Moraga had no one to talk to.  Moraga needed no one to talk to.  Sometimes Moraga would talk to himself, but mostly he only would think.

He did not often think about the job.  Like most in his profession his mind was often at a drifting lull, never resting on what it had to do in the hours leading up to the hit but only drifting about trivially, like a wind waiting for a plastic garbage bag to catch.  There were weeks of preparation to make and then there were those few seconds or minutes of razor-sharp focus, but now, there was just the wind, the near-random tossing about waiting for something to get caught up in. 

One of the things he thought was how much he did not like Mexico.  This, he thought, is where his grandparents had left, the place they wanted to get away from.  He did not like being brought back here, even on good business.  It was too hot even in winter, and there was something wet and heavy in the air that wasn’t the beginning of rain.  When people would here him talk they would assume he was one of them.  He wasn’t one of them and he wanted to do the job and get out of their shithole country so he could go back home to Chicago.  He hated the ignorant fucks in the restaurants and hotels, the way they looked at him with a mixture of expectancy and pride, like he was a local boy made good.  It made him sick, how they looked at him.

Absently, he hitched the waist of the attendant’s uniform he wore.  He thought about the money he’d be making for this, how it made the trip to this rotten country worthwhile.  It was easy to soak clients back home when you were doing a job out of the country.  You would tell them that operating expenses were higher, that you had to grease palms and take care of paperwork and buy your way around dozens of local regulations, combine it with the expense of travel, and, well, sir, you understand why I have to ask.  He’d usually walk away with an extra fifty, easily.  It was funny because what you would tell them, it was the opposite of the truth.  Expenses were nothing in most countries, hotels and meals a tenth of what they cost at home.  Bribes were indeed plentiful but you could have anyone in this whole fucking country for the money you’d use back in New York to pay off a cut-rate parking lot attendant.  As far as the law, he could walk around carrying a grenade launcher if he flashed enough cash.  The only thing that was hard about it was that you had to get used to being less careful than you usually were.  It made him laugh.

Moraga had heard before he left that Anagnostakis was taking his boy on a client meet.  That was funny too. Andy Anagnostakis and Daniel Hampton were the only big hitters in Chicago besides Moraga, and always they were calling him ‘unprofessional’.  They would say it to each other and they would say it to hitters in different towns and they would even say it to clients, he knew they did.  They would never say it to his face, the chicken shits.  But here was Anagnostakis, that old Greek fuck, bringing a little boy to meet clients, and they called Moraga unprofessional. Anagnostakis with his boy, goddamn faggot probably, Hampton with a fucking wife, and it was Moraga who was unprofessional. 

He of the three of them had not been trained.  Hampton and that other nigger, Berry who taught him, they had both been Army, and Anagnostakis came from who knows what branch of intelligence – some kind of spook, anyway.  They looked down on him because he came up through the street.  Small change killing, they called that.  He came from drugs and gangs, and fucking Hampton, nigger Hampton looked down on him for it, like he wasn’t ghetto, like his whole fucking family weren’t bangers.  Moraga learned to do it right; he hadn’t touched anything to do with drugs in fifteen years.  He commanded a higher salary than any of them because he wasn’t afraid to work for someone who wanted to send a message.  He would be sending one tonight. 

They kept tabs on each other.  Not to rat anyone out; try that and your work dries up before your next heartbeat, and the heartbeat after that is your last.  It was just something you did, something you knew about; there weren’t many people in the business, and not a lot of work being done at their skill level, so you naturally tended to know what the rest of them were doing. Anagnostakis was on some corporate job, the kind he liked, with all those good people in good suits who felt so bad about what they had to do, the bought-out cocksuckers Andy loved to work for so much.  Hampton was getting ready for a political gig; he did lots of those.  That, at least, Moraga respected.  The two of them, though, Jesus Christ.  They didn’t even like to say killing or murder.  It upset their self-image. 

The earpiece was starting to bother him.  It was rough on the edges and felt like it was cutting him, but there was no blood.  He hoped the call would come soon so he could get the fuck out of the hallway, out of the hotel, out of the country.

He wondered what Hampton told his wife about what he did.  Moraga never kept a woman around long enough for them to ask, and if they did, he would have told them he was a drug dealer.  No one even cares anymore that you do that.  It was as safe an occupation as anything nowadays.  The cops never hassled him about anything, and he didn’t have some house in the suburbs and some bullshit reputation with his neighbors or their kids or some motherfucking wife to worry about.  The only reputation he needed was the one that put him where he is right now, waiting for a call, waiting to do what he needed to do. 

