Barry Eisler - Rain Storm aka Choke Point

I wondered briefly if I’d mentioned her name to him to force my own hand, to clarify that, by sparing his life, I’d be ending hers.

I reminded myself that he had tried to have me killed. That, given the opportunity, he would certainly do so again.

Don’t think. Just do it.

I felt a valve closing over my empathy like a watertight bulkhead. The bulkhead would open later, I knew, as the pressure built behind it, but it would hold long enough for me to finish the matter at hand.

I picked up the stun gun and jolted him again. He jerked violently from the shock, but the pillow kept him from marking his head. After about ten seconds I released the trigger and set the unit aside.

I sat him up and got behind him. I hooked my legs over his, wrapped my arms around his neck in a hadaka-jime strangle, and dropped back to the plastic-covered floor so that my body was under his. I put the strangle in carefully, using just enough pressure to close off the carotids, but not enough to damage his trachea or to cause any bruising. He didn’t make a sound and he was unconscious within seconds. I held him that way for several minutes, until unconsciousness had deepened into death.

I got up and dragged him to the living room closet. The plastic was practically frictionless on the carpet and made the job easier.

I laid him down under the dowel in the storage closet and went back to the living room. I like to clean up as I go along-one step, one cleanup. Repeat. Makes it easier not to forget anything. I picked up the duct tape, then noticed something: a swath in the carpet where the fibers had all been pulled in the same direction by his plastic-assisted passage. I walked back and forth along the swath until it had been eradicated.

I went back to the closet, dropped the duct tape, and cut the plastic off him with the box cutter. I noticed that his boxers were damp-he’d pissed himself as he’d lost consciousness and died. Not uncommon. It was lucky he had just used the toilet or I might have had a more considerable mess to deal with.

I opened the folding doors near the entrance and turned on the washing machine. I added some detergent, then walked back to the closet, where I retrieved Crawley’s shorts and tee-shirt. I threw them into the machine. Then I grabbed a couple of washcloths from the bathroom, which I used to clean him up. These, too, went into the wash, along with the contents of a plastic laundry basket that was sitting on top of the dryer. A small detail, but you don’t want to leave loose ends, such as, Why did the dead guy wash just his boxers, a tee-shirt, and two washcloths? Why didn’t he throw in the rest of the dirty laundry, too ? I also took a moment to hang his coat, suit, shirt, and tie in the clothes closet.

I pulled off the deerskin gloves I’d been wearing, went to the storage closet, and pulled on the surgical pair. I grabbed the K-Y jelly and headed to the bathroom, where I squeezed out half the tube’s contents into the sink, washing it all down with hot water. Then back to the closet, where I put Crawley’s hands on the tube to ensure that it would be personalized with his fingerprints.

I set the tube on the ground and fashioned the clothesline into a slipknot. I pulled the knot over his head and ran the other end of the line over the hanging dowel, close to the angle brace where it would be strongest. Then I used the rope to haul him up onto his knees. He listed forward a few degrees, but the rope restrained him. I tied off the end on the dowel, cut off all but about three feet of the excess, and stepped back.

Diminished oxygen supply to the brain, called cerebral anoxia, can intensify sensations, making it, for some people, a good accompaniment to masturbation. The practice is known as autoerotic asphyxiation and usually remains a secret until the enthusiast dies accidentally in the midst of the proceedings. The statistics make extreme sports look safe by comparison: somewhere from five hundred to a thousand fatalities every year in the United States alone.

I looked at Crawley for a moment. Make that a thousand and one .

I applied a measure of K-Y jelly to his right hand and his genitals, then stepped back and observed. Yeah, that looked about right. The private life of a “State Department” bureaucrat. The quintessence of buttoned-down Washington Beltway seriousness by day; periodic bouts of autoerotic asphyxiation games by night. Really, you just never know what goes on behind closed doors. Especially closed closet doors.

A sudden thought nagged me: Was he right-handed? Or left ?

Hmm, should have thought to find a way to check on that earlier. Sloppy. But the hell with it, no harm done. Maybe he enjoyed himself in private ambidextrously. Who could say one way or the other? The main thing was, the CIA wouldn’t want this getting out. They’d want it dealt with quickly, quietly, and cleanly. They’d call it an embolism, a weak heart wall, something like that, and, wanting to believe this was the case, they’d repeat it until they did. Even if they had some suspicions, they would be reluctant to do anything that might cause this to leak. All of which would mean less pressure for me.

I pulled off the surgical gloves, dropped them inside out into the briefcase, and slipped once again into the deerskin pair. I eased into the overcoat. I rolled up the plastic, picked up the rest of the items, and put them in the briefcase, too, which I carried back into the living room. I looked around.

Take it backward, starting with the bathroom . I double-checked everything, then triple-checked. Nothing was out of place. No telltale signs. The washing machine was cycling through rinse. Crawley’s things would be clean soon.

One last check of the closet. Everything was in order, Crawley included. He was canted forward, the rope preventing him from tipping onto his face, his knuckles resting alongside him against the carpeting. Well, there are worse ways to go , I thought. And I’ve seen plenty of them.

Ordinarily, I work under substantial time constraints, and don’t have the opportunity for triple-checks, and certainly not for reflection, when the job is done. But this time, it seemed, I did.

I watched Crawley’s lifeless form, thinking of all the death I had seen, of the deaths I had caused, starting with that unlucky Viet Cong near the Xe Kong river so many years before. I wondered what that poor bastard would be doing today if our paths had never crossed.

Probably he’d be dead anyway , I thought. An accident or a disease or someone else would have killed him .

Yeah, maybe. Or maybe he would have lived, and today he would be married, to a pretty Vietnamese girl, a fighter, as he had been, and they would have three or four children, who would revere their parents for the sacrifices they had made during the war. Maybe his first grandchild would have been born recently. Maybe he would have wept with terrible joy as he hugged his child’s child to his own thin chest, thinking how strange life was, how precious.

Maybe.

I sighed, watching Crawley’s oddly canted form. He looked relaxed, somehow, untroubled, as cadavers often do.

In developed countries most people live their lives without ever even seeing a body, or, if they do, it’s an open-casket affair, where you have context and witness only the peaceful, ruddy-cheeked façade of the mortician’s artifice. When Mom and Dad die, they’re taken care of by strangers in a nursing home two towns over. The kids don’t have to see them go. They don’t even have to see them after. They just get a “we’re sorry to inform you” call late that night from the institution’s management, for whom such calls are as routine as putting out the weekly garbage is for a suburban homeowner. The funeral home picks up the body. The cemetery buries it. Unless you’re a professional, you might live your whole life without seeing someone in the moment of leaving his own.