“Go on.”
“The woman, Win, was being shoved into the back of an SUV parked at the side of the road. I could see bruises on her face where she had been punched. When her assailant saw me coming towards them, he pointed a gun at me and said to mind my own business if I knew what was good for me. I don’t know why but I kept moving toward him and then Win bit his hand and the gun came loose. Crying out, her assailant hit her with his fist knocking her head into the back of the car. The other woman, Toni, who I hadn’t seen before, picked the gun up off the ground.”
“Where did Toni come from? You said she was in the restroom.”
“Well, maybe it was Win who had picked up the gun and Toni was somewhere behind me coming on to the scene.”
“He had just knocked Win unconscious, how could she have picked up the gun?”
“I take your point. It wasn’t likely that Toni would have gotten to the gun before me. So I must have been the one to pick up the fallen gun. I had never fired a hand gun before and my intent was to rescue Molly, although it was Win this time, wasn’t it, by keeping the gun away from her assailant. Win wasn’t moving so I gave the gun to Toni, who had just come up behind me and told her to cover me while I carried Win to safety. Before I could react, Buck, I think that was his name, had Win in a stranglehold and was using her as a shield. And then I noticed that two of his redneck friends had come out of the bar and were calling to him and we had lost whatever limited advantage we had.”
“I’m losing you,” the interrogator says.
“When Toni shot Buck in the leg, Win was able to free herself and we got into a pink Cadillac convertible which had been left unattended about a hundred feet away.”
“So you admit to having stolen the car.”
“Yes, but we would have returned it if given the chance. The three of them chased us in Buck’s Blazer and we exchanged gunfire and I got lucky and must have blown out a tire because their van went off the road and crashed into a tree.”
“And after that you stopped to see if anyone had survived the crash.”
“No. Not that I remember. I think we just continued on.”
“Didn’t you want to know what happened to your pursuers?”
An image flashes before my eyes of a large man slumped over a steering wheel, his face crusted in blood. The interrogator removes her blouse and sits down on the side of the bed. She removes her bra and invites me to put my head between her breasts. I am not usually so reticent. An unseen hand lingers on my crotch as if it were the only possible resting place.
“I wanted them dead,” I say. “I killed them all. I fucked both girls that night.”
“You lovely man,” she says.
60th Night
The following is the transcript of my first confession. They write down everything you say here. No falsehood, no specious sigh, is left unrecorded.
I was hired and subsequently trained by an ultra-secret subgovernment organization as an assassin. I was at loose ends at the time and looking to do something adventurous. For some reason, perhaps shyness, I never bothered to verify the credentials of the shadowy men that hired me.
Initial contact was established through an unstamped letter dropped through my mail slot, offering me the opportunity for well-paid, fulfilling work with the added bonus of exotic travel while serving the unannounced interests of my country.
Nothing in the recruiting flyer suggested that killing might be part of the job description. The offer came with a questionnaire, which would indicate or not whether I had the right stuff for the job. I filled out the questionnaire in my usual fanciful way and expected of course never to hear from whoever it was again. Three weeks later I got a check in the mail for fifty dollars, which if signed and deposited would represent acceptance of their offer including an all-expenses-paid invitation to their training facilities in New Mexico.
I agonized over the decision, but when a week later a check for two-hundred dollars arrived in the mail, I provisionally accepted their offer.
The training was very much like the preparations for the football season at my high school. A lot of it had to do with the testing and sharpening of reflexes. A notable exception was the weaponry work in our regimen. I suppose I should have known that if they put guns in your hands for practice, eventually they’ll ask you to use them for real. The thing is, they kept us so busy we didn’t have time to reflect on the implications of what we were doing.
Anyway, my weaponry instructor, a woman virtually my own age, was very encouraging, complimented virtually everything I did in the shooting-at-human-targets class, said I had a natural gift for this kind of work.
My first assignment was to serve as my final exam for the course so they sent a shadowy figure with me to grade my performance.
I assumed that this would not be a actual assassination, just a realistic approximation, that we were just going through the motions to test how well I had assimilated the training. Consequently, it was a shock to discover, watching the news on TV that night, that the public figure I had lined up in the sights of a high-powered rifle had been shot between the eyes from some unseen distance.
The discovery threw me into a funk and my immediate supervisor sent me home for rest and recovery. Eventually, obsessive regret turned into amnesia and I felt absolved for whatever it was I had done. So I was feeling okay about myself when my second assignment arrived through the mail slot in my door in an unstamped envelope.
The assigned target was a public figure I had always instinctively disliked so I thought to myself, I’ll do this one for the payday and then quit, change my name (which they had already changed) and go somewhere unexpected, a place no one would think to look.
As much as I disliked the target, and possibly for that very reason, I couldn’t kill the man when faced with the opportunity. It made no sense, but that’s the way it was.
When I reported my failure to my superior, she said not to move from the booth I was phoning from, that they would send someone I knew to bring me in for debriefing. The someone they sent, a man I had trained with in New Mexico, took a shot at the phone booth from a roof across the street.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, there was someone else in the booth at the time. Instinct had led me to wait elsewhere.
When they discovered their mistake, they came after me again, and again, and in the process, mostly in self-defense, I ended up killing more people (sometimes bystanders got caught in the crossfire) than if I had continued my aborted career as assassin.
So the killing didn’t stop, as I had hoped, but became a way of life predicated on the instinct to survive, the body count far beyond anything I could have imagined.
When the secret government agency got tired of sending their own operatives after me, they framed me for capital crimes in places I sought sanctuary so that the local authorities would do the job for them. Even in places I had never been before, I was an established public enemy, thought to be armed and dangerous, my face on file on virtually every electronic screen.
During this period, I was in constant motion, eating and sleeping on the move, so tuned to impending danger that everyone on my radar screen seemed a potential assassin.
If there was no safe place to go, the only way to break the pattern was get myself killed. The idea came to me when I met this derelict, who looked enough like me to pass as my twin. This is not a story I am particularly proud of so I will not go into the unappetizing details.
Suffice to say, a week or so after I was reported dead, the agency that hired me and had been doing their damnedest to get me off their books, gave up their pursuit.