edges where the needle had scratched his skin repeatedly.
“The skulls represent everyone he’s killed.”
“That’s quite the mental jump. So he’s a serial killer?”
“No, contract. The skulls are all the same design. A serial killer would want to remember the kills distinctly. They’d all be different.”
“But if he killed Paula, and had her name tattooed on his arm at one point, she must have meant something. So why isn’t the skull distinct?”
“The skull is for someone else. Just a job. The tattoo cover up is to keep the cops off the scent. Although if I could spot the cover up from here, the cops won’t be fooled for long.”
I blew the hot froth on my cappuccino.
“I feel sometimes like I’m not guiding you in the right direction.”
There were scratches on his face, starting to scab over.
“Looks like Paula put up a fight. It was personal. She saw it coming.”
He bit into his bagel. His knees, visible beneath his long black shorts, were shaking.
“Right, game’s over. Time to put this one to bed.”
She got up and walked quickly towards his table. When he looked up from his bagel, she grabbed his head by the ears and slammed his face down into his plate.
Before he could react, she picked up his fork and drove it deep into the side of his head.
A woman shrieked, not quite believing what she was seeing.
He twitched, more so than before. She leant toward his ear and whispered something I didn’t quite catch.
For Paula.
She slid a knife from her sleeve and ran it, with speed and precision between the folds of skin on the back of his neck.
Blood and cherry compote oozed out across the white tablecloth.
The coffee shop regulars were stunned. Immobile with confusion.
She wiped the knife clean on the tablecloth and smiled at me.
“Let’s go, daddio.”
We walked out calmly. Someone behind the counter had pressed an alarm. It rang out loudly, but no one made an attempt to stop us.
We turned down a side-street. I heard the level of panic from the cake-shop filtering onto the sidewalk. My daughter didn’t seem to notice.
I put my arm round her shoulder, and ruffled her hair.
“That’s my girl”, I beamed. “Black as midnight.”
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This was a fun read. I wanted one of them to be a hitman so I'm glad it turned out that way. I also like how you introduce the reason for the hit as a discussion about a "covered up" tattoo. That is some fantastic work!