by Stella Noir
And my rifle was still up on the roof. I couldn’t leave it up there by itself for too long.
“Fuck!” I hissed, calculating my next step.
I waited until she reached the ground floor to see in which direction she would be running off to. Left, opposite of the way that I had been looking at all night. The direction in which the corpse of a satisfied yet careless man was now rotting in a dark alley until some poor passerby would find him.
There was still a chance for me to get her.
I decided quickly, turning on my heel to make my way back up to the roof where my rifle was still positioned for the job, now unguarded. It was dangerous enough to leave it up there, a reckless move that is unusual for me. As is being seen on the job.
Luckily, I find the rifle just as I left it, its deadly eye still aiming down the alley below—and far away.
This is my favorite weapon, the most reliable and the most suitable for my style. Quiet, discreet and accurate even at a very far distance.
I grab my loyal companion and head over to the other side of the roof. My well trained eyes find her soon. She has a very distinct feature. That thick and untamed hair, a wild mane dancing on top of a slim frame. It makes her head appear huge in comparison to her delicate and almost child like body.
I watch her running down the street while setting up my rifle. She is a fast runner and putting distance between herself and the building at an almost admirable speed.
However, distance has never stopped me from finishing a hit.
I get down on my knees. Squinting through the scope, I find her within seconds, her dainty stature dancing in front of my eyes as she darts down the street. The way she is moving her arms along with her sprint suggests that she knows what she’s doing. She must be an athlete. But to me she looks more like a quick little deer trying to get away from its predator.
Not an easy catch—but she’s never been hunted by me.
My aim moves along with her, my finger on the trigger, ready to fire.
But for some reason, I don’t.
I have never shot a woman in my life before. Not once. I never had to. All my jobs were men. Shitty, awful men who deserved no better. They were the kind of jobs I received—and gladly accepted. The orders always came with the addition to kill any potential witnesses, no matter their sex or age. I never felt comfortable with these conditions. They basically gave me the green light to kill women. And children. The thought of having to do that on account of being careless with my proceedings made me one of the best, one of the quietest and most discreet killers. I pride myself on this reliable discretion.
And now this.
My pulse is racing and I am breaking into a cold sweat. My index finger is hovering over the trigger like a frightened kid.
She’s right there, within aim. I still follow her through the scope, but I am hesitating.
You have to do this. You want out. What if she talks? What if she saw your face? What if she has been watching you the entire time, even before you pulled up the scarf? What if she could recognize you?
She could tell them where the shot came from, and she could tell them God knows what about the appearance of the man she witnessed shooting another.
She has to go.
So she is a woman. Why should I let that stop me? Why do I discriminate between men and women? It never made sense to me on a rational level, I just avoided having to make that decision by being careful. I was lucky enough to never be presented with a job that had me face a female target.
But it’s more than that, I know it.
It’s not just the fact that she is a woman. She is also innocent, just a young girl who was at the wrong place at the wrong time. As far as I know, she has done no evil to deserve this fate. She knows nothing of the dark world I reside in. Right now, she is just scared for her life—and has every reason to be.
Of course, I could be wrong in all of this. After all, she did sit on a rooftop all by herself in the middle of the night, in a neighborhood that is anything but safe and classy. Who knows what she was up to.
But my gut tells me that it was nothing bad. Those eyes, they have never seen true evil.
Until tonight.
“Dammit,” I hiss. I find myself unable to pull the trigger. It’s as if my finger is pushing against an invisible wall.
How can I be so stupid? Female, innocent, whatever. It should not make a difference, because all that matters is that she saw me and that she could talk. She could talk and put my sorry ass behind bars with her testimony. That is all that should matter to me right now.
As it turns out, the girl releases me from my pathetic dilemma—by turning into a narrow alley that leads to one of the more populated main streets and thus out of my reach.
I straighten up, panting heavily as I stare down the brick walls between which she disappeared. There is no way for me to get her now. She is obscured by a maze of high brick wall buildings and no longer running in the open in front of me.
“Fuck!” I let out another frustrated yell.
But that agitation is mixed with a strong sense of relief.
CHAPTER FOUR
Nike
It’s amazing what a little more than a week can do. It has been nine days since that terrible decision of mine to spend another night on this rooftop.
My best friend and roommate Amanda may have a point: I really need a new hobby.
When I got back home that night, I have never been happier not to live alone. I don’t know how I would have handled sleeping by myself in an empty apartment, easy prey for a professional killer who could hunt me down easily and finish me off just like he did with whoever he shot that night.
But then again, why hasn’t he? I still have trouble believing that I could have gotten away from him. It seems too good to be true.
Just like another thought: he might not have killed anybody that night. I checked the local news for days after the incident, searching for any kind of murder report that would coincide with what I had witnessed that night. But there was nothing. If someone gets shot within the city, albeit in a bad neighborhood, one would think that it gets mentioned in the news. Right?
