It's What I Do

Jake was an automaton. His plan of action: enter, execute, exit. Tonight’s target — an accountant whose seemingly tranquil life belied the secrets she held. He’d secured the apartment door behind him, and once inside the bedroom, saw her unassuming profile gently rise and fall as she slept. Raising his gun, he sensed an unease at the fact the mark was a woman, but despite this, resisted the primeval urge to protect someone who probably watered a dying bonsai each morning before leaving for work.

***

The clink of ice was a counterpoint to the hotel bar’s hum. Jake nursed a scotch, the second of the night. The first hadn’t survived long and had been of little comfort after tonight’s work. Outside, a black and white slid past the hotel, its taillights bleeding over wet asphalt. Jake turned from the street-side window and eyeballed the dimly lit room, homing in on a woman supporting the bar, cradling a martini.

The weariness in her posture echoed his. Ordering a double, he slid onto an adjacent stool. “Rough day?” he murmured. Foreign sounding words uttered after hours of silence.

She offered a smile that failed to reach her eyes. “Are you hitting on me?”

“It’s what I do,” Jake retorted sarcastically, signalling the bartender for another martini. They talked, and talked, but failed to put the world to rights. Her name was Zara. She was a translator based on the west coast, but in his neck of the woods babysitting some Japanese business types. There were no expectations on either’s part; they were just two strangers seeking safe harbour in each other’s company.

Later in her room, the city lights pulsated outside the rain-lashed windows. There was a tenderness in their intimacy, an understanding that remained unspoken. For a few hours, blanketed by a warmth he hadn’t realised he craved, the burden had lifted.

Jake woke to an empty bed. Zara had departed. Her side was cold, as was the half-drunk coffee she’d brewed before leaving. She’d been rummaging through his clothes, as his gun had gone walkabout, but a single shell lay on the nightstand, silently lounging on a sheet of hotel notepaper that bore an alarming, three-lined message penned with a hurried scrawl.

It wasn’t only me you hit on last night.

Nightmares tell tales.

I know what you do.

BIO: Steven Lemprière’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Literary Garage, Instant Noodles, Uppagus, Suddenly and without warning, Punk Noir Magazine, Micromance, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Drabble, Friday Flash Fiction, 50-Word Stories, 50 Give or Take, Paragraph Planet, Six Sentences, and The Hoolet’s Nook. He undertook a creative writing course while a long-term patient at an Irish psychiatric hospital, and shortly after his discharge, was short-listed for the New Writers Prize at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature. He divides his time between the West Coast of Ireland and South-West France.