Leon/The Professional AU (Part 2/4)
Title: No One Has a Photo of This Man (changed from The Fallen Man because I kinda hated that title)
Author: sneaqui
Artist: heavenly_rain
Team: ANGST
Prompt: innocence, home, overwhelmed
Word Count: 3200
Rated: R
Warnings: graphic-ish depictions of murder, death of a child, mentions of drug use
Summary: Arthur is a hitman. Eames is the teenage boy that lives down the hall from him. I've changed the setting from New York (where the movie takes place) to Los Angeles.
Notes: This fic now has ART!! Courtesy of the lovely heavenly_rain . You guys, look at the way she drew their faces! Look at their EXPRESSIONS! Click on the picture for a larger version.
I just realized that it's been over a month since I posted the first part of this. Part of the reason for the delay was me being busy and part of it was the LJ blackout. It should only be a week or two before I post the next part.
This part and the first part were beta-ed by metacheese , the Bobby to my Whitney.
Part 1 of this fic is here.
Eames comes awake slowly the next morning, curled around a patch of wet in the center of his mattress, his briefs sticky. He blinks his eyes open and then closes them again briefly. The image of a slim man with strong hands and ebony irises reappears behind his eyelids, and Eames crooks his lips in a quiet smile.
The apartment is quiet this morning. No sound of the television. No shrieks of laughter from his mum. No sound of her boyfriend grumbling and stomping about the kitchen.
Perhaps everyone is out. Eames would love to be able to sneak out of the apartment without anyone asking him, “What the fuck are you still doing here?” He’d considered getting up when he’d heard his sister stirring on the other side of their bedroom. She’d even poked him a couple of times on her way out and said, “Are you coming?” He’d answered her by grunting and rolling over, and she’d giggled and flicked his ear before scampering out the door.
Eames pushes off his covers and stretches his body out to its full length, a groan and a squeak jumping out of his throat. His feet dangle off the edge of his twin mattress, and his hands almost touch the floor above his head.
He rolls off the bed, lands face down on the floor and begins his morning routine of fifty pushups and as many crunches as he can stand. By the end of it, he’s grunting loudly, sweat tickling his forehead and his upper lip, his gold medallion bouncing up and down on his chest.
As soon as he’s finished, he jumps up to standing, peels off his briefs and tosses them on his bed. He does a sweep of his room and picks up his dirty laundry from where it’s been strewn about the floor. He sniffs each piece before adding it to the dirty pile and dons the cleanest-smelling articles he can find, a pair of plaid shorts and a bright purple t-shirt.
He gets down on his belly to search underneath his bed, where his hand encounters three long metal objects that rattle when he knocks them over: half-empty canisters of spray paint that he found in a dumpster last week. Probably tossed in there by some paranoid hipsters who think that cops have nothing better to do with their time than dust spray cans for prints.
He shoves them into his backpack along with the stencil he’s been working on: a likeness of his estranged father with the question ‘Have You Seen This Man?’ in block letters underneath it.
He checks the front pocket of his bag to make sure he has enough cigarettes to last him the day and finds something else that he’d forgotten about: a bag of Haribo gummy bears that he bought yesterday with his mum’s money. For the second time that morning, Eames smiles.
He walks into the kitchen with his bag slung over one arm and his laundry wrapped up hobo-style in his bedsheets. His mum’s boyfriend, Andy, is sitting at the kitchen table, shirtless and barefoot, reading the Surgeon General’s warning on the side of a pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes. A cigarette sits in the ashtray in front of him, smoking itself. He startles when he catches sight of Eames and jumps up out of his seat. “What are you doing here?”
Eames takes in the sagging flesh below Andy’s eyes and the way his hands tremble at his sides.
“Where’s mum?” Eames asks him, suddenly wary, peering down the hallway toward her room.
Andy’s shoulders twitch in a jumpy approximation of a shrug. “Out... she went out. With a friend.”
Eames drops the bundle of laundry from his shoulder. “Andy...”
“I told you, she went out. I told her to get lost for a little while and gave her some money to go shopping.” Andy slumps back in his chair and picks up his cigarette. He inhales deeply and looks up at Eames, his face disconcertingly void of emotion, too tired to put up a front of annoyance at the boy’s presence. “Some guys are coming by the apartment later today, and I don’t want her to be here when they come around. You should probably stay away for a few hours too.”
