Charlotte, Part One
Jan 10 '04
The Bottom Line This is truly the most dark, disturbing story I've written........
I must say that although there is a crime element to this story, it's not really a pure crime/detective story in any way. As well, this is a very disturbing plot, as the main character says and does things, and has things done to her, that are very unpleasent. This is also narrated from her point of view..... in any case, I hope that you'll get something out of this story.....
PART ONE : http://www.epinions.com/content_3706953860
PART TWO : http://www.epinions.com/content_3707019396
PART THREE :http://www.epinions.com/content_3707084932
PART FOUR : http://www.epinions.com/content_3707150468
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Charlotte. It’s such a sweet name; a pretty word as it rolls from your tongue. But her life isn’t so sweet and pretty as you regard it with your eyes........
Charlotte. That’s me. I’m a contract killer. Ruthlessly, I dispatch people, people who have no connection to me whatsoever, at least not directly. I’m the middleman, so to speak, between you, the person desperate enough that one would pay me thousands of dollars to get rid of such a hated person, and the person who is unfortunate enough to be rubbed off from the universe.
I seriously doubt that any reader glancing through these sentences would pinpoint the speaker to reside anywhere else, but a gloomy urban jungle, buried somewhere beneath the sanitized image of New York City or Los Angeles. Some readers may even consider it credible if I were from, say, Toronto or Vancouver, although Canada does not seem to have an equally shocking reputation.
This is Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. The smallest province in Canada, where crime is petty, for the most part. Where most people feel relatively safe to walk the streets. And this is me, a dangerous woman, who is permitted to mingle alongside men, women and children. Who is able to strike anyone by surprise, if the price is right.
..... yet few people take any regard of my existence. Occasionally, sure, you may encounter one of those overtly eager folks who practically want to start a conversation with you even if they never met you once in your lives........
........ quite a chilly day out there, isn’t it, miss?........
.... or maybe they have met you once before. Charlottetown only has about fourty-thousand people in it. Maybe you have bumped into the same person a few times in the span of three or so decades that you’ve been here.
I appear just as another citizen, one of many. Everybody walks on their own path, paying scant attention to this ordinary citizen. This brunette young woman, early thirties, her hair bound up in a ponytail. She frequently wears a bulky sweater in this shuddering fall weather, to hide the feminine curves that she doesn’t believe she possesses. Quite rarely would she walk outside with a body-hugging t-shirt or a snug pair of jeans. She wouldn’t truly want the attention from distracting eyes with sequestered intentions.
Nobody pays attention to me. And that’s the way I like it...........
...... I suppose that is the key. Nobody pays attention to me. Nobody lays any suspicion of what demons lurk within me. Who would look at a youthful, fresh-faced woman and assume that she would be that kind of girl? Someone who would be so immoral to commit such heinous, cold-blooded actions.... and for cash, at that!
Oh, all of you are just cowards.
I can predict how you will respond before you even prepare your speech. It has nothing to do with cowardice. You are morally upright, too much so to even consider such actions for a moment. Even as you meet with me in private, and plead with me to help you out, so you don’t have to worry about the consequences, so you don’t have to commit the act that you publicly decried as immoral in the first place..........
I understand. I understand totally.
The summer heat is becoming a rare commodity nowadays. Autumn quietly, subtly, takes over. You can see the evidence on the city streets. There are not as many cars with out-of-province license plates. The shops in the downtown close earlier than usual.... some nights, Charlottetown is a ghost town at six pm, except for those who want, who need, to find a place to drink. Bars are always open, it seems.
I’m not walking the weary sidewalks for a drink. Or for a shopping spree. I have more important business to attend to.
I never do my business at home. Nobody has any idea where I live, except for myself. Only a few people have any knowledge of what I do. Those people are clients, as well as potential clients who inquire about my services from previously satisfied customers. If they want to meet with me, they have to mail me. I rent out a mailbox at the local post office, and then respond to them --- I tell them to meet me at a specified location. Almost always, it’s an empty building -- I usually have a list of three or four old businesses that have long since abandoned the premises. I have the space entirely to myself.... as long as nobody in any authoritative capacity strays nearby.
