Jason Pinter - The Mark

I ducked into a newspaper kiosk and grabbed the nearest magazine. Penthouse.

Whatever.

I splayed the pages open, standing just behind the soda cooler so I was out of sight. Peering over a picture of breasts the size of beach balls, I watched the cops scamper up to the platform. They spoke in staccato bursts, gesturing wildly around the station, then the younger one pointed to a mass of people walking up the stairs to the street. They ran toward the exit, shouting and elbowing past frightened commuters. When they disappeared from view, I collected myself and slowly walked back down to the lower platform. Another train was just pulling into the station.

I stepped behind a pillar-just in case-and waited.

The train stopped, the doors opened and I stepped inside. When the doors closed behind me and the car began to move, I knew I was alone. I took a deep breath and sat down.

An elderly woman seated across the aisle eyed me with contempt, shaking her head with disdain. Could she know?

Then I looked down and noticed the Penthouse still in my hands. I smiled, shrugged my shoulders and held the mag up for her to see.

“Sorry,” I said. “Thought it was Newsweek. ”

It took everything Blanket and Charlie had not to turn around, to simply stare at the man following them. Blanket looked to his right, saw Charlie biting his lower lip, and knew they were thinking the exact same thing. Mere steps behind them was the most brutal and cold-hearted killer they had ever known, and for men in their profession they’d known every cutthroat, backstabbing, soulless bastard to walk the earth. But he was different. He scared the life out of two men who’d grown up frightened of nothing.

The musty smell of the basement had grown all too familiar this morning. Blanket listened to the footsteps behind him, the enigma nearly silent. He’d only seen the man briefly-opening the front door to let him in-and was now doing his very best to hide his quickening heart rate and sweaty palms.

“Almost there,” Charlie’s voice rang out. A pointless statement, Blanket thought, said just to see if the man would respond.

“Watch your head,” said Blanket, ducking under a swinging bulb. He eyed Charlie again. They shared a smile.

At the large door in the building’s sub-basement, Blanket rapped the code. The metal slot opened. A pair of eyes looked out at Blanket and Charlie, unimpressed. Then they caught sight of the man behind them. The eyes widened. The man behind the door whispered.

“Is that…him?”

Blanket nodded solemnly.

The door swung inward. The three men entered. This ghost, whom powerful men like Michael DiForio called when they needed odds tipped in their favor, a man whom the shroud of death hovered over permanently, was mere inches behind them. That Michael had summoned him only underlined the severity of last night’s incident.

As they entered the large conference room, a dozen men, none of whom had ever bowed to any man save Michael DiForio, stood, craning their necks for a better look. With no empty chairs available, Blanket and Charlie stood on either side of the door as it slammed shut. After a tense few moments, the men all sat down. Except Michael DiForio.

“Welcome,” Michael said. “Glad you could make it on such short notice. Hope I didn’t interrupt your morning tennis game.”

The man said nothing. For the first time Blanket was able to see him clearly.

He stood a shade over six-four and looked slightly north of two hundred pounds. His brown hair was done in a Caesar cut, short bangs dripping over his forehead. He wore a black leather jacket-not frayed, but worn-and dark pants. Blanket estimated the man’s age in the early thirties. But his dark eyes were reminiscent of policemen who’d been on the beat far too long, men who’d seen the depths of hell and had sunk too far to ever return.

“Michael,” the Ringer said. He bowed his head slightly, more a formality than out of respect. “I don’t imagine you called to talk trivialities.”

DiForio grinned and said, “No, I didn’t. So let’s get right to business. You know, that’s what I’ve always liked about you. No bullshit. Cut right to the chase.”

Blanket noticed Charlie fidgeting, his fingers clenching and unclenching. They were in the presence of a ghost of the New York underworld, a man whose past was well-documented, revered like a disturbing bedtime story, and feared to the point of paralysis.

The Ringer had cut his teeth as a professional assassin at the tender age of fifteen. He worked as a contract man for low-level hoods, men who didn’t care if the job was a little sloppy, a little too bloody to keep under wraps. The Ringer killed with a vicious disregard for cleanliness or subtlety. His targets were drug dealers who skimmed profits, middlemen who didn’t deliver payments on time. Small-timers. Deaths the cops would pay little attention to. Lives that wouldn’t be missed. Barely into manhood, the Ringer was a minor leaguer with all the ruthless tools to make the majors.

Once word spread of his brutal efficiency, the Ringer was given a healthy retainer to work exclusively for a single organization whose last mercenary for hire was found missing several vital organs and smeared across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. This new employer offered the Ringer his first meaningful assignment: the assassination of a rival organization’s consigliere, a power play that would have citywide ramifications.

The Ringer ambushed the man at a trendy nightclub, killing three bodyguards in a spray of gunfire and smoke and blood. But somehow in the mayhem, the target survived. And for the first time, there was a living man who could identify the Ringer.

Two days later, four armed men broke into the Ringer’s home, a fifth-floor brownstone on the lower east side. The shotgun blast that buckled the front door woke him and his wife, a struggling actress named Anne who was just a notch below gorgeous and talented enough to make the big-time.

The Ringer killed one man before the assailants fired a second shot. Realizing they had little chance of outfighting three armed men, the Ringer took his bride and ran for the fire escape. Then a bullet caught him in the lower back. The assassins grabbed him by his numb legs, pulled them back inside. One held them at gunpoint while the others doused the apartment with gasoline and ripped out the gas pipe from the stove.

The lead gunman leaned over the Ringer’s limp body and said, “This is your first and last lesson, asshole.” Then he put the barrel of the gun to Anne’s head and pulled the trigger.

The Ringer took another bullet in the chest. One of the gunmen lit a cigarette, took a puff and offered it to the Ringer, who lay dying on the bedroom floor. Before leaving, the gunman tossed the lit cig into a puddle of gasoline.

Your first and last lesson.

As flames spread through the apartment, the Ringer managed to drag himself to the window, hurling his maimed body onto the fire escape. He tumbled down a flight of steps, then the apartment erupted in a massive fireball.

Four weeks later, all of the assassins were dead, their body parts strewn throughout the city with the precision of discarded cigarette butts. All save one man. One man who’d survived the Ringer’s vengeance. One man who was never hunted down. And it was that man, the lone gunman who’d somehow escaped his rage, the man who’d sent a bullet crashing through his lover’s head, who kept the Ringer’s heart beating to this day.

The Ringer was dead to the world. Another statistic for the FBI. Another record closed. Two charred bodies were found in the smoldering wreckage. One was Anne, the other a failed assassin. The authorities assumed the Ringer had been caught in the blast. Now, years later, his name and face were a mystery to everyone but those he killed for.