Eames looks down and sways on his feet as he considers Andy’s suggestion. “All I really have to do is my laundry.” He stops moving abruptly and smiles. “But if I had a few extra dollars, I’m sure I could keep myself entertained for a while.”
Andy shakes his head as he pulls out his wallet. “Just like your mom.” He tosses a twenty at Eames’s feet. “She’s a manipulative bitch too.”
Eames ignores the insult, bends over to snatch up the twenty and throw his laundry back over his shoulder. He strolls out the door, attempting to whistle around the wide grin on his face.
~
Once every couple of weeks, Arthur pulls on a pair of jeans, an old cotton t-shirt and a black hoodie. He takes the bus from Echo Park to Los Feliz, gets off at Franklin and Western and walks two miles uphill to Griffith Observatory. He walks up and away from wide, car-clogged avenues and manicured lawns; through sparse, brightly-lit forests of eucalyptus and jacaranda; until there’s nothing but dry scrub and wildflowers clinging to the sides of an every narrowing dirt path. Until the earth begins to fall away beside him and into the canyon.
He walks until he can see the freeway ending in the ocean at Santa Monica, until he’s eye-level with the Hollywood sign, until his feet hit pavement and he joins the throngs of visitors that have made the journey up here by car.
He walks into the observatory, a stone temple consecrated to astronomy, and turns left. He starts at the east end of the museum and walks west, stopping at every exhibit along the way, reading every word on every plaque.
He walks down the low-lit tiled hall, through day and night and the changing seasons and the phases of the moon until he reaches he reaches his favorite exhibit: a light-up periodic table of the elements. It’s currently overrun by a field trip of small children, indiscriminately pushing buttons with their nose-picking fingers. Arthur hovers a few feet away with his hands in his pockets, shifting his weight back and forth from one foot to the other.
Once they leave, he walks swiftly up to the exhibit and stands in front of the plaque. He lets out a breath and runs his eyes over the familiar words: “The calcium in our bones, iron in our blood, and oxygen in our lungs were all created inside a long-dead star.” Arthur touches the words with the tips of his fingers, reads them again and smiles.
~
Arthur takes the bus back to Echo Park a few hours later, gets off at Sunset and Echo Park Avenue. He walks swiftly towards his apartment building, deftly weaving through clusters of skaters and elderly Mexican women pushing wheeled grocery carts full of produce and knick-knacks.
He’s a few steps away from the iron gate in front of his building when someone jumps in front of him and says, “Boo.”
It’s the kid that lives down the hall from him, the one with the unnecessarily large mouth and biceps.
Arthur observes the kid’s expectant look and wonders aloud, “What are you doing?”
The kid’s expression deflates, and he drops his hands to his sides, fiddles with the stitching on his jeans. “Trying to surprise you.”
Arthur thinks back to a few seconds before. “Oh.” He tries to placate the kid with a smile, but drops it almost immediately. He’s fully aware that smiling makes him look like a creep. “Well... better luck next time.” He steps sideways and begins to walk forward, but the kid jumps in front of him again.
Arthur has to stop himself from instinctively felling him and pressing his boot into his larynx. The kid’s standing too close now, fewer than ten inches in front of him. Arthur’s muscles twitch, wanting desperately to do what they’ve been trained to do when in such close proximity to another human body.
The kid is oblivious. “What’s your name?” he asks, his gray gaze flitting back and forth from one of Arthur’s eyes to the other.
Arthur stares right back at him. “Why do you want to know?”
The kid lifts his chin up, speaks in the falsely authoritative tone often used by teenaged boys. “Because. This is our second conversation. I think now would be a good time for us to exchange names.”
Arthur continues to stare at him, slightly bewildered. “My name is Arthur?” he replies, as much a question as a statement.
The kid pulls his bottom lip into his mouth and lets it pop back out. The gesture makes Arthur’s muscles twitch with another instinct that he doesn’t fully comprehend.
“Ar-thur,” the kid purrs in two long syllables. “I like it.” He pulls himself up to his full height and extends his arm. “I’m Eames.”
Arthur takes his hand, grips it a bit too tight without meaning to and moves his arm up and down slowly. He hasn’t done this in a long time. He thinks aloud, “I didn’t realize that kids these days still shook hands.”