From the subtleties of the phrasing upon the letter that I received, the person who wrote it to me was a young woman, just an ordinary young woman, a few years less than I. I suspect that her situation is desperate.
There’s a major difference between somebody who is desperate, and somebody who is merely miffed enough that they would desire their enemy wiped away from the canvas. My last job, from my viewpoint, was situated in the latter category..........
A man showed up one afternoon, claiming that he represented an individual running for political office. I don’t recall the politician’s name, or what party he represented. I have no interest in politics; it’s just a bunch of guys who play with tax dollars. I couldn’t even tell you the name of the premier of Prince Edward Island, let alone the guy who sits on the top seat in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where I’m originally from.
In any case, the man visited me with a plea to do “something” about his boss’s opponent.
“I would like you to do something about the trouble that my superior has been in.”, he would say.
“What problems does he have?”
He looked around, doubting the privacy of where the two of us stood. “He..... he may lose the election.”, he muttered, twinging with a desire for drama.
“Sounds serious.”, I deadpan. Losing elections did not seem particularly serious, but then again, most of my customers’ “reasons” for wanting somebody wiped out are trivial to outside observers.
“It is quite serious.”, he intoned. “He is the incumbent in this district -- he’s done a lot of things for the people who helped him out in the previous election. He gave those people jobs, he gave them something to do in the winter when they were sitting around collecting unemployment benefits after their regular job finished for the season. Fine, you can tell me that they were all patronage appointments. And......” His voice grew louder. “... of course we have to tell everyone that patronage is a thing of the past, that back-scratching is not how politics should be done. But, damn it, if someone helps you out, of course, you are going to return the favor. That’s human nature!”
I place my finger over my lips, telling him to keep his voice down.
“.... ah, sorry.....”, he whispered. “But..... his opponent is doing everything he can, to ensure that all of the good deeds that my boss has committed will be undone. All those people will lose their jobs.......”
Replace “those people” with “I”. I know you want to say it.
“......all of those projects that he started in the legislature might fall by the wayside. They’ll die! It’s just not right. It’s a goddamn conspiracy... even one of the landlords in the area was passing around leaflets -- “suggesting” that his tenants vote for this guy.”
“Is this landlord on your hit list?”, I joke, flatly enough so he wouldn’t understand my attempt at morbid wit.
“He doesn’t need to be.”, he muttered. “If our opponent.... is no longer able to run... then obviously his supporters would no longer be able to support him. Simple as that.”
My, the people that I meet. So why do I do it?
Well, he wrote out a check. For five thousand dollars. Pays for a lot of meals, and other trivial things like shelter and clothing. Works for me.
He passed it out to me. As I was about to capture the paper with my palm, I experienced a aching twinge along the core of my wrist, which created a slight difficulty in committing the simple act of taking the object away from him. Why this happened, I’m not sure. My heart sped up slightly, equally inexplicable, like if I was tense, nervous.
Yet I covered up those slight imperfections. I had to. I took the check away, and shoved it within the pocket of my trench coat.
I then regarded him silently.
He squirmed. “Is... is there anything .... else?”
“I just want to be sure that I have your confidence, that is all.”
“Do... do you not trust me?”
“Well, I don’t want you to pipe up like you just did now..... not to the wrong person.”, I said. “Don’t you want me to do my job?”
I’m sure that blasted morality struggled with his heart, before he spoke. “Yes... yes, I want you to do it.”
“Thank you.”
They always come around in the end.............
*
I stood at the corner of Queen and University, waiting for the light to change. Some others didn’t regard the lights, sprinting out whenever the mood struck them.
I watched them disregarding the law and wondering why I wasn’t as carefree as they were. I seemed to do everything in secret, shrouded in mystery.
The light turned green. I automatically stepped off from the curb, like a dog slavishly obeying its master.
