Thrice Told Tales Read online

  THE END…

  and the end of my 500 word stories! And quite possibly my career!

  From Rob:

  Now onto some longer short stories. This next story, A Snitch in Time, was written recently and has never before been published anywhere, but the story following it was published in These Guns for Hire edited by JA Konrath for Bleak House Books in 2007. Enjoy A SNITCH IN TIME…

  A SNITCH IN TIME

  Across from me inside the cab of the jet plane sits a man in fear. Mirroring me, it seems. His plane about to take off, and he should be relaxed, but no, he is fidgeting. Maybe he’s the guy they put on the plane to kill me? But then here is another fellow fast asleep with the plane still at the terminal. Yet he can sleep? In this stifling air inside the belly of the beast? Maybe it’s pills? Maybe a fear of flying? Maybe he can sleep because he knows he has a long way to go before he has to kill me. Plans to take his sweet time. Australia is a long way off. After all, it’s a red eye flight and the movie is The DaVinci Code.

  Then again, the assassin they sent could be the guy with the headphones on, rocking to sounds no one else hears. Damn headphones might be covering one of those newfangled Bluetooth earpieces. Could be receiving instructions right this second. They might want the job done before the plane lifts off. I mean, for all I know.

  Then again it could be the fellow with the hooked nose stuck in a book, a Max Bolan novel from the look of it. Some mook wanting to be Max Bolan; thinks if he kills me, his reputation is set.

  OK, so I don’t know for sure who the hit man is, but I know one thing sure. A lousy snitch got to Romero, collected a good sum, told Romero that I hadn’t fulfilled the contract. That despite taking Romero’s blood moneyI didn’t kill one John Russell.

  I was supposed to be on a plane, any plane, half way to anywhere by now, supposed to be no hassle, no worry, while Russell was off in another direction, taking his family into hiding—all before anyone could possibly know. But one snitch got curious. One snitch got in under the wire. All it takes. One worm. A snitch in time.

  As a result, I am sitting here in first class examining my fellow passengers one by one—instead of enjoying the champagne; —desperately trying to decide which of them is the guy. Not the snitch. Snitches seldom to never get killed, and they never do any killing. They’re the parasites who live off both sides at once—the criminal element provides for them on the one hand, the authorities on the other, and for mere peanuts—gambling change—the worms will sell a man out to both sides.

  The authorities damn near caught up to me in the airport before I randomly selected a target of my own, brought him to heel, and became him: Sloan Davies Roberts. Damn sure I don’t look or talk like a Sloan Davies Roberts, and the ill fitting suit doesn’t help. Thing is extra large but still a tad tight around the middle. Still, if I keep my mouth shut, shuffle papers in Roberts’s briefcase, and make no eye contact, I figure to make it. Even if they find the dead Roberts, without any papers on him, there’s no way for airport or San Francisco PD to put it together.

  Do I feel badly about the real Mr. Roberts? You tell me. If you were facing life without the possibility of parole or execution, and a sure execution by shank on the inside ala Romero, huh? Don’t hesitate. Just do it. It’s called survival; you let nothing stand in the way of survival. Hell, it’s the way we’re wired, guys like me and John Russell.

  But someone on this g’damn plane must’ve spotted me in the terminal. Someone on this plane either here or in coach, is on my escape plane. I can feel it, almost smell it. A hired assassin same as me—a hit man, but this time, thanks to a slavering lowlife stoolie, I’m the mark. Never, in all my professional career, have I been the target of a hit. Gotta start now, on a Quantas jet?

  Whoever it is, I hope he understands cabin pressure at 50,000 feet.

  # # #

  I have to determine who it is and do him before he does me.

  No other way to play it if I’m to touch a single toe on Aussie soil, a place I chose at random when I stole Roberts’s wallet and plane ticket. Poor schmuck was just trying to relieve himself. Wrong place, wrong time for him, right place, right time for me.

  The only thing I can’t figure is how Lenny Guida—and I know damn well it was that weasel—figured out that John Russell was tipped off instead of killed, that the body inside a burning hulk of a car was not Russell’s. Guida, that Italian grease ball somehow squeezed in anywhere. He had an animal instinct, a real knack for getting in and getting information.

  Guida had to’ve gotten to someone at the hospital, someone in the morgue, someone who knew enough science to know that the dead guy didn’t match up on some minutia. Enough in Lenny Guida’s onion head. To be honest, I gotta hand it to Guida. A guy with multiple contacts for sure, and he knew how to turn news into money fast. Damn that fat little snitch. He had to be Johnnie on the spot to’ve gotten it all back to Romero in time for Romero to get someone on this plane. Here … now.

  A real snitch in time that Guida. With a bald head that looked for all the world like a melon or a ball of Gouda cheese at a wedding. Wish I had his neck in my hands right now; I’d squeeze life out of the creep-a-zoid.

  So who among the deadly human cargo aboard Quantas 174 is the guy? Who is it I need to worry about … the one who is going to come sneaking up behind my stuffed seat while I’m asleep to put one in my back? Who on board looks like he knows a silencer from a shot glass?

