Yesterday disintegrated. A fingertip touched to a surface covered in dust. His breath catches on the exposed nerve in his front canine. He bites his lip to redirect the sense of pain elsewhere, but there is a bruise as cold as ice spreading through his face.
Back alley brawls aren’t much of a recipe for anything other than pain. Maintaining cover is a necessity, and sometimes the shit you have to do so that it keeps rolling along buckles the needle in your moral compass. He has carte blanche as long as he eventually brings down the kingpin. He has spent a long time dancing on that border where they start to question if you are a good undercover man or whether you’ve gone native.
But there is a hanging moment where hesitation is read by the wolves in the room. Wolves sense a sheep.
Being asked to take a piece off the board elevates you from being a piece yourself. You get to be a player. Not to say that you aren’t always a piece on some size board.
The guy who they’ve asked him to take care of is not a surprise. The man has entitlement issues and hasn’t earned a damned thing, except the shitty reputation that etched his name on a bullet. The clueless mooks that he’s seen getting whacked have, by and large, been totally unaware of their impending doom.
This guy isn’t like that. He must have heard something, and the something he heard must have included the data that his assassin was a first timer. The centre spread doesn’t do dick, where a headshot would have ended the problem there and then.
The crowbar shatters his left knee. He goes down in the most awkward fashion possible. The bullets aren’t to kill him after the first couple — they’re to make a point. There is one reason why he is not worried about them discovering the wire on him — he isn’t surviving this. His target is going to come out of this shining; and when they find the wire and realise what they’d been saved from, the whole crew us going to be in a love affair with the man.
Who made him? Who thought it was funny to make him think he was going to be a made man? Maybe it was this fucker stood over him now. He’d never know.
Oh, for a backstreet brawl. At some point the stomping takes out his hearing so he can’t hear anything beyond a high pitched whine. Death will come in silence. Eventually they will get everyone in this crew. A cop will be dead and there will only be one conclusion that can be drawn from it — only one place to look for the killer. A job. A job done.
Except the man who had made him had a tip off from the man who had been handling him. All the information disappeared into a metal trash can with a match dropped into it. Yesterday disintegrated.