Robert Ferrigno - Prayers for the assassin

“Was there a retrieval?”

“No.” Harriet took a big bite out of the peach. Juice ran out the side of her mouth and she caught the dripping with a crooked finger. “But, as they say, tomorrow is another day.”

There was blood on Rakkim’s boots, but it would wash off too. He looked at Harriet. “Where in Ballard did they find the body?”

Rakkim circled the apartment building where Harriet said the bodyguard had been found, looking for vehicles that looked as if they didn’t belong in the neighborhood. Harriet’s information was usually reliable, but that didn’t mean she was. Rakkim had no idea if there was a price on his head, but Harriet would, and though she might buy flowers for his funeral and weep real tears, business was business. Rakkim parked behind the building. Trash cans overflowed, flies floating around rotting food and soggy pizza boxes. A cool wind stirred the flies, but they returned. It was going to rain soon.

Ballard was an older, rundown section of the city, a blue-collar mix of Catholics and lapsed Muslims. The mosques themselves seemed sad and neglected, their outer walls cracked and dusty, and the call to prayer just completed had been a recording and not a good one at that, the muezzin’s voice weak and distorted. The people on the street were mostly burned-out moderns and give-a-shits, collars turned up against the damp.

The monorail zipped on the trestles over the main street, its gleaming cars heading toward downtown. The monorail system was the pride of the capital, a multibillion-dollar project initiated by President Kingsley in the first years of his administration, designed to show the world that the Muslim state was capable of grand technological projects. Twenty years later, while usually packed, the monorail remained clean, quiet, safe, cheap, and dependable. No graffiti. Not since a few taggers were executed its first year of operation. The monorail operated at a huge loss, but the exact cost to the city was a state secret. The buses were dirty and sluggish, the freeways decaying, but the monorail remained true to the president’s proud vision. It didn’t impress Rakkim. He had been in South American dictatorships where the streets flowed with raw sewage, but the movie theaters were digital palaces, free to everyone, with buttery leather seats and symphonic sound.

The bounty hunter’s body had been found in apartment 302. Rakkim took the stairs two at a time, keeping to the sides to minimize noise. He climbed to the fourth floor, walked the corridor to the opposite stairwell, listening. Television sounds from the apartments, commercials and laugh tracks and news bulletins. Always a breaking news bulletin.

Cooking smells in the hallway, a heady mix of onions and mint tea. Someone was roasting a chicken in 409, a child singing off-key-Rakkim imagined a man coming home from work soon, climbing the steps, clothes sticking to him, wondering if they were ever going to be able to afford a home of their own. He imagined the man walking down this very hall, the smell of dinner getting stronger, stopping outside the door to listen to the child singing. The man would straighten himself, smooth his clothes before he opened the door, the child launching himself or herself into his arms. His wife would ask how his day was, and the man would lie, say it was fine, just fine. He would kiss her, smell her sweat and the hint of perfume behind her ear, the small bottle he had bought for her birthday. Last night’s perfume still lingering. Rakkim stood outside the door, listening to the child sing, and the song was different now, and he had no idea how long he had been standing there. He took the steps to the third floor slowly, checking up and down the stairwell, shaken by his lapse, his momentary inattentiveness.

Different smells on the third floor. Someone was cooking cabbage, and it covered anything tasty that anyone else was making. Apartment 302 was down almost at the end of the hall, just past a boarded-up broom closet. As he passed 300, he heard a creaking behind the door. Rakkim stopped. He stayed where he was, watching the peephole, and saw the shadow under the door shift as someone moved back into the room. Rakkim moved on to 302, and there was another smell now. Worse than cabbage. The door was locked, but one of the hinges had been twisted, and Rakkim did what the last visitor had done. He gave it a push, and the bolt, which barely made contact with the frame, gave way. He stepped into the room. The windows were wide-open. It helped, but not much.

Sarah had been here. Her clothes were strewn around the floor, a sunflower-yellow dress she had worn to one of their assignations. A spring dress, though spring was over a month away. A sign of her confidence then. He took pleasure in the destruction in the room, furniture overturned, cabinets kicked in, the refrigerator pushed over. Good to see the wreckage, the rage of the search-it meant that they hadn’t found her. A search of the room would give him nothing, but he searched it anyway. She had left nothing of value behind, nothing that would point to where she had gone. More of Redbeard’s lessons.

Back in the hall, he closed the front door and started for the stairs. Another creak from 300. He knocked. No answer. Knocked again. “Open up or I’ll knock the door down.”

A muffled voice. “Who are you, the big bad wolf?”

Rakkim laughed. “Just open the door.”

The door opened slightly. An old man in a striped bathrobe peered through the gap between the door and the jamb allowed by the security chain. He had three days’ growth of gray stubble.

“The woman who lived next door was a friend of mine.”

“Lucky you.”

“She had to walk past your door to reach the stairs. I think you saw her every time she left. Every time she came back too. I don’t think you miss much.”

“I don’t want trouble, mister.”

“My name is Rakkim.”

“Hennesy.”

“Could you let me in, Mr. Hennesy? I don’t mean you any harm.”

“I heard that before.” Hennesy wiped his nose with the sleeve of his striped bathrobe. “Might as well come in, you’re going to do what you want to anyway.” He opened the door, the security chain falling onto the floor. “The other bastards didn’t bother introducing themselves, so I guess that makes you the polite one.”

Rakkim closed the door behind him. The carpet was worn in front of the door where the old man had been keeping his vigil on the hallway for a couple hundred years. The wall screen in front of the sofa had been torn down, the screen shattered.

Hennesy walked to a small table next to the window and sat. He folded his hands, waited until Rakkim had seated himself across from him. A cup of cold coffee on the table, cream curdled. A plate with toast remnants next to an open jar of boysenberry jam. “I told you I don’t know anything.”

Rakkim saw the shell of Hennesy’s right ear was evenly notched all around. The edges raw. Crusted over. Whoever had done it had stopped halfway around the left one. Grown bored, probably. “You should put some antibiotic ointment on that.”

Hennesy gingerly touched his ear. “My own fault for keeping a pair of pinking shears lying around. They were my wife’s…”

“They would have found something else to use. Something worse. People like that…they always reach for the first thing at hand.”

Hennesy screwed the lid on the jam, brushed crumbs onto the floor. “They said she was a wanted criminal. A runaway who killed a man trying to bring her home. I didn’t have anything to tell them. Don’t have anything to tell you either.”

“I don’t believe you, Mr. Hennesy.”

Hennesy sipped at the cold coffee. “I squint my eyes…I squint and I see death all around you, mister. Are you here to kill me? I’d just like to know.”