Out By Morning

Written in February of 2008. This is a piece of work, man. Sorry if it is hard to read because of the present-tense narration, but I do what I want! You will read it anyway! HA HA HA ha... *eherm* Anyway I thought this wasn;t a bad idea for a story.


“My deal is simple, sir. All I want you to do is find out the name of this person,” he had said, and slid a briefcase with a photograph on top of it across the table. “Half now, half when you tell me the name, agreed?” he had said. I popped open the briefcase and marveled at the sheer amount of bills that were packed in it. How was I to know, at that time, that those who gather information had the most dangerous jobs ever?
My name is Luke Mines, but everyone calls me Trespasser. I'm an information specialist, in technicality, but really my job comes down to breaking and entering, and then stealing. I'm fine with it most of the time. It's never really bothered me that my source of income was completely illegal in all respects. Not, at least, until now.
So here I sit, three armed thugs sitting around me, in a rather unkempt apartment. The carpet, or what was left of it at least, probably used to be white or grey, but now it is a distinct brown and green smear pattern, probably from cigarette ashes mixed with vomit and alcohol. There's a couple of chairs in here, but they're too broken to use comfortably, at least in my opinion. Not like I could get up and walk over to them in the first place, they've got me trussed up like a Christmas goose.
One of these guys is smoking a cigarette I watched him roll himself. He's got a scar on his left hand, and he's missing his little finger on that side too. He fidgets a lot, like he's got bugs or something. He's the one that saw through my disguise earlier. “Take off that stupid wig,” he'd said, and had swung his hand at my head, knocking off the exquisitely prepared wig I was wearing and blowing my cover completely. I am still not sure how he noticed it was fake.
The second guy is bald, real bald. If you gave me some wax I could probably make his head shine real nice. He's left-handed, but he's carrying his gun in his right. I only noticed because he has more developed hand muscles on his left side. He isn't the strongest fellow I've ever seen, but he certainly has some meat behind him.
The last one, man, he's a piece of work. He's got this big, puckered scar on his right bicep, like he was stabbed there or something, and another real nice, white scar across his left eye going down his cheek. Looks like he was on the receiving end of some punishment a while ago. He has the biggest gun, a rifle. The other two have what appear to be semi-automatic handguns, making them only slightly less of a threat to my health.
The door was about twenty, maybe twenty-five feet ahead of where they had me sitting, which was in the corner across from it. I made a note of it. “So your boss is a pretty important fellow, huh?” I say, acting as if there were nothing wrong with me being tied up and surrounded. “Pretty important that nobody finds out who he is, huh?”
Lefty turns around and sneers at me, his teeth that pleasant shade that tells of either too much smoking and not enough hygiene, or the excessive consumption of daisies. “Shut yer trap, kid, 'r I'll put some lead through yer leg,” he says with the accent that graced so many gangster-fellows. I nearly chuckle. That's not too bad an idea you have there, I think.
I had already got the ropes untied behind me. You'd think someone smart would tie the ropes in the front so that if the person they were tying up tried to get out of the ropes, you'd be able to see it. These guys were not smart. I lean forward a little bit. “Pretty important that someone like me doesn't get out of their ropes and get away, too, huh?”
He stands up and points his gun at me. “Ye'r too cocky, kid,” he says, and starts to pull the trigger. At that instant I roll a little to the side and sweep my leg into his shins, knocking him off balance. In a second I have my hands in front of me, and I've got his arm in one of those locks you see the police do to people with guns. Now I've got the gun in one hand and the guy in the other, and I don't intend to give the other guys chances to react.
Bang, bang, bang, I squeeze the trigger three times, hitting Scar in the right shoulder, Fidgets in the left thigh, and poor Lefty here in the center of the back of his right knee. They all go down pretty fast, and nearly as fast I collect their firearms. They yell lots of things I don't pay a lot of attention to, lots of curses and such. For good measures, to make sure that nobody goes anywhere, I turn and fire again into Scar's right calf. “Sorry, man,” I say. “Next time I'll only shoot you once.”