Eames giggles. “Listen to you: ‘kids these days’. You can’t be much older than I am. How old are you?”
Arthur opens his mouth to speak and realizes that he can’t remember. “I’m not sure. Twenty-eight... no. No, I’m twenty-nine. I think.”
Eames cocks his head at him. “You’re a bit odd, aren’t you?”
Arthur shrugs. “Probably.”
Eames catches sight of something over Arthur’s shoulder that causes him to draw his eyebrows together. Arthur wheels around and steps to the side just in time to let a scrawny young girl run past him and into Eames.
Just like that, Arthur is invisible again.
Eames wraps both of his arms around the girls back, encasing her. He speaks into her blonde curls. “Lu? What happened? Why are you home early?”
The girl’s shoulders convulse as she sobs into Eames’s shoulder, “Becca was saying things about you... in gym class... in front of everybody... I smacked her in the face.” Her breath hitches. “I ran home. They’re gonna expel me, Tom. I can’t go back there I can’t.”
Eames shushes her, clumsily petting the back of her head. “It’s alright. It’s alright.”
Neither of them notice or acknowledge Arthur when he walks away.
Eames sends Lu upstairs to get cleaned up. Her lip and he eyebrow are split open, and there’s a giant bruise forming on her upper arm. Apparently, her and Becca’s fight went a little bit beyond a slap in the face.
Eames walks to Walgreens to get some Band-Aids. He knocks into several people on the way there and doesn’t stop to apologize. He stomps down the sidewalk, teeth grinding together, cursing the world for being an unfair place and himself for being a coward in it. He should have been at school today. His little sister shouldn’t have to fight his battles for him.
Eames’s vision being clouded by fury, he doesn’t notice the two men that step out of a rusting Grand Pris in front of his apartment building just as he’s leaving. One is an older man with gray hair and a paunchy belly. The other is scrawny and pale, blue eyes encircled by sunken, purple skin.
~
Arthur is standing in front of his bathroom mirror, attempting to turn the corners of his mouth up into an expression of happiness that would be immediately recognizable to another person as such. He gives up after five minutes when his jaw begins to ache.
He walks out into his kitchen, sits down at the table and opens up his leather case. He pulls out his Beretta and is about to start taking it apart, when he hears low voices whispering just outside his door.
The air in his apartment becomes warm and too close, constricts and loses oxygen, making it harder for him to breathe. The hair on his forearms stands on end, and his skin tingles in anticipation and excitement. He picks up his Beretta and keeps it trained on the ground as he steps soundlessly to his door, leans against the wall near its hinges and listens.
A voice (low, male, older) says, “Bobbie... we can’t just kill his kids.”
Another voice (higher-pitched, also male, younger) says, “Yes, we can. If they’re in there when it happens, they’ll be witnesses. Ergo, we will have to kill them.”
“I know that, Bobbie, but... I don’t know that I can do it if it comes to that. I’m just trying to be honest here. They’re just kids.”
“Pete, if it makes you feel any better, just think of it like this: these kids’ lives are miserable. You’d probably be doing them a favor by offing them. They’re poor, destitute. Their father’s a drug dealer...”
The voices begin to move farther away, and Arthur walks up to the peephole on his door. He recognizes them as the two men who were here last night talking to Eames’s dad. They’ve got guns.
He watches as they stop in front of Eames’s apartment.
Arthur’s hand itches to grab the door handle, throw open the door and level the barrel of his gun at their skulls. He takes a deep breath and thinks about what his employer has always told him: ‘If it doesn’t concern you, Arthur; don’t get involved. Because if you do, you’ll get both of us in trouble. Is that clear?’
The older man sighs. “Alright. No, you’re right. You’re right.”
The younger man smiles and slaps him on the shoulder. “Of course I’m right.” He positions himself in front of the door to Eames’s apartment, raises his foot in the air. He tosses a glance back at the older man and shakes his head. “Jesus, Pete. You’re such a fuckin’ pussy sometimes.” And then he kicks the door open.
~
The first one walks right in front of them. She comes running into the front hallway when she hears the door burst open. She’s older, late thirties, dark blonde hair, breasts sagging underneath a lacy tank-top.
