Pro Bono

By Ebbe Roe Smith

From the writer of the darkly comedic film Falling Down comes the novel Pro Bono, the story of Adrien, a professional assassin and amateur chef who, in order to overcome a career-crippling crisis of conscience, volunteers to kill a few deserving souls free of charge. The client, Charles, formerly a take-life-by-the-balls thrill

• Language: English
• Publisher: Klipspringer Press
• Release date: Oct 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9780999231944

Book preview

1

There’s something about the dawn. Maybe it’s the freshness of the dew. The smell of that new water turning into vapors with the first touch of the sun. It’s a rebirth. That water was created out of whole cloth. Assembled from particles that never met each other before, pulled out of the very air, molecule by molecule.

Or maybe it’s that sleep has given you a re-start, like a computer. You’ve forgotten all those glitches, those bumps in the road that have collected in your head. Some psychic garbage collector has made the rounds, swooped up the cans filled with your frustrations, unanswered questions, thwarted desires from the day before, tossed them in the grinder where they’re reduced to mush along with everybody else’s.

The night, that’s a whole nother deal. Things can go all spooky in the night. It’s a different universe. It’s a different realm. The dark, the quiet, conspire. The house creaks. Something scratches in the walls. A vague sense of evil descends. It’s no good comforting yourself with the coming dawn. You’ve got no guarantee it’ll be there, not when you’re lying in the dark, smelling your own sweat.

You can’t say, Hey, the sun rose yesterday, right? But maybe it didn’t. Maybe it was a sick dream. You look back, you examine it like a shipwrecked sailor scanning the horizon for landfall. It turns on you. Something you thought was a compliment becomes an insult. Something you thought was beautiful in the light of day all of a sudden doesn’t look so good. The sum of its parts don’t add up. You’re still in the night, flat on your back, caught between a sheet and a hard place.

But then comes the dawn and everything’s hunky-dory again. Just like that. The world is new and so are you. All that night shit is gone like a will-o’-the-wisp. You’re ready to kick some ass, take some names, deal with the situation. You are in the zone and when push comes to shove, you are ready to do your duty, to cross those T’s and dot that I.

Yeah, but the night. First, you got to get through the night.

......

I was stretching, working out the kinks that the long night had given me. Behind me was the city, before me were the trees of the park. I was at the fringe, the dividing line between wilderness and civility. She jogged past and gave me the look, the one that makes you feel pretty good about yourself. I didn’t return it. I knew from whence it came. She was mid-thirties, pretty, in a standard kind of way, the kind that didn’t bear too close an examination, that looked good when supported by youth, but not so good when left to its own devices, the kind that you suspect will not abide the passage of time. No worries there. She was wearing the serious jogger’s costume, unlike myself. I had a pointless T-shirt, some generic shorts and beat-up tennies. She was serious in yellow shorts, serious stripy top, the serious headband and serious, I’m-not-kidding shoes. She was probably one of those who insist on running in traffic when a perfectly good sidewalk is five feet away. Her hair was pulled back in a pony-tail, blonde with streaks like they practically all are these days. The tail bounced prettily from side to side as she jogged easily past. Just in case I hadn’t gotten the message, she threw me another glance back over her shoulder. I saw it out of the corner of my eye, because I wasn’t looking at her. I was looking at the dawn.

It was coming up behind the screen of trees like an orchestra doing one of those builds, the ones that seem to go on forever, that swell and climb and just don’t quit, that seem to levitate you up out of your seat. Every leaf on every tree was back-lit. There must have been a billion shades of green and every one of them was screaming, look at me. Beneath it all was that mist, that once-upon-a-time dew going through its process, changing from liquid to gas with the fresh heat. It swirled like grey fire. It was gorgeous. I was feeling good. The night was over, the day had come and I was employed.

I caught up with her about a mile down the dirt trail that snaked through the forest. I rounded a curve and the flash of her yellow shorts caught my eye like a life-vest on dark water. At the sight of her, something happened in my head. It always does. It feels like a silent explosion that radiates out to the walls of my skull from some point in there, some center, some nexus. I don’t know exactly where that point is, but it’s deep, I know that much. It’s down under all those layers that civilized life has retrofitted over the first brain, the core one, the reptile one that crouches at the heart of us all. It feels good, that flash of feeling. It’s like coming on to the sweetest drug of all time. A guy could get addicted.

I automatically speeded up. Her little yellow tail kept appearing and disappearing as the winding trail threaded out ahead of us and each time I spotted her, she was just a little bit closer. As she grew in my view I automatically fell into her rhythm, step for step, so that when I was close enough, she wouldn’t hear me over the pounding of her own serious shoes on the dirt path and her own breathing in her ears. The run had warmed me up and shaken out the last of the kinks. I was running with her. She had no idea I was there.

I like it when they don’t know you’re there. It’s like a stationary target. There won’t be any spastic moves, any ducks, jerks or twists that can mess things up. I was right behind her now but I didn’t act just yet. I waited for the optimum, for the trail to hit a straight stretch, so I wouldn’t be rushed. I don’t like to be rushed if I can help it. Haste makes waste and waste in my line of work can be deadly. I didn’t have to wait long. The trail straightened out. We were on a slight downgrade. I came up right behind her. That pony tail was still twitching back and forth like the rear end of a happy horse.