*
*
*
*
I am currently approaching the Confederation Court Mall, boxed in by the streets of Queen, University, Kent, and Grafton. Quite a few people surround the building, either entering or exiting, or merely tracing the outlines of the building with their feet as they walked to unknown places. All this activity, despite the belief that there was nothing of importance at this shopping center. None of the major chain stores were here in the downtown, but, instead, along the outskirts, near the suburbs.
I merely speak this as a belief of others I’ve heard. I haven’t had any interest in what lay inside there. Materialism doesn’t attract me. Look at my apartment, and you’d believe me........
The bad part of town, I guess. Some people that live in this city would tell you that the street I live on cuts across a nasty area of town. Yet I know much better than to absorb that statement without a few tons of salt. If you are reading this from a notorious urban jungle where people get shot at every day, and the police show up every day to clean up the blood, you’d probably give me your home address so I could mail you a travel brochure to this town, even just this one street if necessary. The worst thing that happens in town here is that there are many unemployed people, many people who like to drink a lot to forget the fact that they can’t afford anything, much less the alcohol. Nobody gets shot, although some may feel lucky if they did, thereby having their misery erased. Sounds like the town for you, stuck in the middle of New York, or Detroit,or Los Angeles, doesn’t it?
...... although I’m sure you’d recognize a few of the same people no matter where you go. Like these teenage girls, loitering outside of the mall, decorating the outside view. Most individuals don’t pay much mind to me. Except for those girls. They’re probably not even out of high school, not mentally, at least.
There were four of them, standing underneath the Subway logo nearby. Those s!uts. They think they can give me a fright, with their zombie-like giggling fits. They don’t frighten me. They inflame me.
“..... look at that skank. Her hair is so .... blah, so stringy. Does she ever wash it?”
“All those marks on her face. She must be forty years old.”
“She’s probably on heroin or something. Ha! Ha! Ha!!”
“Looks like a real winner!”
I continue walking at the same pace, not daring myself to look back, to follow the sounds of the voices. I don’t want to look back, only to see mindless teenagers, wearing make-up as if someone crushed pie against their faces, wearing clothes that show nothing but their breasts and asses, as if their lives depended on it.
Why don’t they just go to the war cenotaph, in front of Province House, where people remember those who died for our freedom in World War Two, and throw out their tits for the world to see, and say, Hey look at me! I have brains, but I choose not to use them!! Please make me realize that I never need to!!
I used to be that way when I was much younger, when I was lost, when nobody was aware that I needed to be found.
I would play with my mother’s make-up kit, when I was a young girl, wondering at what this stuff was that we were expected to smear over our faces. I had to determine the facts all by myself. Nobody would give me any lessons or advice. When I asked, I was told that I was too young, that I had to be a grown-up lady.
In secret, then, I had to get a taste of what those grown-up ladies experienced. I would apply the make-up and lipstick, as a child would apply crayons to pre-drawn ink figures in a coloring book. I was helpless to color beyond the lines.
I suppose that’s how a lot of girls introduce themselves to artificial beauty aids. They play with their mother’s stuff as if it was a box of toys, not realizing that those toys, once used as intended, carried messages and implications that were far beyond the reach of plastic dolls and board games and other innocent creations.
Even later, as a youthful teenager in Newfoundland, I did not have much money to realize such things as make-up and grown-up clothes as anything other than expensive toys. But that did not stop me from attempting to get as much use as possible out of the few toys that I had..........
..... sh*t.
A crack in the sidewalk. I tripped across it, and fell awkwardly on my side.
At least those four girls were no longer in my sight. I hope...........
I stand inside an empty building, with a young woman, my new client, standing opposite me. I read a few chapters upon her face, and the story was an expose of insecurity. She couldn’t even feign an air of calm.
Hiccup!
And she hiccuped. I’m sure that her nervousness and her hiccups went hand in hand.
I did not say anything to reassure her. I only wanted the story, so I could write the ending for her. My silent lingering possibly contributed to her current psychological state, but I cannot permit myself to care about that sh*t.