The next room over is supposed to be their boss's room, but he probably ran when he heard the shots. Maybe he didn't, maybe he thought they were shooting me. Tough luck, man, I'm still intact here, and you've got records somewhere, I know you do. “Say, you guys know where your boss keeps his checkbook? Or his insurance papers? I could even go for a piece of junkmail if you guys have any,” I say, turning back around and heading for the door. “All I want is his name, you know.”
One of the guys spits at me through his teeth, and tries to stand up. He gets about halfway up, but then the bullet hole in his leg puts him back on the floor. I kind of feel bad for having to shoot them, but hey, they were waving their guns around first, you know? So I leave. I take a few steps toward the next apartment over.
The door is unlocked, probably not expecting their hostage (is that what I was? I wonder...) to come out with three guns and a really, really simple question that nobody seemed to want to answer. So I push the door open and dodge back to the side, just in case something comes flying out at me. Nothing does. I stick my head around the corner, and there's nobody there. Go figure, why would they make it easy on me?
I take a few steps into the room, which is far better furnished than the one next to it. The table in the center of the blue carpet area near what I suppose is a kitchen but really looks like a chemistry lab has an empty glass and a bottle of whiskey resting on it. I could go for a drink, but this is not the place to do it, so I walk in a few more steps.
The door shuts behind me, and I hear the click of a hammer being pulled back on what sounds a lot like... “Colt revolver. Probably a later model,” I say, and put my hands up in front of me when I feel the muzzle of it push against my neck. There's a chuckle behind me, sounds like the boss is a relatively young fellow.
“Please, have a seat,” he says, so I sit down at the table. He sits down across from me, and pours himself a glass of the whiskey. “Care for some? I can get another cup,” he says.
“I'm fine, thanks,” I reply, and start to put my hands on my lap.
“Oh, if you'll do me the courtesy of putting your firearms on the table where I can see them,” he says. I slide the three guns across the table to him, and he smiles. “That's a good boy. You listen well,” he says, and smiles. His teeth are clean.
He's wearing one of those suits that if you saw it, you'd know the guy wearing it was a mobster or something. You know the kind. He's got a black and blue tie on under his coat, a white handkerchief sticking out of his breast pocket, and damn if I wasn't right about his gun. I bet he thinks that he'll only need three rounds to kill me. Hell, I bet he only thinks he'll need one. Well, he could be right. I have to admit, I'm in sort of a bind here.
He's got all the guns, I've got nothing but the chair I'm sitting on, and he's pretty confident about his situation. I would be too, if I were in his shoes. I've got to do something, pretty quick.
The table is covered with a tablecloth, red and white tessalations all over it, and it sort of makes me dizzy when I look at it. There's one glass, in his hand, and the bottle is on the table. Behind him there's a big mirror on the wall, the sort that you can see your whole body in if you stand next to it. The kitchen is full of pots and beakers and the like.
“What's for dinner, boss?” I say, glancing over at the cluttered countertop. There's a bunch of little plastic bags filled with white powder in a neat pile near the edge of it. It's cocaine, it looks like. I don't do the stuff myself, but in this case I could probably use some. The edge of the counter is only about eight feet away, and Boss does not look like he expects me to do anything out-of-hand.
“It's delicious. Would you like a taste?” he says, and laughs. There is the distraction I need. Quick as I can, I jump up from the chair and push the table forward with all I got. It slams into Boss's gut, and he coughs and doubles over just as I grab a fistful of the bags, and hurl them in his direction before he has time to pull the trigger. A bunch of them break open and then there's a cloud of white dust all over. Boss has his face all covered, so he drops his gun to try to rub the stuff out of his eyes like a little girl.
