A Quiet Minute of Reflection - Keith Rawson

A MINUTE OF QUIET REFLECTION

“Come on, motherfucker, un-cuff me and get this asshole off of me!” The girl's voice is nails on a blackboard. Not that I could blame the panic. She’s handcuffed to a radiator with 300 lbs. of dead man resting in between her legs.

“Come on, come on! He’s still in me! Please he’s still in me!”

I’m sure the girl has had worse lays than my headless, still warm ex-partner. I know this, because I’ve seen Paul naked more times than I care to admit, and trust me, the boy was definitely packing. Of course, I imagine most of her former fuck buddies—although I’m sure not as well endowed as Paul—were in possession of fully functioning skulls that didn’t leak blood all over her glorious, surgically enhanced tits.

I needed a minute to zone out; just a quick second to smoke and take in my current situation with a fresher perspective. I’d been gone all of ten minutes, down to the bodega for a fresh deck of smokes, a couple of sandwiches, and some coffee. Ten minutes and I come back to the flop and spy Paul humping away on the girl like $39.99 of Mylar blow up doll. Under a normal set of circumstances, I would’ve attempted to slip back out the door unnoticed and let the bruiser finish up. Not that I condone rape—being the victim of a vicious gang bang myself, which by the way, was headed up by Paul. This was before we got chummy, of course, and I was just another pretty white man new to the slam. It’s just better idea to let a boy like Paul drain the spunk out of his thick head so he could have a coherent thought for longer than 3 seconds.

But our situation was far from fucking normal. Orders were to sit on the girl until we got the call confirming that the contact had his money. After that, it was up to us what happened to the girl. But since I had the phone and no call had come from the contact, that meant Me and Paul were still on the clock and that meant do not touch the fucking girl! So instead of discreetly exiting stage right, I dropped my sandwiches and coffee, pulled my Browning and sighted down on Paul’s contorted rape driven snarl of a face and turned it into a big red mist.

If only the big dumb fucker waited a little longer, a couple hours at the most, he could have done whatever he wanted to the cunt. Hell, I might’ve broken my no forced screwing policy and had a couple of 'around the worlds' with her before turning her out and scrapping her remains in some lonely cornfield. But that was always Paul’s problem, patience. Paul was strictly a smash and grab type. Quick jobs that required muscle and not all that much in the brain cell department. But Paul was fresh out of stir and in need of cash and was begging me for a job, anything to carry him for the next six months, anything to keep from getting a straight job.

I was more than sympathetic. I’d been through more than my fair share of rough patches. Hell, I even had to do a stretch peddling used cars before a solid caper finally came my way. Plus, I’d known Paul for over 10 years, we’d done time together; most of the brotherhood tattoos decorating Paul’s massive frame (Not that either of us was racist, in the real, money was green no matter who handed it over. But inside you were either dead or fucked within a week if you didn’t join up with one of the racially charged gentleman clubs.) Was tapped into his flesh by my hand, and the contract for the girl was a sweet deal. Not exactly a two-man gig, but the cash was enough to split down the middle, or at the very least 75/25. The job was simple enough: Snatch the girl, sit on her, and once the contact had the money, pump and dump. I thought even Paul could handle a job so shockingly simple?

The only major issue was the grab. The girl was high profile. An entertainment industry heiress who liked hitting the clubs and enjoyed pretending she was an actress/model/singer, but lacked the basic skills necessary to pursue any of those endeavors. What the girl truly excelled at was spending the family fortune, inhaling brand name pharmaceuticals like they were M&M’s, and acting as a human condom to any cock worth more than twenty million. It was rare that she was ever alone—a caravan of scumbag photog’s were typically tailing her like eager puppies—and Daddy loved her enough to provide her with gun toting monkey men of the failed football player type. You know the type, six-foot-five steroid freaks who looked good in the spotlight as their clients shadow, but would crawl into the fetal position and whine like little girls as soon as they saw a gun.

But the girl was smart. She didn’t like Daddy’s giants following her around all the time, so five days out of seven she would get them drunk, or laid, or a combo of the two and she would sneak off with one of her 3rd generation wealthy boyfriends to go and score a couple of pipe full’s of crack, and spend 8 or 9 hours sucking on a two different kinds of dicks. And that’s the where and when I decided to grab her, just as her and some shit heel with a vintage Porsche and a trust fund pulled up to girl’s favorite corner man.

