In Those Days

A Short Story

The rain drummed the plastic awning and sluiced through the kudzu-encrusted drainage ditch behind the discount grocery. Gideon logged on from his phone and opened up the turking job forum, double checking to be sure his jailbroken vpn package was running. Everything loaded up slowly behind layers of defensive packet routing, giving him time to get annoyed at the humid fog of pavement steam and pre-ban Marlboro Reds swirling past. Some of the cashiers were taking a break, and a decade of living in the BirmAtNash triangle still hadn’t gotten him used to the constant companionship of tobacco fumes. He grumbled to himself quietly as the last wallet check passed and he was in.

It had taken Gideon months of careful maneuvering through increasingly bizarre and troubling online communities to obtain his passtoken for this particular turk board. Lots of people ran small anonymous jobs for whoever would drop tokens, what with the Huntsville space boom starting to dry up. But this was different. A parallel world waiting for only those with the right real-world web of relationships and a couple of innocuous-looking art tokens in their wallet. You could drop through the floor and find the real bottom. Nobody else on the mold-blackened back stoop of this Super Winn-Dixie knew that he had killed four people that month. But if they did, he hoped they’d understand why.

The spring sunset blasted the sky above the pines in orange and violet while he scrolled through notifications and tried to allow Ambient Liturgical 12-Hour Continuous Mix to take some of the tension out of his shoulders.

His filters showed him a small slice of the available work for the evening, and even then he was still choosy. When he first got on the board he’d still thought about somehow keeping his hands completely clean, as if maybe he could have offered his services as the only confidential straight-edge PG-13 rated illegal warboy available for hire in your area. It only took two jobs for him to learn.

You couldn’t walk into the darkest corners of your city and back out without losing a few illusions. At least he could still make the decisions before each job started. At least, that’s what he told himself.

He saw what he was looking for a few minutes later. Night job, domestic violence, subject rolling heavy. He signed the job off the board and walked back around the building to his car, mentally assembling his bag and working through his checklists. He realized he’d forgotten groceries of any kind in his haste to line up a job, went inside with a hand basket to grab some essentials. He didn’t like talking to anyone beforehand but couldn’t avoid Miss Emma, running the self check as always.

“Well Mr. Gideon, I haven’t seen you down here in a little while. Are you coming to church tomorrow?”

Gideon took one deep breath and smiled.

“God willing, ma’am, I’ll be there.”

The portly woman kindly fussed over his basket, suggesting sale items and expressing concerns for his diet. By the time he escaped, the bright white and red from the building’s signage dueled the sunset to paint glares on the slicked parking lot. He threw his two plastic bags into the trunk. Nothing that needed a fridge, so he wouldn’t stop home. Might as well be extra cautious on a work night.

Gideon always told himself that method and scruples set him apart from your average turked metal banger. He worked the process, no jumping to conclusions. He walked away from jobs he didn’t like. If we wasn’t sure, he didn’t go loud. He had rules, and the rules separated him from the rest. He wasn’t some animal, a gangster running a human trapline in the decay of the postwar Sunshine Belt. He worked justice, and if he didn’t, who was going to help? So that was enough. Of course he couldn’t stay bright and shiny like before. But it would be enough.

He cruised up and down a few main drives, watching the blue fade from the black in the sky and the evening’s denizens come out to play. He watched the drag race clubs shut streets down, saw the tide of users and pushers float around the clubs and behind the gas stations. He tried to pray. Once he got out to fill up and buy snacks, felt himself shrink from the rail-skinny hungry-eyed front door crowd. The murmur of “hey old man” from one far gone junkie only stopped him long enough to toss a bill. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. Not on a work night. He grabbed his energy drink and got back in the car.

As the hour neared Gideon circled closer to the location, avoiding main roads and checking for tailing vehicles. In one neighborhood he picked a crumbling cul-de-sac of suburban squats to get rigged up. His go suit made him look no different from thousands of assorted high-speeds trading gear and tactics as they tried to keep up with the growing market for lethality in the Triangle. Milsurp web gear and import NVGs, a subsonic .17 HMR pistol setup for indoors and a folding-stock rifle on a triangle sling at the small of his back in case he needed to get loud. He looked around the darkened street and suppressed a chuckle. He always felt the surreal quality of it all just before he got started.