  The white-haired lady traveling with her of-age granddaughter seems harmless enough. They even giggle with an Aussie accent. But what about the granddaughter? A she-hit-man? Nahhh. Still, why not an Australian hit man? And the young guy to my left? Looks like a college kid. Be a great cover for a hit man, but then again… .

  Man, all of ’em seem to have an accent. Everyone aboard but me. Seems they’re all going home. Home to Aussie-land, I suppose. Me? All I know of Australia are a barrage of strange names on a map like Launceston and Tasmania. But these people, every man and woman aboard except me and this other killer have a home to go home to. And me without an accent. Makes me a larger target for the assassin whenever I open my mouth. Like when the stewardess asked about champagne and to buckle up, and what’d I stupidly answer? “Shore thang, ma’am.”

  Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps Romero’s guy missed getting on board, whoever he may be. Then again, maybe I’m just being paranoid. But in my line of work, paranoia is the gift that keeps a man healthy and breathing.

  The plane’s actually moving, being shoved off, like a tugboat push to sea. Things are looking better. We’re taxing off now. On my way. Rather on our way.

  Still can’t seem to relax, to stop staring at everyone around me. People are starting to stare back. Perhaps there really isn’t a damn thing to worry about. Maybe I got off scot free after all.

  Lay your head back, I tell myself. Take advantage of the pillow the young lady handed you. Cute in her uniform. Relax. Dream a little. I’d always heard that the beaches in Australia are spectacular. I catch my reflection in the portal window when the plane comes about. You look jumpy, someone’s gonna notice. In fact, the stewardess is now staring. Calm down. You’re home free.

  All true unless this guy on board is such a cool character that I won’t see it coming until it comes.

  I put on the headphones the nice stewardess had earlier handed me. I love to fly first class. Don’t want to listen to Kenny G, so I tune into the cockpit palaver between the pilots and those in the tower. At the same time, we stop taxiing, and I assume we’re finally in line for takeoff. Elation washes over me at the prospect of actually lifting off for a country I’ve never been.

  Then I hear disturbing news in my ear. I know it before others in the cabin because I’m listening in on the cockpit frequency. We have a delay, ladies and gentlemen. I imagine an hour if not more on the hot, black asphalt, and I imagine panic taking over sitting here in the already stifling atmosphere of the 747.

  But it’s worse than a mere delay. I hear the pil
ot tell his co-pilot that they gotta return to the terminal, something about the authorities looking for an internationally known spy, a real killer. I have to inwardly laugh even as I cringe that they got me confused with some James Bond type.

  I got into this mess because I didn’t kill John Russell. Did so for good reason. John and me, we grew up on the meanest streets in Cisco, and you don’t kill a guy who saved your ass several times over. Not in my book. So why’d I take the contract? Who better? Who better to warn John and to help him before the termites, the parasites, and his real killers got at him and his family? Yeah, the contract called for the death of his family before his eyes … before he bought it.

  Told JR—I’ve always called him JR—that it was no way to live, the way he and I live, always on the edge, always looking over our shoulders, always in peril, and always worrying if the next time it’d be one of us. How many beers had we hoisted to that kind of talk over the years?

  The door to the cockpit is opening now, and the co-pilot is stepping out, his features blocked by the red-headed stewardess who is flirting with him. But the co-pilot is studying everyone in first class. Meanwhile, the pilot is politely calling us ladies and gentlemen in preparation of the bad news, reporting to everyone over the PA that “We’re having to return to the gate. A brief delay.”

  A wave of groans is the response, a collective groan with Australian accent intact. As for me, I’m fixated now on the co-pilot. Strange. I see it in his eyes: intensity and alarm. Then his gaze falls on me.

  He’s the killer, uniform or not. And he’s coming toward me.

  I feel like a man dropped into a pressure cooker. I got no weapon to defend myself. That’s when I realize something else—that I know this guy. It’s a shocking sort of revelation. Despite the mustache and the colored contacts, I know he’s been put here to do me, and from the way he moves, I know it’s JR—John Russell himself.

  I got no weapon; had to ditch it in an airport trash container. Knew I’d never get it past inspectors. But slick JR in a pilot’s uniform with a Quantas logo, he’d’ve gotten past J. Edgar Hoover. Still, he’s my friend, and he must know he can’t go through with it.

  Questions tornado through my mind faster than I can answer. How’d he know I’d be on this Quantas plane? That he’d need to don a Quantas uniform and cap? And how could he have been turned against me this way? After all I’d done for him? Had they promised him safety for his family as well as a bundle he couldn’t refuse? Was it Romero’s way of keeping everyone in line?

  JR makes his way past me to sit in the empty seat just behind and to my right. My back quivering uncontrollably, I expect the shock of a bullet to rip through me.

  “They turned you against me, hey, JR?”

  “I had one last job to do for Romero.”

  “Whataya talking about? There’s no patched things up with Romero. He sent me after you.”

  “Lenny Guida told him about this guy named Sloan Davies Roberts, but he didn’t say he was you.”

  “But I’m not Roberts!” I half-turn to see him out the corner of my eye. He looks grim.

  “Checked with the stewardess, and you’re in his seat, Max.”