She turns and begins to run away then stops abruptly when three bullets enter her torso via her back. She sways for a couple seconds and then collapses, coughing out her last breaths.
They find the second one in her bedroom hiding behind her mattress, bare knees drawn up to her chin, hands held up in front of her face, palms out, stuttering, “P-p-p-p-p-p...”
The thin man catches sight of her split lip and eyebrow. He shakes his head as he points his gun at her face. “Just like I told Peter. I’m doing you guys a favor.”
The third one is well aware that he’s their primary target. They find him in his bedroom, backed up against the wall, pointing with a quivering finger at something on the bed: half a kilo of cocaine, wrapped up in a translucent bag sealed shut with brown tape.
He stammers through the hard spasms of fear that run through his body, “I’m s-s-sorry. J-just take it. Take it. It’s y-yours. Please. Please just d-don’t k-” He stops talking abruptly when two bullets enter his skull. He crumples forward, his head knocking against the bed post on his way to the floor.
Now they just have to take care of the fourth one.
~
Eames takes the metal steps up to the second floor of his building two-at-a-time, a half-empty bottle of red Gatorade in one hand and a plastic bag containing Band-Aids and Neosporin in the other. He pauses when he gets to the top of the stairs and sniffs the air. He smells something burning. Not plastic or paper or wood. More than anything, it smells like heat.
He walks slowly down the hall. When he’s a few feet away from his apartment door, he notices that it’s open. He takes a couple more steps and sees that the doorknob is dislocated. A couple more steps give him a good view of his mum, lying face down in the hallway in a pool of dark liquid. For one mad second, he doesn’t understand what it is, what he’s looking at. He opens his mouth to ask his mum what she’s doing.
He hears a clatter and an angry shout inside his apartment. The sound of furniture being overturned and a familiar, high-pitched voice. All at once, Eames understands what he’s seeing.
He turns and walks away.
Eames keeps walking until the hallway ends in front of Arthur’s door. He reaches his hand up to knock on it.
He waits, red Gatorade sloshing about in his trembling hand.
~
The two men look everywhere for him. They overturn mattresses and metal bed frames, open up kitchen cabinets, tear clothing out of closets.
“Where is he?!” the thin man screams, slamming the refrigerator door shut.
The older man touches him lightly on the shoulder. “Bobbie. We should get out of here. Somebody’s probably called the station by now.”
The thin man spins around, flutters his hands as he speaks. “He saw us, Pete! Yesterday. He was out in the hall. He heard fucking everything!”
“Bobbie, calm down. We’ll find him. It’s not a big neighborhood. Besides, what’s the worst he can do? Go to the police?” The older man smiles. “Then he’ll be coming right to us. Don’t worry. We’ll take care of him. C’mon. Let’s get out of here before the boys show up.”
~
”Don’t get involved. Don’t get involved.” The voice of Arthur’s employer becomes replaced by his own, small and futile in the face of the boy standing on the other side of his door.
He watches Eames through the peephole as the tremors move up his body, until his shoulders are heaving and the skin around his eyes is trembling and leaking. The door shakes under Arthur’s palms when Eames pounds on the door again. Arthur lets out a deep breath and doesn’t move to open it.
Eames begins to mouth a word repeatedly, and it takes Arthur a moment to realize what it is. ”Please. Please. Please.” Tears dripping of his chin. His mouth a livid, artificial red.
Eames jumps at a noise that Arthur can’t hear, and at that, Arthur shoves his gun into the waistband of his pants, throws the door open, grabs Eames’s arm and pulls him inside. He shuts the door quietly as Eames stumbles backwards into his kitchen table, startling at the contact and dropping his bag and his Gatorade, whimpering to no one in particular, “Help me. Help me.”
Arthur walks through the red puddle, takes Eames by the shoulders and guides the boy gently into one of the chairs. Arthur looks into the his eyes and keeps his voice level when he says. “It’s okay. You’re okay. Just sit here and be quiet, okay?”
Eames doesn’t say anything, just continues to stare at Arthur, eyes wild and unseeing.
Arthur walks back to the door and looks through the peephole. After about thirty seconds, two men walk swiftly out of Eames’s apartment and down the stairs.
Arthur lets out a deep breath and rests his forehead against the door. “They’re gone.”
