I woke up with a stiff neck but feeling much more refreshed. I heard the water in the shower running and surmised that Claudia was in there. I looked around the office; she had taken the time while I slept to straighten some things out, rearrange others, and hung her clothes up near the bathroom door.
I made a mental note of where all my things were now that they had been tidied up and walked over to the door. I knocked gently.
“Hey kid, you in there?”
I could hear the water cascading down and began to imagine Claudia once again, naked and shimmering in the hot, steaming water.
“I’m here, Clayton. I thought I would freshen up.”
“That’s fine,” I said as I conjured up and image of her lathered in suds and seductively washing them off. I peeled myself away from the door and went back to my desk for my cigarettes. Before I could hit the desk, there came a knock at the door. I went over and opened the door, allowing the chain lock to keep it from swinging all the way open. That’s when I had the wind knocked out of me.
The door had been kicked open, the chain lock no match for the sheer strength of the individual behind it. I tumbled to the floor and tried to gather my breath. Before I knew it, there was a mass of gargantuan muscle on top of me. I took two quick blows to the cheekbones before I could even make out who it was that had busted in.
It was the hitman from Claudia’s house.
Shit.
He had me pinned under his massive size, and I tried in vain to wriggle free. He laughed as I squirmed, bringing his face down to mine so that we were nose to nose.
“I don’t think so, stronzo,” he grinned, his breath reeking of old gin and cigars. He brought a heavy fist down on my face, nearly obliterating my nose in the process.
“You shot me, bastardo, so I think I shall repay you in kind, no?” He uttered a chilling chuckle. “But first, I have a little fun.”
He wrapped two massive hands around my throat and clamped down, squeezing tight. I could feel my windpipe begin to give way under his vise grip. I began gasping for air as it became impossible to breath. I started to see spots before my eyes, my heart was pounding like a piston and my lungs screamed in searing pain.
He reached under his jacket with his right hand, his left still grasped tightly around my throat. He produced a gun, a Colt Anaconda .44 (of course this schmuck carries a Colt) and put the barrel to my head.
“Lead for lead. Vaffaculo, and good riddance.”
I closed my eyes and braced myself, still struggling weakly to get free. Then the shot rang out.
I wasn’t dead.
I wasn’t dead?
What the hell happened?
I could breathe again, and I felt the massive weight of the hitman’s body slump off of me. I scrambled out from under him, gasping in precious oxygen. In front of me was the lifeless body of il fissatore, the fixer. I could see blood pooling around his head. I looked back and saw Claudia, smoking gun in hand, a look of terror and confusion on her face.
“He’s dead?”
Her voice was a fragment of a whisper. She began to tremble and dropped the gun. Tears streamed down her face as she dropped to her knees. I crawled over to her and took her into my arms. She was sobbing silently, violently. It was the first time she had ever killed anyone. I remembered that feeling.
“Hey, Claudia, hey,” I soothed, my voice a bit raspy from my near death experience, “you did what you had to do. If he would have finished me off, you were next. You saved me, kid.”
I stroked her hair as she sobbed. She clawed at me, trying desperately to cling onto anything as her would spun around off-kilter. I cooed and soothed her as best I could. We sat there in silence as a few neighbors began to congregate around my busted down door.
“Oh my God!”
“Is he dead?”
“Someone call the police!”
I picked up the gun and placed it back on the desk. I stood up, standing Claudia up with me. I walked over to the doorway.
“Folks, I appreciate your concern, but I will handle this along with the police. I would appreciate your cooperation in giving us some privacy as we handle the situation.”
I shooed every off. Ms. Saavedra, the kindly young lady that lived next door, told me she had phoned the police. I thanked her and walked her back to her apartment. Claudia had gone to the bathroom and was now vomiting into the toilet. I went to comfort her and wait for the police to show.
It was well into early evening before we had finished with the cops. An ambulance had come and taken the body of the assassin (now identified as Dario Montelongo) and a beat cop had taken our statements. I wasn’t familiar with the new kid, but he seemed to have a handle on things.
In the end, he said that there would be some further questions once they figured out why a known hitman who worked for an organized crime syndicate in another country was lying dead on my floor from a gunshot wound to the head from my gun shot by a former child prostitute and Canadian expatriate. Well, when he put it that way, I would have questions too. He told me not to skip town, and I told there wasn’t anything out there that interested me much anyways.
The cops left and we were once again alone. The silence was deafening, and Claudia seemed to be beside herself. She sat on the bed, staring ahead blankly and not blinking. I sat beside her and drew her close.
“Listen, Claudia,” I said softly, “you did what you had to do. It doesn’t change the feeling of killing someone, and trust me, that feeling will stay with you forever, but you can rest easy knowing that you didn’t kill someone who was innocent or didn’t have it coming.”
She gave no response.
“You saved my bacon, kid,” I said, trying my best to sound jovial, “I was in a tight spot there. If you wouldn’t have pulled the trigger-”
“Clayton,” she whispered, still not looking at me, “I think I enjoyed it.”
Now she slowly turned to face me. Her eyes were icy cold, but there was still a fear behind them, not a fear of what she had just done, but a fear of what she might become.
“When I pulled that trigger,” she continued, still whispering, “I was terrified. I was terrified that he would kill you and that I would be next. I was terrified that I was going to die because I was taken off the street when I was a kid and forced to have sex with people for money, a decision that I did not make. I was terrified that I would die because I married a man that I did not love because I was left with no other choice if I wanted to escape my fate. I had very few choices up until the moment I pulled the trigger on the gun and shot that man in the head. I killed him, Clayton, and I chose to kill him, and I liked it. It was the first decision I had been able to make in a long time that I was not afraid of. I killed that man, and I liked it, and I don’t think I will be afraid any longer.”
The frost in her eyes melted away. The sweet innocence of Claudia Noe returned, but the innocence was not the same. There was a darkness now in her eyes, a sliver of fog that shrouded the tiniest portion of her childlike purity. She was no longer a helpless damsel in distress; she had become her own protector.
“Claudia,” I said, not exactly knowing what I was going to say next.
“You protected me,” she interjected, “and now I’ve protected you. We are on an even footing now, squared up.” She placed her hand on my face tenderly. She gave me a smile, a wickedly mischievous smile.
“Who would have thought that little old me would have saved your life?”
“I knew you had it in you, kid,” I chuckled. We kissed softly at first, then passionately. Soon we were rolling around on the bed, clothes and inhibitions being ripped away. Claudia had been turned on by my gun earlier, and I was pretty sure her engine was running again because of the whole incident just now, but I couldn’t seem to care about that. We were in a moment of passion, and logic never comes into play with passion.