  “I can explain.”

  “We never had any secrets, you always said, but you never told me about this gig or this Roberts alias, man! You workin’ for the terrorists now? Roberts?”

  “Never!”

  “Romero sent me after Roberts to square things. According to Lenny Guida, you’re carrying government secrets in that briefcase on the seat next to you, Max.”

  “But I’m not—” I glance at the papers and for the first time realize Guida’s information is again correct.

  The blast sounds like a puff of air from an air gun, hardly noticeable above the tinkle of ice and the calm chatter bouncing off the cabin walls as life drains from me, and I feel JR’s warm, firm hand holding me by the shoulder so as I won’t slump over. He does this while closing and taking control of the briefcase. “I’ll just put this in a safe place, Mr. Roberts.”

  The End…just in time…

  From Rob:

  The next story is also about a hit man, but it is from the point of view of a dead hit man, a hit man who made an important discovery about himself which proved too little, too late and quite fatal… (picture me as Rod Serling with smoke curling about my face). PET PROJECT was published in These Guns for Hire edited by JA Konrath for Bleak House Books in 2007.

  PET PROJECT

  Dead don’t get any deader, Tino ‘The Ax” Capino said while spitting out dirt and realizing the lie inherent in the phrase that said a green light don’t get any greener—cause he was more than just dead. His parts were scattered all over the state of Illinois.

  And me a professional, getting pegged while in bed, escorted out to my own execution by a small-time sociopathic, unfeeling fuck who could have just give me one in the back of the head, but no…he had to follow Capino’s orders to the letter, make me suffer torturous hours, and watch while tied to a tree as each part of me was cut away. Bastards ought all to rot in hell but I ain’t found where that place is yet myself.

  Taking one in the back of the head, simple and clean, or like I did it, a single swift cleaver blow—hence the nickname, get it? Christ, had I known…had I any inkling of the series of events that lead up to my virtual slaughter, then maybe…just maybe I’d’ve done things some different. And I wish now I had spent more time with my mom and the family. And that time I stole that old lady’s purse when I was eleven, damn, there was no call to hit her in the face with it first. I never shoulda treated that old lady the way I done, but a man’s only got so much fuse. End of story…unless you want the details…and as for me…what else I gotta do? I’m fuckin’ here to eternity so if you want to see the devil in the details here goes:

  When Tino ‘the Ax’ Capino for the first time sat up in his grave and looked around and noticed his missing limbs, ears, nose, genitalia, and other extremities, he said to himself, “For a minute, I thought I was in trouble.

  Then he felt the black walls on all sides of his unmarked dirt grave closing in. He realized the depth of the choking pitch dark all around him. “But I’m here, even if I ain’t all in one piece.”

  It slowly came back to him. Yeah…Binney Melvino aka Binney the Butcher had played slice and dice with him. He’d begun with Tino’s ears…taking each off one at a time, holding the bloody things up to Tino’s tortured eyes, chanting his name—“Ax…Ax…the Ax…ohhh…I’m so scared of the Ax!” Binney then tossed each ear off into the trees and brush for animal consumption.

  Only justice he saw in this life and it had to be his own body parts being consumed by hungry woodland creatures from rodents to a red fox that’d made off with one of his feet.

  Being a hit man, Tino’s old father used to say, had its bad days, and this was damned bad. It even started to rain while he was being executed body piece by body piece. Binney snipped off his left nipple, and by the time ‘The Ax’ screamed, lightning started and thunder roared and the rain became hard chinaberry pellets stinging the raw flesh areas, the most recent his right nipple now removed and in the bush. Gave new meaning to biting flesh.

  Tino the Ax knew where Binney the Butcher was going with this now….

  Sure, he’d brought this down around himself; maybe he’d made a few mistakes. He recalled pleading with Binney—a useless act of contrition, as good as talking to the bark on the tree that Tino found himself lashed to. Saddest part of all, he was being killed in a vengeance thing that started when he showed a small human spark of pity, an inth of kindness—the milk of human kindness he’d never known…pity for a mark.

  In all his career as a hit man, no one had ever asked Tino ever once to take out a sniffer dog, a greyhound, a cat, a monkey, a canary, or a horse--or any other animal. But that side of the business had begun to thrive and the money was too good to turn down. These days anything goes, Tino thought, and you couldn’t turn your nose away from the green so e
asy anymore given the state of the economy.

  Tino started out an enforcer, doing odd jobs even as a hefty teen while still in Carpenter Elementary—eighth grade. He’d been born with some kind of glandular problem that left him a giant among peers; he’d never fit in, and school simply was not for him. Certainly, not after a third repeat of eighth grade. So he asked his Uncle Sal Capino for full-time work.

  Sal took him in, treated him like a son—albeit calling him Quasimoto all the time. Sal sent Tino to another kind of school—The Squash Garden Restaurant, a front for a hit man school with an all-hit man faculty. At hit man school, the first thing he learned was to never ever let a single emotion enter into his thinking; he learned to be an automaton able to pull the trigger on anyone anytime anyhow to get the job accomplished when the bosses handed you a contract to fill.