Luckily the contact had provided detailed information on the girl’s nightly movements, so all Paul and I had to do was sit around and wait for her to pop up. I held the Browning on the faggot boyfriend and the dealer and Paul grabbed the girl. The dealer was smart and faded back into his alley; the bitch wasn’t anything to him, just another fifty-dollar sale. The trust fund tried puffing out his shallow chest and pulling that ‘Do you know who I am?’ bullshit. I opened him up above the right eye with my piece; that shut him the fuck up quick and caused him to ruin the leather driver’s seat of his car. Paul’s job was a bit more of a struggle. The little bitch played right into the stereo type of the raging female, hissing and spitting, all fingernails and attempted shots to the groin. She was pissed, and I couldn’t quite figure if it was because we were grabbing her or because she wasn’t scoring any crack tonight?

After a couple minutes of her bullshit, Paul had enough and gave her a stiff elbow to the jaw. I should’ve known right then he was going to be trouble when I saw his eyes after his little tussle with the girl; glassy, bug eyed wonder, his face slick and shiny, a noticeable bulge in his jeans. Of course, all of this was hindsight. At the time, all I was concerned about was getting the girl in the van and back to the flop; it was only a matter of minutes before the photog’s caught back up with her.

The flop the contact provided us was a couple of blocks away from the grab sight, a typical fleabag: run down and populated by tenants who mind their own business or were too old to care and simply turned their TV’s way up to deafening volumes anytime there was trouble. The place was bare bones, no furniture except a couple of hard folding chairs, an ancient card table, and a crystal ashtray that added just the slightest hint of elegance to our surroundings. No TV, no radio, no land line, nothing to connect us to the outside except the prepaid cell phone I kept on me at all times for when the call came.

We kept the girl handcuffed to the radiator, eyes and mouth duct taped, she slept most of the time, either from the stress of the situation, or that this was the first time in years—perhaps in her entire life—where she was forced to sit in one spot for longer than 10 minutes. When she was awake, she did the usual hostage thing, cried a lot, plead a little through her gag; not that either of us could understand her, it was all dentist chair mumbles. I stayed on top of news of the grab when I went out for food. The story, as expected, spread fast. The Post ran the grab as its front page for three days straight; interviews with the cops, with the crack head boyfriend (A Horror in the Inner City was the headline, and the boyfriend or whatever the little pussy was to the girl, sobbed like a fairy about what he had to endure.) the parents. The cops, according to the paper, the cops didn’t have a clue, which didn’t mean all that much. Cops were a fountain of disinformation when it came to the media, but after three days, there were no sirens screaming down in the street, the blinding strobe of red and blue lights, there was no pounding at the door demanding to open up or they were going to knock it down.

My minute of quiet reflection is up. I toss my butt on the carpet and grind it out with my heel instead of snuffing it in the overflowing ashtray. I stash my piece behind my back and walk over to what’s left of Paul and the still very freaked out girl. The two of them are still joined at the hip and the girl is slick with Paul’s blood; her once perfectly coifed blonde hair now matted and clumpy with brain tissue. It’s very modern art and I take a couple of seconds to admire the contrast and shadow. Eh, not really, it’s just the shit coming out of the girl’s mouth is making me want to fall down with a case of the giggles.

I finally manage to muscle Paul’s weight off of her and drag his big ass over into a corner of the flop a few feet away from her. I’m bent over hacking and trying to catch my breath when the cell chirps a couple of times. I pull it from the inside pocket of my coat and answer.

“Yeah?”

“It’s done. Your fee will be transferred within fifteen minutes.”

I hang up and pocket it again. Stupid bastard Paul, you just couldn’t wait it out like a normal person. I collect myself for a couple of more seconds making sure my heart rate is calm and my breath is nice and even. I walk back over to the girl, and pull the Browning. It’s primed and ready. I draw down on her and inch the hammer back.

Paul lived for the chance to put his cock in anything warm, slick, and struggling. Me, sex just doesn’t do the trick. For me it’s those two or three seconds when you’ve lined up the sights on your target and their eyes go big and watery with the fear. Yeah, I know it’s cliché as all fucking get out, but what can I say, I am who I am.

The girl’s keeping me waiting though and I’m starting to get a little pissed. My anticipation is so heavy, I don’t notice the flop’s door click and swing open. I don’t notice the warm body behind me. I only notice when the girl starts throwing off a big throaty laugh, her eyes focused over my shoulder. I half turn and the faggot boyfriend from the grab puts a bullet through my skull.

Fucking shitty nine millimeter.

The slug doesn’t even kill me; it just bounces around and turns my brain into a soupy gray and pink jell-o. If some how my now useless body is discovered, I’ll spend the rest of my very limited existence wearing a diaper and watching shitty daytime television. Hopefully I’ll just bleed out.

BIO: Keith Rawson lives in the Phoenix, Az. suburb of Gilbert with his wife, daughter, and dog. He works as an Education counselor and has been writing off and on for the past fifteen years. He love crime fiction and other such degenerate literature.