Maybe he didn’t shoot anybody. Or he just tried to shoot but missed his target? Either way, his behavior after noticing my presence was scary enough.
With every day that passes without any news about a murder in that neighborhood that night, I become calmer and calmer, and I dismiss the idea of going to the police for many reasons, the main one being fear.
One is my fear of having to answer a lot of questions that I have no answer to—and I know there are many. Everything happened so fast that night, I wasn’t even sure if what I thought I had seen was even true. Was there really a rifle? Was it a real one? Did that man even chase after me? Did he maybe say something, yell some kind of explanation and I just didn’t hear it because I was panicking?
And I am scared of would happen if investigations started and I would have to testify as a witness. If he really was a professional killer, maybe he was just waiting for me to go to the police to testify so that he would know who I am? He might be a well known criminal with connections. Connections that would carry out some kind of revenge in his name if I were to bring him behind bars.
I shake my head to cast the thoughts away. It’s time to go home, anyway. I am one of the last few people left at the office and there is no reason to stay any longer. I close the manuscript I was working on and leave a few notes to myself for the next day.
Even as a new editor, I am left with a surprising amount of freedom when it comes to the projects I am working on, even though it has only been a year on the job for me. My boss not only trusts me a lot more than I would have expected at this stage, he also includes me in a lot of affairs that I would have deemed myself to be too unimportant and young for.
Like this upcoming fundraiser. I don’t know what made him decide to invite me to come to an event like this, as I always figured they are reserved for the
more experienced in this métier, but he did. It is a very high class event, but with little meaning, at least to me.
In all honesty, the most nagging question that I see myself confronted with is that of what dress I should wear. It’s not like my wardrobe is prepared to serve for high class receptions among Gucci and the like.
I will have to ask Amanda. She will know, she always does. After all, she is closer to fashion professionally as well. We met during college in a writing class. Our love for the written word soon made us the closest of friends, even though we headed in different directions. While I managed to land a position as an editor at a publisher for all kinds of fiction—but mostly criminal and suspense, as those are our bestsellers—she became a journalist and works as a freelancer for different fashion magazines.
Both of us are living our dream, but as it often is with dreams; they don’t pay well. So, it was more out of necessity than want that we decided to rent an apartment together and become roommates for the time being.
“Until we find someone else to share the rent with,” she said back then, speaking, of course, of men. Unlike me, she has a very colorful hobby that keeps her busy on the weekends: the pursuit of a suitable bachelor. Though, I reckon that a lot of the guys she decided to bring home, were not exactly the kind of suitable that most would think of.
I admire her in that regard. To say that my love life was less exciting would be the understatement of the year. I don’t think I would want to pursue a life like hers, bringing home a new guy almost every weekend—most of them quite a “waste of time” as Amanda calls it. But it would be nice to be a little more… out there.
When I get home, I find my adventurous friend sitting in the kitchen, talking on the phone. She throws me a quick kiss and a wave as I pass by. I peel myself out of my office clothes and exchange them for yoga pants and a sweatshirt.
I also brush my hair, even though I know that it is a futile attempt. There is nothing I can do to tame it. It frames my face and shoulder in thick, dark blond waves that appear to have a will of their own. Lioness, my mother used to call me, because of it. I hated that nickname, because it doesn’t describe me at all. Lions are strong, fierce and dominant creatures. They are predators, hunters and there is a reason why they are called kings of the jungle.
I am nothing like that.
Besides, the ones with the manes are male lions. Their manes may look similar to my hair at times, but when it comes to character, the animal and I couldn’t be further apart.
After changing clothes, I follow another routine. A new one that I have adopted just this week. I start my laptop and check the local news, again. And again, there is nothing that suggests a murder has taken place just a few days ago not too far from where I live.
I shake my head in disbelief. Had I imagined things?
That’s when it hits me. The news may not tell me anything, but there’s something that could.
Police reports!
I furl my eyebrows as I type in the words, not sure exactly what I am looking for. I don’t even know if these reports are public. But if they are, they could possibly tell me something the news won’t.
My search soon takes me to a site that lists the kinds of incidents I am looking for. It is scary to see how much criminal activity surrounds the peaceful microcosm I am living in. A lot of attempted robberies, almost every day. Knife attacks, drunken men punching each other’s faces, a woman reporting that someone tried to rape her just two blocks from where I am living.
I swear to myself to never look at these again once I am done searching. This shit is crazy. I thought the kind of manuscripts I am working with were farfetched fiction, but looking at these statistics leads me to think otherwise.
