Fresher fiction
The tv shows will tell you that killing gets easier. That you can justify each one as being subsumed into what great cause led to the first.
I’m not sure Diego Diaz would have agreed. He’d killed some nameless woman on the street not two hours ago. Maybe he needed more time to process it before he became a serial killer. Or maybe he was just a piece of crap junkie who’d dropped his wallet at the wrong crime.
“Please, man, let me up,” he whined. He was on his stomach, with one arm bent at his side at a very incorrect angle. Dislocated at the shoulder and elbow was my guess.
I stood on the other arm, grinding the bones of the wrist beneath my boots. Nice black motorcycle boots I was going to regret having to toss in case someone swabbed them for DNA. There was a lot of Diego’s blood and saliva on them. And bits of a tooth stuck in the leather above the steel cap.
“I don’t know what you…,” he started, before screaming. All of my weight was on his wrist, as I cocked my other foot back. The kick caught him at the base of the skull and he was instantly silent.
Wade was already on the phone behind me. “Hello, Fitz,” he said, quite proper in an inside voice he didn’t use a lot. “Diaz is done.”
He listened for a moment, nodding and murmuring. “For you,” he said, tossing the phone over.
“Hello, Fitz,” I said. Wade’s phone was too small for me and a little greasy from whatever pomade he was using. At least I hoped it was pomade, although his hair was very short.
“The boss is not pleased.”
“About?”
“He would like to question Mr. Diaz and it appears that is not possible,” he said, his accent fading in as the sentence stretched out. He went from generic middle American to selling Lucky Charms in a heartbeat.
“That’s not what he told me when we left,” I reminded him. “You were sitting there.”
“I am relaying the message, Tobias. Bring the body back with you and we’ll see what we can do.”
“You want me to drive through the city with a dead body in the trunk? It was last week ATF had cameras on us all 24/7.”
“ATF is gone. It’ll be safe,” he said, then the line went quiet. I looked at the flashing numbers, making sure that he really had hung up on me.
“Get the car, Wade. We’re moving cargo.”
Wade stepped closer to Diaz and poked him with a toe, before lifting his loose head and facing it at me. Blood was still pooling under the various cuts and holes in the head. Wade held him by the greasy hair on top of his head and moved one hand under the chin.
“Shotgun!” Diego Diaz called out in a squeaky cartoon Spanish voice long ago ruled politically incorrect. And just tacky in general.
“The car, Wade.”
He hefted Diaz and carried him along, like he was helping a drunk buddy. He giggled to himself as the Spanish voice kept mumbling something. Not really what I planned, but if he was the one burning his clothes and taking a Clorox shower tonight, so be it. Maybe I’d even have a chance of getting home at a decent hour.