“I feel so strange being here!”, she erupted, in a twitchy giggle. Her expression was a shrill sob, a desperate disguising of bloodstained shards of glass embedded inside her skin with some flimsy fabric of manufactured happiness. The blood was too thick, too progressive, that it sponged through the cloth, allowing attentive eyes to notice.
“You and the rest of them. You ought to know that before deciding to meet with me that it wasn’t going to be like going to a quiet family get-together.”, I deadpan.
Her head tittered, not wanting to admit a nod of confirmation. “I .... didn’t expect to see a woman. Are you sure that you can go through with this?”
“Suggesting that a woman isn’t capable of cold, heartless violence? It’s like saying that only men start international warfare. Try putting a woman in the Oval Office and see if things would turn out differently.”, I rant. “It doesn’t take a specific chromosome to do what I do. It only takes nerve.”
The woman had fractional success in swallowing her next approaching hiccup.
“Well....”, a crack in her voice, “um...... I had a boyfriend.”
Naturally.
She continued. “He... walked out on me a few weeks ago, the prick! What a bastard. He walked out on me! Leaving behind all our bills, all our commitments, all... all of our pasts!”
Was that all, I wondered. “Why don’t you just sue him for all the money he supposedly owes you?”
“mmm..... well, there’s more than that......”
“Well.... tell me......”
“Anyway.....” She pauses, trying to hold back her hiccups. “...... my boyfriend was a real charmer. Such a charming hypocrite. He was a very bulky individual, and yet he had the nerve to call me a fat sow every chance he got. Or some variation of sentences and words that made me feel like one. “
The woman’s voice lost the spasms from moments earlier, and pushed out every word as if it gave her energy.
“Yea....,”, she continued. “I was quite a few pounds overweight. Twenty or thirty pounds, maybe. But that f*cker was two-hundred and fifty pounds! He was two of me, even back when I had that weight on my body!”
The woman did not appear overweight to my eyes. Obviously, when her man walked out on her, he took her extra poundage with him.
“Once....”, as her monologue continued, “...... I was eating a hamburger. I picked it up on my lunch break, and decided to eat it at home. He approached me, and slammed the hamburger away from my hands. I had to go to outpatients later on that day, having realized that he broke my middle finger....... maybe... maybe that hit was enough to make me want to lose weight.....”
But why did his violence have to be the way to do it......?
“ --- and that hit... should have been enough for me to get up and walk out. But I did not.......”
The woman’s eyes were sinks overflowing with rage. Rage that flew outward, and sank inward, tightening the insides of her body, but never breaking, only hurting more and more.
“He wasn’t much more friendly with woman who were more thinner -- more tighter -- than I was. He was actually a lot nicer to me than he was to those other women........”
“So he cheated on you.......”, stating the obvious.
“He cheated on me. Yes, the typical cliché. Every night that he hurt me..... every time that he roughed me up, physically, mentally, whatever...... he was out there chasing tail!”
Her eyes were bloody with anger.
“Man, if he had just cheated on me in the usual way...... it would have been a betrayal........”, she continued. “But this... this was a lot worse........”
I couldn’t guess her next statements.
“I was told...... by people. Mere acquaintances, mind you! Who knew of both him and myself. They began to tell me that his leaving me was a blessing in disguise... for me!
He was assaulting women.... at his workplace! And I never knew...... until he was no longer there to tell me what he wanted me to hear.......”
“So... he... they were......”. My throat went dry for some reason. I tried to speak the proper words that wouldn’t twinge at my voice box -- but the woman interrupted me again, before I found the correct merging of syllables.
“They.....well, actually, there was two of them..... they were raped!”, she said pointedly. “You might as well say that they were. Although officially -- when he was let go from his job -- it was harassment. Petty harassment........ I suppose taking advantage of an intoxicated woman in a hotel room, during a Christmas staff party, and ignoring their moans and confused protests while mauling them and basically jerking off either on them... or maybe even inside of them..... nah, that’s not any more than silly harassment, is it?”