Eames doesn’t respond. He stares down at the bag of Band-Aids still clutched in his trembling hand.
Author: sneaqui
Artist: heavenly_rain
Team: ANGST
Prompt: innocence, home, overwhelmed
Word Count: 3200
Rated: R
Warnings: graphic-ish depictions of murder, death of a child, mentions of drug use
Summary: Arthur is a hitman. Eames is the teenage boy that lives down the hall from him. I've changed the setting from New York (where the movie takes place) to Los Angeles.
Notes: This fic now has ART!! Courtesy of the lovely heavenly_rain . You guys, look at the way she drew their faces! Look at their EXPRESSIONS! Click on the picture for a larger version.
I just realized that it's been over a month since I posted the first part of this. Part of the reason for the delay was me being busy and part of it was the LJ blackout. It should only be a week or two before I post the next part.
This part and the first part were beta-ed by metacheese , the Bobby to my Whitney.
Part 1 of this fic is here.
Eames comes awake slowly the next morning, curled around a patch of wet in the center of his mattress, his briefs sticky. He blinks his eyes open and then closes them again briefly. The image of a slim man with strong hands and ebony irises reappears behind his eyelids, and Eames crooks his lips in a quiet smile.
The apartment is quiet this morning. No sound of the television. No shrieks of laughter from his mum. No sound of her boyfriend grumbling and stomping about the kitchen.
Perhaps everyone is out. Eames would love to be able to sneak out of the apartment without anyone asking him, “What the fuck are you still doing here?” He’d considered getting up when he’d heard his sister stirring on the other side of their bedroom. She’d even poked him a couple of times on her way out and said, “Are you coming?” He’d answered her by grunting and rolling over, and she’d giggled and flicked his ear before scampering out the door.
Eames pushes off his covers and stretches his body out to its full length, a groan and a squeak jumping out of his throat. His feet dangle off the edge of his twin mattress, and his hands almost touch the floor above his head.
He rolls off the bed, lands face down on the floor and begins his morning routine of fifty pushups and as many crunches as he can stand. By the end of it, he’s grunting loudly, sweat tickling his forehead and his upper lip, his gold medallion bouncing up and down on his chest.
As soon as he’s finished, he jumps up to standing, peels off his briefs and tosses them on his bed. He does a sweep of his room and picks up his dirty laundry from where it’s been strewn about the floor. He sniffs each piece before adding it to the dirty pile and dons the cleanest-smelling articles he can find, a pair of plaid shorts and a bright purple t-shirt.
He gets down on his belly to search underneath his bed, where his hand encounters three long metal objects that rattle when he knocks them over: half-empty canisters of spray paint that he found in a dumpster last week. Probably tossed in there by some paranoid hipsters who think that cops have nothing better to do with their time than dust spray cans for prints.
He shoves them into his backpack along with the stencil he’s been working on: a likeness of his estranged father with the question ‘Have You Seen This Man?’ in block letters underneath it.
He checks the front pocket of his bag to make sure he has enough cigarettes to last him the day and finds something else that he’d forgotten about: a bag of Haribo gummy bears that he bought yesterday with his mum’s money. For the second time that morning, Eames smiles.
He walks into the kitchen with his bag slung over one arm and his laundry wrapped up hobo-style in his bedsheets. His mum’s boyfriend, Andy, is sitting at the kitchen table, shirtless and barefoot, reading the Surgeon General’s warning on the side of a pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes. A cigarette sits in the ashtray in front of him, smoking itself. He startles when he catches sight of Eames and jumps up out of his seat. “What are you doing here?”
Eames takes in the sagging flesh below Andy’s eyes and the way his hands tremble at his sides.
“Where’s mum?” Eames asks him, suddenly wary, peering down the hallway toward her room.
Andy’s shoulders twitch in a jumpy approximation of a shrug. “Out... she went out. With a friend.”
Eames drops the bundle of laundry from his shoulder. “Andy...”
“I told you, she went out. I told her to get lost for a little while and gave her some money to go shopping.” Andy slumps back in his chair and picks up his cigarette. He inhales deeply and looks up at Eames, his face disconcertingly void of emotion, too tired to put up a front of annoyance at the boy’s presence. “Some guys are coming by the apartment later today, and I don’t want her to be here when they come around. You should probably stay away for a few hours too.”