There was already work on the burner for when he came home.  He’d gotten word before he got on the plane to Mexico.  Moraga had more in common with the two men back in Chicago than differences, it was true:  but it was all in the details.   How they handled guns, how they hid their money, their aversion to phones and computers, the way they could disappear into the bigness of the world – these were all just tricks, things everyone did in their profession because it was the only way to do them.  But he alone of them did not hide from what he was, did not pretend he was someone other than who he was.  To the world the were all invisible, but he alone could see himself.

The earpiece chirped.

“¿Puede usted hacer que alguien me traiga el hielo, por favor?”

“Si, señor.  Immediatamente.”

“Éste es Sr. Alvarez en el sitio 1432.”

“Si, señor. Por supuesto. Enseguida.”

Moraga pocketed the earpiece and slipped the flat pistol out of the small of his back, where it had lay, cold and heavy, between the white dress shirt and the undershirt.   He reached above the soda machine where, earlier in the day, he had taped the suppressor, and screwed it to the barrel.  He stood up from the ice bucket upon which he’d been sitting for nearly an hour – who’d have thought that old Alvarez had it in him to go that long? – and stretched his legs for a few minutes.  He removed the tape, pocketing it and making sure he’d left no fibers snagged above the machine before filling the bucket with ice.  He stopped briefly in front of a hallway mirror to straighten his tie and make sure the false mustache was in place and didn’t look too ridiculous.  Throwing a serving cloth over his inside arm, he knocked firmly on the door of 1432.

“Sr. Alvarez, he traído su hielo y la bandeja del servicio.”

He could hear the creak of the bed as Alvarez lifted his fat frame to come to the door, already rumbling out some complaint about not wanting to be charged for room service he hadn’t ordered.  Moraga had plenty of time to insert his own key in the electronic lock, hearing the bloated bag of shit inside get winded as he pulled on a robe; of course he wouldn’t bother to just get dressed while he was waiting.  Probably wanted to admire his own flab.  The lock gave its small, satisfying click and Moraga entered; set the ice down on the edge of the dressing shelf near the door he knew would be there, and Alvarez was kind enough to present him with the perfect target of his fat angry mouth wide open to tell him what an outrage it was that his room had been entered without permission.

Moraga pushed the door shut with his back foot as he squeezed the trigger once.  The pop of escaping gas from the pistol was followed in less than a second by the wet flick of the back of Alvarez’s head opening up on the wall behind him.  Moraga knew where the girl would be, so he didn’t even look at first, just two more squeezes of the trigger with the gun moved slightly down and to his left, in hopes of shutting her up before a scream.  It was a proper guess; the shots went directly through the mass of her brown trunk, and she made no more noise than a rattling wheeze as she let her life out through her back and onto the white sheets and gold blankets.

“Huh,” he said to himself. 

He performed a quick check for cameras or recording devices just after confirming the two were dead, then went back out in the hall to where he’d left the room service tray.  From under the burgundy table-cover, he removed a small saw, some towels, and a number of sealable plastic bags.  Returning to the room, he turned on the television, hoping to catch some baseball scores while he was working.

Twenty minutes later, he returned to his own room, on floor 4 of the hotel.  He washed up, changed clothes, and altered his appearance slightly to resemble who he was when he flew into the country.  After several hours, he walked out to a spot on the beach and took the plastic bags out of a small backpack he’d bought in the city.  He pricked small holes in them to let water in, and weighted them with rocks.  Three contained the disassembled pistol and suppressor; two contained the disassembled saw and blade; two more contained the hands of Mr. Alvarez.  One by one, the threw them into the ocean.

On his way to catch his plane home, he wondered what kind of a hitter gets married, anyway.  He had met Dan Hampton’s wife.  She wasn’t so great.  The girl in the hotel room had better tits.  He remembered he’d wanted to pay off one of the kitchen workers to call in the shooting, so it didn’t have to wait until the maid found them the following morning, but he’d forgotten.  Perhaps he’d just call it in himself, from the airport.

Permanent Link
Previous Entry ~ Current Entry ~ Next Entry
E-mail the Ludic Log ~ Find Me Out

"At no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it." (Yukio Mishima)