I change the neighborhood I am looking at, now scrolling through the district to which I tend to escape almost every week. Not any neighborhood. It’s the closest I could call home, the place I have stayed at the longest. A place that has the strength and characteristics to pull you down, to destroy any decency, any dream and willpower, any ambition. There seems to be only one path to follow for kids who grow up there: down.
For me, it acted as fuel. While it took everything from me, trying to take me down with everyone else, I held on to the idea that there must be something else, something better out there. Something that may not feel to be within reach, but actually is, if I only tried enough.
My dreams weren’t that big, but big enough to give me something to strive for. Maybe that made it easier. I not only had something to get away from, but also something to get to.
As I scan through this much longer list of recent reports, I am instantly reminded of how bad it really was. How scared I was to take a step outside, even when my mother was with me. It was terrible.
As I approach the date on which I met the dark guy on the roof, my heart starts pounding with fear. Please, don’t let there be any reports. Please, please, please no report.
But there is.
It is the first incident listed for the day that followed the night I was chased away from my usual hangout spot on the roof.
47-year old man shot. Possible connection to mafia activity.
I inhale audibly and can almost feel the color disappearing from my face.
Fuck.
Somehow, it was so much easier until now. There was nothing in the news, and as long as it’s not reported, it hasn’t happened, right? I tried to convince myself for more than a week that what I had witnessed that night didn’t really happen.
No one had died that night—until now.
I have to go to the police. I have to report this.
But how would I explain myself? How would I explain the fact that I waited for more than a week to tell them? Maybe they’d think I was involved in the whole thing somehow.
And what good could possibly come out of this? It’s not like I could tell them a lot about the guy. I haven’t seen his face, just a quick glance of his eyes. It was dark and he was dressed in dark colors, hiding his face behind a scarf and his hair beneath a beanie. I don’t even know what hair color he might have, though something tells me that it was not blond. How tall was he? I don’t know. Was there anything characteristic about him that would help me to identify him? I don’t think so.
All I could tell them is that I saw him shooting with a rifle from that roof, and they probably know that much. Though, I wonder if they were able to unveil the exact location of the shooter.
Would it help them to know? Probably.
Would I become an accessory to the crime if I don’t report to the police?
My thoughts circle back to the concern of what might happen to me if I report him to the police. What if all this would lead to was me becoming embroiled in the mob somehow? The thought scares me so much, and I don’t think that it’s such an unlikely turn of events. After all, the mafia does act in its own little microcosm, at least that’s what it feels like to me. Everyone knows they exist and have their hands in all kinds of business affairs, but one hardly ever hears anything about their activities.
Like this one, a definite murder. Why was there nothing in the news about it? Not even in the local news that seemingly reports about even the dumbest shit that happens around here…
“Nike?” I hear Amanda yell from the kitchen. “You wanna eat something? I’m making pasta!”
I swallow hard. I feel sick to my stomach. My throat is shut tight by a heavy lump and the thought of food is almost painful.
I don’t know if I can eat, but I know that I would welcome the distracting company of my friend.
“Yeah, sure!” I reply and shut my laptop.
CHAPTER FIVE
Nike
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” my ever so observant friend comments when I walk into the kitchen.
I cast her a weak smile, trying to look less distraught. It never works with her, though.
“Tough day,” I lie.
“Oh?” She asks, turning back to the stove. Amanda is an e
xcellent cook. While I am capable of feeding myself with somewhat healthy food here and there, always having to force myself to cook something that requires more than one pot, she effortlessly throws in ingredients and spices and creates amazing dishes.
“I thought your deadline was still miles away,” she adds. “How come it’s been rough today? Isn’t this one of the slow stretches right now?”
Damn. I’m such a bad liar, and I tend to forget how well Amanda listens every time I tell her even the most mundane stories from work.
“Oh, not really stress like that,” I try to explain, sitting down at the kitchen table behind her. I know she wouldn’t want my help for cooking, and if there is something to do for me, it’ll most likely be something that needs to be chopped and she’ll just place it in front of me along with the order.
“Just bad moods, people fighting. And I’m tired, haven’t slept well,” I continue my lies.
“I see,” she states, without looking at me.
She said she’s just making pasta, but there are three pots on the stove, a big one and two smaller ones. She is boiling water in the big one while throwing in chopped up onions in another. The third doesn’t seem to be in use yet.
“What are you making?” I ask in an attempt to change the subject.
“Pasta,” she repeats. “With a carbonara variation. Kind of deciding on the spot here.”
Almost everything Amanda cooks is a variation of something else. Sometimes, I wish I could be as creative as she is with her cooking, and her work, too. While I just polish the work of others, she’s someone who writes new pieces and can make up a story of her own. I don’t think I could ever do that, neither in cooking nor in my work.
“Hey, I heard today that you guys are involved in that Connor fundraiser this weekend,” Amanda says, casting me a quick glance over the shoulder.
I’m startled. “Yeah, how did you know?”