Eames looks down and sways on his feet as he considers Andy’s suggestion. “All I really have to do is my laundry.” He stops moving abruptly and smiles. “But if I had a few extra dollars, I’m sure I could keep myself entertained for a while.”
Andy shakes his head as he pulls out his wallet. “Just like your mom.” He tosses a twenty at Eames’s feet. “She’s a manipulative bitch too.”
Eames ignores the insult, bends over to snatch up the twenty and throw his laundry back over his shoulder. He strolls out the door, attempting to whistle around the wide grin on his face.
~
Once every couple of weeks, Arthur pulls on a pair of jeans, an old cotton t-shirt and a black hoodie. He takes the bus from Echo Park to Los Feliz, gets off at Franklin and Western and walks two miles uphill to Griffith Observatory. He walks up and away from wide, car-clogged avenues and manicured lawns; through sparse, brightly-lit forests of eucalyptus and jacaranda; until there’s nothing but dry scrub and wildflowers clinging to the sides of an every narrowing dirt path. Until the earth begins to fall away beside him and into the canyon.
He walks until he can see the freeway ending in the ocean at Santa Monica, until he’s eye-level with the Hollywood sign, until his feet hit pavement and he joins the throngs of visitors that have made the journey up here by car.
He walks into the observatory, a stone temple consecrated to astronomy, and turns left. He starts at the east end of the museum and walks west, stopping at every exhibit along the way, reading every word on every plaque.
He walks down the low-lit tiled hall, through day and night and the changing seasons and the phases of the moon until he reaches he reaches his favorite exhibit: a light-up periodic table of the elements. It’s currently overrun by a field trip of small children, indiscriminately pushing buttons with their nose-picking fingers. Arthur hovers a few feet away with his hands in his pockets, shifting his weight back and forth from one foot to the other.
Once they leave, he walks swiftly up to the exhibit and stands in front of the plaque. He lets out a breath and runs his eyes over the familiar words: “The calcium in our bones, iron in our blood, and oxygen in our lungs were all created inside a long-dead star.” Arthur touches the words with the tips of his fingers, reads them again and smiles.
~
Arthur takes the bus back to Echo Park a few hours later, gets off at Sunset and Echo Park Avenue. He walks swiftly towards his apartment building, deftly weaving through clusters of skaters and elderly Mexican women pushing wheeled grocery carts full of produce and knick-knacks.
He’s a few steps away from the iron gate in front of his building when someone jumps in front of him and says, “Boo.”
It’s the kid that lives down the hall from him, the one with the unnecessarily large mouth and biceps.
Arthur observes the kid’s expectant look and wonders aloud, “What are you doing?”
The kid’s expression deflates, and he drops his hands to his sides, fiddles with the stitching on his jeans. “Trying to surprise you.”
Arthur thinks back to a few seconds before. “Oh.” He tries to placate the kid with a smile, but drops it almost immediately. He’s fully aware that smiling makes him look like a creep. “Well... better luck next time.” He steps sideways and begins to walk forward, but the kid jumps in front of him again.
Arthur has to stop himself from instinctively felling him and pressing his boot into his larynx. The kid’s standing too close now, fewer than ten inches in front of him. Arthur’s muscles twitch, wanting desperately to do what they’ve been trained to do when in such close proximity to another human body.
The kid is oblivious. “What’s your name?” he asks, his gray gaze flitting back and forth from one of Arthur’s eyes to the other.
Arthur stares right back at him. “Why do you want to know?”
The kid lifts his chin up, speaks in the falsely authoritative tone often used by teenaged boys. “Because. This is our second conversation. I think now would be a good time for us to exchange names.”
Arthur continues to stare at him, slightly bewildered. “My name is Arthur?” he replies, as much a question as a statement.
The kid pulls his bottom lip into his mouth and lets it pop back out. The gesture makes Arthur’s muscles twitch with another instinct that he doesn’t fully comprehend.
“Ar-thur,” the kid purrs in two long syllables. “I like it.” He pulls himself up to his full height and extends his arm. “I’m Eames.”
Arthur takes his hand, grips it a bit too tight without meaning to and moves his arm up and down slowly. He hasn’t done this in a long time. He thinks aloud, “I didn’t realize that kids these days still shook hands.”