I kept my face rigid. I did not want to begin an emotional conversation with her. I was merely the receiver.
“... and”, she said, “I’m sure she didn’t put up much of a fight. She was drunk, after all.... what could she do?”
I watched her. She was a wounded soul that needed mending. She was nothing like my other clients, who were only abused and wounded in their own imaginations. But, damn it, Charlotte, damn it, don’t analyze.
“I want you to kill him.”, she glared at me. “Strangle him. Shoot him. Tear his goddamn heart out; stick a spear through his balls, anything!! I can’t bear his existence any longer.”
“I.... um, I get your point.”
I understood that I slipped. I stammered. I lost my confidence for one brief frightening second. And I believe that she caught my mistake, for she bit her lip in anticipation, in the hopes that she discovered a vulnerability.
“.... ah, what’s your name again?”, she asked.
I nodded my head. “I never did tell you my name.”
“Christ.... you’re just as bad as he was. Withholding information. Worried about sustaining your own selfishness rather than the person right next to you. What are you hiding? Can I.....” Hiccup. “.... trust you?”
Damn. She handed her trust over to the wrong people. An obese, angry rapist. And then a reclusive female contract killer. I didn’t want to look at her. But I had to. I had no choice.
“It has nothing to do with trust. This is my job. I do it when I get paid. Those are the instructions I follow. I don’t care about you. I only care about my livelihood.......”
The woman’s eyes leaked across her cheeks. “Goddamn.”, she trembled. “I never met a woman like you......someone as ruthless as you. What... what sort of a life did you have... to make you this way?”
The woman sobbed quietly. Her fingertips sponged the salty water that fell down her face. “Um...... I... I do have something. I hope that it will be enough for you.......”
She opened up her purse, and held up a set of car keys. God, now this was desperate. She probably didn’t have a penny in her account that wasn’t already reserved for food and shelter.
“It’s my car.... well, the car’s in his name. I made payments on it for the last year, but it doesn’t matter to him. He has threatened to pick it up at any time now...... I want you to have it before he gets his hands on it. Besides, that assho!e can’t even drive it with somehow getting beer stains all over the front seat.”
Normally I wouldn’t be impressed. I only cared for cash. A car can’t pay for rent, food, or clothing.......
But this time, I said nothing. My fingers embraced the jagged edges of the keys.
“What if you get caught?”, she asked.
“Wimping out on me, are you?” Of course, they’re always worried about that......
The woman squinted her eyes, as if the pit of her stomach tore with pain. “this... feels so immoral. For... for the both of us........”
For both of us? That’s the first time that a client cared anything about me.........
“Immoral.......” I isolate that word, for the two of us to consider. “Immoral it may be, but only by degree, compared to what everyone of us has done in our lives.”
The woman stared at me. The dampening eyes questioned my words.
“Sure, sure.”, wiping her cheek. “only by degree. Some of us eat too much cheesecake when we’re lonely. Some of us hire sociopathic women to kill our ex-boyfriends. Only a few degrees to the left or to the right.”
Her hiccups grew in number, like labor pains.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t supply paper bags for gassy customers. That will cost you extra.”
Her hiccups continued. She didn’t even attempt to stop her spasms.
“He ripped away nearly four years of my life.” She created a verbal deja vu. “I can never get those years back.”
“So you want to take some away from him, an eye for an eye, shall we say?”, I say wryly.
“Ah, take all of them away.”, she trembled after a pause. “Forget about an eye, rip him from limb to limb!”
Every person who came through those doors with me were selfish, cold, immoral -- they couldn’t give a damn about the victim, only their own skin. Maybe this woman was no different. But I detected a fragile soul. That if I held her here any longer, she would have broke down, told me not to go through with it, to leave things alone. Or else her soul, her spirit, would die.
What a sentimental old fool I am.
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Part Two
http://www.epinions.com/content_3707019396
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Member: David Macdonald
Location: Prince Edward Island
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About Me:
Alice, a story in nine parts, posted on Sept 24, 2008 - http://www.epinions.com/content_5241348228
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