He pulled off into a service access road a half—mile from the location and left the car half-buried in the vine blanket carpeting the pines. It took about twenty minutes to carefully pick his way along the dry creekbed that snaked behind the development. No dog, no alarms that he could see, and he wasn’t that worried about impressive hardware in this area of town anyway. He dropped the blackout box in a flowerpot on the back porch, waiting for a few minutes just to make sure nobody was moving around indoors. He pulled out his phone and double checked it: no signal, no wifi, no emergency call. It was always worth investing in the good shit, he thought. Then he whispered a tiny apologetic prayer, whether for the mental profanity or the impending homicide he wasn’t sure. Time for work.

He popped the back door and slid inside, everything eerie green daylight to his eyes. Nobody in the living space or the first two bedrooms he cleared. Then bedroom three, surprisingly cluttered given the poverty-minimalism of the other rooms. A riot of bottles, vape carts, styrofoam takeout containers, and less savory detritus. A soggy mattress in the center of the room cradling the sleeping form of a woman in her mid-twenties. Gideon blinked and tried to remember the exact words of the posting. Something was very wrong. Where was “domestic violence perp possibly armed alone in house?” He carefully stepped back into the hall, realizing he’d cleared all the rooms already. This was it. Somebody was paying him to kill this woman, but didn’t want him to know that until he was on site.

He stood at the door of the bedroom for a few seconds before shaking himself and whispering a prayer. This is why he had rules. He walked silently to the front door, popped it, and stepped onto the front porch.

Gideon forgot about the street light. Just long enough for the blinding green to completely blind him through the NVGs. He clawed the binocular off his face and dropped to a knee instinctively, vulnerable and exposed. He still couldn’t see well when the man emerged from the shadowed end of the driveway. Gideon’s remaining senses began screaming that he was in deep trouble as he drew the pistol, holding it behind the small of his back. He couldn’t see anyone else, either in the driveway or the street. The lone man swaggered to the porch, white tank top a smudgy blur in the darkness.

“Hey man, you Mr. Gideon? You do it, man?”

Gideon couldn’t find any higher state of panic for his mind or body to occupy. He numbly wondered what he’d done wrong, what he had missed. White Tank Top fumbled at the waistband of his sweatpants. Gideon lurched to his feet in what felt like slow motion, point-firing the .17 from his hip four times. The integral suppressor turned the subsonic pops into muted crackles. White Tank Top crumpled to the pavement, jerking gently.

Gideon was kneeling next to him before he had completely thought things through. He could see a little better now, see the pistol in the man’s outstretched palm. More like a boy, less than twenty in any case. The dark red leaking across the front of the tank top replaced a pattern of sweat stains.

“Who sent you? Who told you my name?”

What did he think he was, some sort of action hero? The kid was dying, already in shock. There was a phone with a cracked screen in his sweatpants pocket, locked but with turking notifications all over the lock screen. Somebody had sent him to the house. Just like somebody had sent Gideon.

He almost felt the headlights before he saw them. He was on his belly in the mulched sideyard before they pulled up to the base of the driveway. NVGs back on, he could see all the doors on the SUV pop open, almost identical high-speed trigger men hopping out. You could see the money everywhere, the gear, the precision. They had White Tank Top scooped off the pavement and in the back of their vehicle while Gideon was still trying to slow down his breathing. Then they headed for the front door and he realized he was still too close.

As he wormed his way through the shadows and back into the brush, he could hear two suppressed shots from the house. He took his phone apart and threw it down a storm drain before he got to the car, left the guns buried in the woods. He was about to get in the car when he started wondering how much they knew. He’d better walk. Where to, he didn’t know yet. He whispered a prayer. Tomorrow was supposed to be church night.