I’m what is known as an eclectic reader. My reading bounces all over the place in time, genre and geology. One thing leads to another. A reference here sends me there. You might say I’m an autodidact, a fancy word I ran across which means self-taught. I never finished high school. I left it once I realized that I could beat up my teachers, one of whom I did on the occasion of my last day in academia. The I Ching (see? eclectic, right?) tells us that the learning of the self-taught is ponderous. What I’ve come to believe this means is that whereas it may be voluminous (good word, that) it is full of holes and has no solid base, no overview with which to embrace the world. And without an overview, let’s face it, there is no wisdom. I’m well-read but I make no claims to being wise. Anyway, in the course of my autodidactic eclectic reading, I came across the philosophy of the Samurai.

The Samurai’s used to carry two swords, one short and one long. The short one’s called the killing sword. The idea, in a perfect Samurai world, was that you don’t pull the short one until it’s time for the kill. You don’t clang it against the other guy’s sword. You don’t defend with it. That’s the long one’s job. It waits, safe in its little, lacquered, wooden sheath until it’s time. When you pull it, it touches nothing but meat.

It was time. I pulled the .22 from the small of my back. I like a .22. Sure, sometimes you need the fire-power of a bigger caliber, but it’s indelicate, in my opinion. Just like the short sword, a .22 will do the job as long as it’s used with discretion. The good thing about a .22 is that sometimes it’ll go in and not come out the other side. That first wall of bone will slow it down enough so it just bounces around in there like a penny in a piggy bank when older brother is checking to see if there’s anything worth stealing.

I lifted the little gun and pulled the trigger all in one smooth move. That’s what you want to do. You don’t want to hesitate. The longer you aim the worse it will be. The arm swings up, touches that micro-second of perfect positioning and you squeeze. I did. The sweet, sharp crack of the .22 came and went, no echo, it was gone as if it had never been. She plunged forward, I sailed by her falling body and slowed to a stop. I stood there breathing, listening. I didn’t look back just yet. I just listened, past the wind in the leaves and the birds in the trees, listened for the bass beat of shoes pounding the path. There weren’t any. I swung around. She was laying just off the path. She’d hit the dirt, bounced and rolled over onto her back. Her arms and legs were all akimbo (a funny word but another good one).

She was dead but I have a system. Systems save lives. I believe that. I leaned over her and dotted the I. Or, in this case, the eye.

......

Unfortunately, she was gone but not forgotten. She came back for a visit that night, along about three AM, that special time for creepy manifestations. I opened my eyes and knew I wasn’t alone. I knew someone was lying next to me but I couldn’t for the life of me remember who. I rolled slowly over, not wanting to, not liking it, but knowing I had to. Knowing I had no choice. She was propped up on one elbow smiling at me. The eye I had dotted was a black hole on eternity drooling blood that was as black as the hole itself. I yelled and scampered back like a crab fighting the seagull of death. I fell off the bed. I scrambled to my feet because I didn’t want to be on my back when that thing came at me. I backed up against the wall.

A woman was still in my bed but it wasn’t her. This one was younger with green hair and was into piercings. She sat up, freaked out by my yell.

Jesus Christ! What’s wrong!? I just stared at her, breathing and swallowing convulsively. What the fuck is it? You scared the shit out of me. Now I remembered her. She’d been at the Local Yokel with a pack of other pierced and tattooed wanna-be something-or-others the night before. I was medicating alone at the bar and she kept giving me the look and finally followed it up with a saunter over. I let it happen. If it had been a chore I wouldn’t have bothered but it was easy. I took her home and gave her what she wanted. She was a laugher.

You… it was a croak. I cleared my throat and tried again. You have to leave now.

She looked around her. It’s the middle of the fuckin’ night! I came around the bed and grabbed her arm.

Just go on. Get out. I pulled her out of the bed. Go on. Get your clothes. I started gathering up her clothes which were scattered around the room and throwing them at her.

Jesus. What are you, a fuckin’ psycho?

Yes. I grabbed her panties which had some Japanese cartoon character on the crotch, put them on her head like a shower cap, took her to the door, opened it and pushed her out on the porch.

My shoes! She yelled as I closed the door. I found her shoes, opened the door and tossed them out. I listened to her curses as she got dressed out there. She stomped away. Something hit the door and her distant voice yelled, Asshole!

When she was good and gone, I dragged the blanket off the bed and went out onto the porch. I wrapped it around me and sat in the chair and waited for the night to go away and the day to come. It took a lifetime. I could still feel the woman jogger in the house behind me, wandering around, checking my DVD collection, seeing what I had in the refrigerator. When dawn finally quit kidding around, I took a big sigh and closed my eyes. I dozed until the paper boy woke me up with the smack of the newspaper landing on the porch. The news wasn’t good. Is it ever?

2

I listened to Mikey flirting with a waitress on the outdoor patio of The Rest Of It, a bullshit bistro that had clever names for its so-so menu items. Mikey’s a pathological flirt. I had my back to him so I didn’t have to see the cute look he gets on his face when he’s putting on the charm. Mikey’s a handsome guy. Picture the guy in high school you hated because all the girls bought his bullshit. That’s Mikey. He has a young look and probably will keep it ‘til he’s eighty, long after I’ve lost my hair and teeth. I was at another table, pretending I didn’t know Mikey and Mikey didn’t know me. That was our system when he met with the client for the payoff. I was acting as backup in case something funny went down. Mikey was trying to guess where the waitress came from. She had an Eastern European accent.

Estonia, Mikey said.

No, the waitress said.

Czechoslovakia.

Uh uh.

Transylvania?

No way. Where do you get that?

I give up.

Poland. I’m Polish.

I knew it. I knew you were Polish.

You did not.

I did. I can smell a Polish woman a mile away.

The waitress tried to get down to business. I was glad. Do you know what you want?

I think you know what I want. See, this is one of the things I hate about Mikey. He’s got all the time