Russell Blake - Night of the Assassin

The boy quickly grew comfortable with any guns provided to him. As his fourteenth year transitioned into his fifteenth, he was exceeding all expectations Emilio had for him. One afternoon, shortly after the boy’s fifteenth birthday, Emilio performed the ultimate pistol test, bringing with him a Smith and Wesson. 357 Magnum revolver and a Ruger 9 mm semi-automatic. He set up two coffee cans thirty yards away from each other, paced off forty yards with the boy and held out both handguns.

“The target on the left, shoot with your left hand using the revolver. The one on the right, use the Ruger. Fire as quickly as you can while maintaining accuracy,” Emilio instructed.

The boy hefted both pistols, getting a feel for their weight. He knew from hundreds of hours of experience that firing a big bore revolver required different skills to firing a small caliber automatic. Besides the difference in recoil, which was considerable and had to be adjusted for, a revolver used each trigger pull to rotate the cylinder that held the bullets, requiring significantly more pressure and causing a reflex that would make most shooters fire high, pulling up from the target. Firing a revolver with both hands in a military crouch was hard enough, but doing so with his ‘weak’ hand while adjusting for the low recoil of the Ruger was an almost impossible challenge.

“How many pounds of trigger pressure on the Ruger?” the boy asked.

“I wonder, if you’re in a situation where you have to use someone else’s weapon, whether they’ll be able to answer that for you? My guess is, not.” Emilio replied.

The boy shrugged. Never hurt to ask.

He calculated the distance and then began firing, alternating weapons, rapidly, but not in an uncontrolled manner. The cans, which they’d filled with water, both sprouted leaks. After emptying both weapons in their direction they walked over to inspect the results.

Of six possible hits from the revolver, five had found their mark. All nine that Emilio had loaded the Ruger with found theirs.

“ Heh. Not bad. I would have guessed you wouldn’t have hit any with the revolver. The only problem is that the one you didn’t hit it with might have been the one you needed to save your life. We’ll need to practice this more, switch things up on you. And I want to start practicing shooting while running or riding in a vehicle soon. Once you master being able to hit anything using whatever you’re handed from a still position, we’ll kick it up a notch and have you simulate real combat situations where you’re not stationary.” This was high praise from Emilio, who was grudging with his accolades.

The boy smiled. He understood his performance was extraordinary. Nobody he knew could have done it. But Emilio was right. There was no room for error, and no satisfaction from being almost great.

Emilio’s only concern as the boy matured was the inevitable interest that he showed toward his daughter, Jasmine. She was a year younger than the boy but already a beauty, thankfully reflecting her mother’s genes rather than Emilio’s. Also highly intelligent, she was every bit the boy’s match when it came to anything intellectual, and there had been a simmering kind of sibling rivalry between them since they’d first met.

Jasmine’s mother had died when she was five, leaving Emilio to shoulder the burden of raising her, assisted by his sister and mother. One of the benefits of being a breadwinner of secure means with a generous employer like Don Miguel was that you could help with family members, and Emilio did his fair share. In return for which, the ladies, as he called them, raised Jasmine while he was working. It wasn’t a perfect situation but it had done well enough by her and she’d blossomed into a gorgeous, charming example of classical Mexican beauty, all gleaming black hair, white teeth and coffee-kissed skin.

The only quirk she’d shown was a deep interest in the occult, driven no doubt by a frustrated desire to somehow relate to her departed mother. She was Catholic, of course, as was everyone in Sinaloa they knew, but she’d grown restive with the faith and had taken to reading tomes of dubious virtue, on divining, and psychic powers, levitation and transmutation, and all manner of arcane, esoteric disciplines. Jasmine had of late taken to sneaking out and spending time with an old woman who claimed to read fortunes in one’s palm, as well as through studying tea leaves – all for a price, of course. Emilio had been worried, but the ladies had assured him that it was just a phase; a way to appear more mysterious as she came of age. He’d never understood women, having found them all equally inscrutable and impossible to read, so in the end he’d decided to take the advice of his mother and sister and let the fascination run its course.

Emilio’s days consisted of working with the boy and the horses. Once both children were home from school, his attention focused almost exclusively on the boy, leaving Jasmine to be trained by the ladies – in the feminine ways of the world. This wasn’t because of any lack of love on Emilio’s part. On the contrary, he lived for Jasmine. It was just that as she’d grown from a child into an adolescent he’d felt out of his depth, and now that she was thirteen, and moody, her body sprouting the curves that would attract members of the opposite sex like bees to honey, he had no idea how to deal with her. He rationalized that this was natural, and would hopefully also pass. She just needed to be around other women, to learn whatever it was they learned while he taught the boy how to do masculine things.

One Friday before Easter, the boy had come home from school with a bloody nose and some abrasions on his face, which after some hard questioning turned out had come about from a fight with an older boy who had been bothering Jasmine during recess; he had grown increasingly abusive and insulting as the day had worn on. The boy had rushed to defend Jasmine’s honor, only to be pummeled by the larger student, whose two years of seniority was enhanced by growing up in a household with three brothers who had taught him to fight. The boy’s education hadn’t yet moved to manual self-defense, but, looking at his bruised face, Emilio decided it was time to teach him how to use his fists.

As with most things, the boy learned quickly, and within a few weeks had mastered the basics of the primitive form of martial arts Emilio knew; really just a combination of rudimentary boxing and street-fighting techniques. But the boy was a sponge, and once he’d exhausted Emilio’s capabilities he lobbied for more advanced training – and given that it was Emilio’s job to provide him with the fullest possible education, they researched alternatives and quickly found a plethora of options. Culiacan was the nearest large city, a half hour drive from the ranch. It had a number of martial arts schools specializing in judo, karate, and kung fu. The boy convinced Emilio that his development warranted three classes a week. He added the stylized moves and holds he learned to his exercise routine, striving to perfect those as he had so many others.

There were no more incidents at school after the next altercation, when the boy knocked the older bully unconscious within a few seconds of the fight starting, the bully abruptly lost his taste for hassling Jasmine or picking on either of them. His classmates treated him with polite and cautious deference from that point on.

He didn’t mix with the rest of his peers and showed no interest in friendships beyond casual greetings-in-passing in the halls. That was more than enough interaction for him; he viewed his fellow students as inferior in every way – not because he was arrogant, but rather because he’d run an equation and found them wanting and immature. They were children, given to excitement or emotional flights, whereas he was almost an adult, always restrained. He was quiet and withdrawn and tended to keep to himself, preferring to limit his mingling to Jasmine during recess. They had grown close by virtue of their shared male authority figure. It was a brother-sister relationship, for the most part, but the ladies had cautioned both Emilio and Jasmine that things would have to change once they both matured.