Eames giggles. “Listen to you: ‘kids these days’. You can’t be much older than I am. How old are you?”
Arthur opens his mouth to speak and realizes that he can’t remember. “I’m not sure. Twenty-eight... no. No, I’m twenty-nine. I think.”
Eames cocks his head at him. “You’re a bit odd, aren’t you?”
Arthur shrugs. “Probably.”
Eames catches sight of something over Arthur’s shoulder that causes him to draw his eyebrows together. Arthur wheels around and steps to the side just in time to let a scrawny young girl run past him and into Eames.
Just like that, Arthur is invisible again.
Eames wraps both of his arms around the girls back, encasing her. He speaks into her blonde curls. “Lu? What happened? Why are you home early?”
The girl’s shoulders convulse as she sobs into Eames’s shoulder, “Becca was saying things about you... in gym class... in front of everybody... I smacked her in the face.” Her breath hitches. “I ran home. They’re gonna expel me, Tom. I can’t go back there I can’t.”
Eames shushes her, clumsily petting the back of her head. “It’s alright. It’s alright.”
Neither of them notice or acknowledge Arthur when he walks away.
Eames sends Lu upstairs to get cleaned up. Her lip and he eyebrow are split open, and there’s a giant bruise forming on her upper arm. Apparently, her and Becca’s fight went a little bit beyond a slap in the face.
Eames walks to Walgreens to get some Band-Aids. He knocks into several people on the way there and doesn’t stop to apologize. He stomps down the sidewalk, teeth grinding together, cursing the world for being an unfair place and himself for being a coward in it. He should have been at school today. His little sister shouldn’t have to fight his battles for him.
Eames’s vision being clouded by fury, he doesn’t notice the two men that step out of a rusting Grand Pris in front of his apartment building just as he’s leaving. One is an older man with gray hair and a paunchy belly. The other is scrawny and pale, blue eyes encircled by sunken, purple skin.
~
Arthur is standing in front of his bathroom mirror, attempting to turn the corners of his mouth up into an expression of happiness that would be immediately recognizable to another person as such. He gives up after five minutes when his jaw begins to ache.
He walks out into his kitchen, sits down at the table and opens up his leather case. He pulls out his Beretta and is about to start taking it apart, when he hears low voices whispering just outside his door.
The air in his apartment becomes warm and too close, constricts and loses oxygen, making it harder for him to breathe. The hair on his forearms stands on end, and his skin tingles in anticipation and excitement. He picks up his Beretta and keeps it trained on the ground as he steps soundlessly to his door, leans against the wall near its hinges and listens.
A voice (low, male, older) says, “Bobbie... we can’t just kill his kids.”
Another voice (higher-pitched, also male, younger) says, “Yes, we can. If they’re in there when it happens, they’ll be witnesses. Ergo, we will have to kill them.”
“I know that, Bobbie, but... I don’t know that I can do it if it comes to that. I’m just trying to be honest here. They’re just kids.”
“Pete, if it makes you feel any better, just think of it like this: these kids’ lives are miserable. You’d probably be doing them a favor by offing them. They’re poor, destitute. Their father’s a drug dealer...”
The voices begin to move farther away, and Arthur walks up to the peephole on his door. He recognizes them as the two men who were here last night talking to Eames’s dad. They’ve got guns.
He watches as they stop in front of Eames’s apartment.
Arthur’s hand itches to grab the door handle, throw open the door and level the barrel of his gun at their skulls. He takes a deep breath and thinks about what his employer has always told him: ‘If it doesn’t concern you, Arthur; don’t get involved. Because if you do, you’ll get both of us in trouble. Is that clear?’
The older man sighs. “Alright. No, you’re right. You’re right.”
The younger man smiles and slaps him on the shoulder. “Of course I’m right.” He positions himself in front of the door to Eames’s apartment, raises his foot in the air. He tosses a glance back at the older man and shakes his head. “Jesus, Pete. You’re such a fuckin’ pussy sometimes.” And then he kicks the door open.
~
The first one walks right in front of them. She comes running into the front hallway when she hears the door burst open. She’s older, late thirties, dark blonde hair, breasts sagging underneath a lacy tank-top.
She turns and begins to run away then stops abruptly when three bullets enter her torso via her back. She sways for a couple seconds and then collapses, coughing out her last breaths.
