[SP] every time you kill someone, their fatal wound shows up as a scar on your body.
*****
It was hard to keep my emotions – specifically my joy – in check as I cycled to the south gate of the Estate. The reporters were almost there, keen on following the spectacle that Soar was creating overhead, so no one noticed me one bit. I looked into my screen one more time and I accepted that Nathan Prescott was dead. There would be no lucky escapes, no close shaves, nothing. The little C4 bomb had intense heat and shock, and I would not have been surprised if his whole head was shattered by that blast.
Entry, Action, and Escape were all accomplished, and the problem Nathan Prescott and Skeletor had come to pose was now over. Skeletor had no one to fund the rest of the contract, so why work for free either way, especially for the sake of the brat Prescott was? I was convinced that chapter was closed, but then another thing was that the bomb definitely made some noise. I opened my phone which had a secure, private connection, and typed Scarlett Estate incident, and surely the reporters had raced back to the scene.
There was not much known except that there was a loud noise and an explosion was suspected. One person had been wheeled out of one of the luxury homes, and there was a lot of pandemonium in the area. I smiled. It was still a developing story; just some scraps of random information here and there, and nothing too solid at that. Sooner or later, with the help of estate security, they would connect the dots together. And then there would be a manhunt for the cyclist who entered through the North Gate and exited through the South Gate.
Worse still, they would be convinced that the killer had passed right under their noses when they realized how the security camera footage was tampered with, and how only eyewitness accounts could only give them a vague frame of events to use. I would be free to carry out one more assassination within this area before I moved to another part of Baltimore. Yet again, I had managed to escape a pinch.
If Karma existed, then I would have given almost anything to see it and laugh in its face to my heart’s content. So much energy wasted, so many efforts and attempts to administer retribution. Nemesis was lagging behind, too slow to catch me. Another one bites the dust, I thought out loud as I made my way into my apartment, grabbing my EncroChat custom phone and searching my inbox. As expected, I had some new jobs waiting for me.
I smiled again – this was the most I had smiled in a single day, I later realized - and chose a contract of thirty thousand dollars, discussed the specifics with my client, and I went straight to bed. It had been a truly exhausting couple of weeks leading up to that day’s execution, and I was going to finish my selected mission the next day.
My target was the owner of a Conglomerate, Stefan Von Ackerman. My client was probably a business rival. In the world of business, money and influence were paramount in my opinion, and proper handling of the competition was required to maintain those two. Some more ‘orthodox’ companies stayed on top by employing better business strategies than their opponents. Others, like my client, went straight for the jugular, crushing their competition in whatever way they could.
I had no right or sense of moral compass to choose between the two. One put food on my table, and the other didn’t. I would always be on the side of money, wherever it camped. I knew not what right and wrong meant, I only believed that everyone had their likes, their dislikes, and their plans for their lives. When two people clashed, whoever had the better resolve and ability to see their plans come to fruition would win out.
This world was all about the survival of the fittest. The strong lived and the weak died. There was nothing more to it.
These were the thoughts on my mind as I aimed my sniper at Stefan through the glass window of his office. He was seated at the desk and was facing away from me. He would never see what brought him death, he probably wouldn’t know anything until he was slumped over his desk, out of breath, and unable to call for help.
I shot once before I remembered that the client said the glass may have been tempered, perhaps to the state of being bulletproof. As soon as that bullet hit, Stefan flinched and was turning back. But those pullets were high-velocity bullets with ten times more penetrating power than normal bullets. I fired thrice in quick succession, and before he could reach for the panic button under his desk, the second bullet shattered a wide hole in the glass and the last two bullets hit him squarely in the left side of his chest.
His hands slumped, and I could see his legs shake.
It was exactly how I thought it would all go. The scary, sudden realization that death had come, and there was nothing you could do about it.
As I put my hands down and started to pack up and make a clean getaway, the voice behind me made my blood run cold.
“Nice one Skar. If only you had finished Prescott off like this, you wouldn’t be following Stefan there to hell”
As I heard the gun cock, I just knew it was Skeletor.
But how?
*****
TO BE CONTINUED.
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