A good, swift punch in the head puts him into a less-than-caring state, and then I cough a bit myself. This stuff's potent. So I grab the handkerchief out of his pocket, and sure enough, there's his initials on it. A P, it says. I stuff it into my pocket and look around. There's a closed door across from the kitchen, and I figure there might be some information or something in there. So I pick up his nice little revolver and the rifle, and then I open the door. There's a bed with the sheets and blankets all tangled up in a bunch, a nightstand with a lamp on it, and hot damn, a stack of papers on top of the dresser next to he door.
I pick up these papers, and shuffle through them a bit. They seem to be figures for income and money spent and such, so I'm about to just put them back, when I hear something outside. There's a bunch of real heavy, real fast footsteps coming down the corridor leading to this room. It can't be the guys next door, they can't even stand up, let alone run. There's too many of them too. So I stuff the papers into my jacket and round the corner to the main room again. The door's open, and Boss is gone. Go figure, I should've hit him harder. I look back at the wall opposite the door. There's a sliding glass door and a balcony, that's right, this is the third story, I remember. `
I dash over to the glass door and wrench it open. The runners on it are probably broken. The drop is straight down into what looks like a parking lot, full of junk cars with their hoods and windows and tires missing. Great, if I fall into that, I'm liable to get hurt some. I look back over my shoulder, just long enough to catch a glimpse of the big, burly guy in the striped shirt point his automatic machine gun at me and pull the trigger.
There's a lot of loud sound up in that room now, and I'm halfway down to the car lot. A drop from the third story never hurt anyone, unless it... well, actually happened. I'm not looking forward to this landing. I've got a lot of forward momentum, so I could probably pull off a shoulder roll when I hit the ground. So I hit the ground, and it feels like my legs break, but I lurch forward into this awkward roll over an old, rusty tire iron someone left behind after they were done stealing the tires off of one of these cars and which I did not see before I dropped, and suddenly I'm behind one of the old pieces of junk, behind cover from the hail of bullets that came raining down thereafter.
So I check myself for injuries. Legs are real sore, but not broken. Shoulder's a little bloody from the weird roll on the gravel-like asphalt, but other than that, I'm in pretty good shape. I hear the bullets stop, and I figure they're coming down after me. If they were smart, they'd have left one guy or two to continue firing on me so I would not move until they were in position to blast holes in me, but I made that remark before.
So I get back to my feet. It hurts kinda, but I know it'll go away in a few seconds, so I start running. Running kinda clumsily, but running. I unsling the rifle and make sure it's cocked back, because go figure it's a bolt-action. I hear a few shots behind me, and I hear a bullet whiz by my head, so I duck behind one of those boxes that houses electrical stuff, and look around.
So I'm sitting next to the side of the apartment building, and there's this opening for what looks like a crawlspace to go under the building. I do another one of those awkward rolls into the ditch in front of it, and then shimmy my way into the hole after firing a shot off in the direction I figure those guys would be. I hear a bunch of them run past where I am hiding, and then it gets silent.
So I wait for a while. I hear Boss barking orders around to his henchmen, I hear a whole bunch of cars start up and squeal off, and then it's quiet again. I wait a little while longer before I get out and run like hell.
So I meet up with my client. I hand him the stack of papers, the handkerchief, and the revolver for prints. “Couldn't find his whole name, but here's a bunch of information that'll probably help you anyway,” I say, and nod. We're sitting in the same booth in the cafe we met in before, in the back, near the back exit.
The guy looks up at me and grins, and then snaps his fingers. The back door bursts open, and like five or six police officers rush in and point their weapons at me. Turns out my client was the chief of police, gone undercover. Killing two birds with one stone, he was trying to.
So, commissioner, you going to let me out? I promise I'll never do bad things again. Oh, and the guy's name, what was it? It'd be satisfying for me to know.
Alex P------, huh. No wonder he looked so familiar, I used to go to church with him when I was little. Wonder if he remembered me? Commissioner, I'll be out by the end of the night anyway, why don't you just let me go now? I did help you out, after all. Prints and everything. Come on.