They find the second one in her bedroom hiding behind her mattress, bare knees drawn up to her chin, hands held up in front of her face, palms out, stuttering, “P-p-p-p-p-p...”
The thin man catches sight of her split lip and eyebrow. He shakes his head as he points his gun at her face. “Just like I told Peter. I’m doing you guys a favor.”
The third one is well aware that he’s their primary target. They find him in his bedroom, backed up against the wall, pointing with a quivering finger at something on the bed: half a kilo of cocaine, wrapped up in a translucent bag sealed shut with brown tape.
He stammers through the hard spasms of fear that run through his body, “I’m s-s-sorry. J-just take it. Take it. It’s y-yours. Please. Please just d-don’t k-” He stops talking abruptly when two bullets enter his skull. He crumples forward, his head knocking against the bed post on his way to the floor.
Now they just have to take care of the fourth one.
~
Eames takes the metal steps up to the second floor of his building two-at-a-time, a half-empty bottle of red Gatorade in one hand and a plastic bag containing Band-Aids and Neosporin in the other. He pauses when he gets to the top of the stairs and sniffs the air. He smells something burning. Not plastic or paper or wood. More than anything, it smells like heat.
He walks slowly down the hall. When he’s a few feet away from his apartment door, he notices that it’s open. He takes a couple more steps and sees that the doorknob is dislocated. A couple more steps give him a good view of his mum, lying face down in the hallway in a pool of dark liquid. For one mad second, he doesn’t understand what it is, what he’s looking at. He opens his mouth to ask his mum what she’s doing.
He hears a clatter and an angry shout inside his apartment. The sound of furniture being overturned and a familiar, high-pitched voice. All at once, Eames understands what he’s seeing.
He turns and walks away.
Eames keeps walking until the hallway ends in front of Arthur’s door. He reaches his hand up to knock on it.
He waits, red Gatorade sloshing about in his trembling hand.
~
The two men look everywhere for him. They overturn mattresses and metal bed frames, open up kitchen cabinets, tear clothing out of closets.
“Where is he?!” the thin man screams, slamming the refrigerator door shut.
The older man touches him lightly on the shoulder. “Bobbie. We should get out of here. Somebody’s probably called the station by now.”
The thin man spins around, flutters his hands as he speaks. “He saw us, Pete! Yesterday. He was out in the hall. He heard fucking everything!”
“Bobbie, calm down. We’ll find him. It’s not a big neighborhood. Besides, what’s the worst he can do? Go to the police?” The older man smiles. “Then he’ll be coming right to us. Don’t worry. We’ll take care of him. C’mon. Let’s get out of here before the boys show up.”
~
”Don’t get involved. Don’t get involved.” The voice of Arthur’s employer becomes replaced by his own, small and futile in the face of the boy standing on the other side of his door.
He watches Eames through the peephole as the tremors move up his body, until his shoulders are heaving and the skin around his eyes is trembling and leaking. The door shakes under Arthur’s palms when Eames pounds on the door again. Arthur lets out a deep breath and doesn’t move to open it.
Eames begins to mouth a word repeatedly, and it takes Arthur a moment to realize what it is. ”Please. Please. Please.” Tears dripping of his chin. His mouth a livid, artificial red.
Eames jumps at a noise that Arthur can’t hear, and at that, Arthur shoves his gun into the waistband of his pants, throws the door open, grabs Eames’s arm and pulls him inside. He shuts the door quietly as Eames stumbles backwards into his kitchen table, startling at the contact and dropping his bag and his Gatorade, whimpering to no one in particular, “Help me. Help me.”
Arthur walks through the red puddle, takes Eames by the shoulders and guides the boy gently into one of the chairs. Arthur looks into the his eyes and keeps his voice level when he says. “It’s okay. You’re okay. Just sit here and be quiet, okay?”
Eames doesn’t say anything, just continues to stare at Arthur, eyes wild and unseeing.
Arthur walks back to the door and looks through the peephole. After about thirty seconds, two men walk swiftly out of Eames’s apartment and down the stairs.
Arthur lets out a deep breath and rests his forehead against the door. “They’re gone.”
Eames doesn’t respond. He stares down at the bag of Band-Aids still clutched in his trembling hand.