The man sat there in his car, waiting. He had sat like this since the morning, not moving a muscle. The rain drummed on the car’s windscreen in the fading evening. The waiting man looked at his watch, then back at the hotel doors. The light was almost gone now, swallowed up by the dark streets of the city. All that was left was the drumming of the rain on the roof fading down to a whisper and the hotel lights. They gave out a strong, warm light inside the protection of the revolving glass doors, but out here in the cold they faded to an insignificant nothing, leaving a miasma of light in the dirty, polluted air. The waiting man’s eyes narrowed as he heard laughter from inside the lobby. The noise died away, leaving the waiting man alone again. He didn’t mind, he didn’t care.
He had been alone all his life, since his mother had died. He had been brought up in a state home, alone there always. He had left when he was fifteen, ran away. Nobody had missed him. He had been living in the slums around Naples, where he had run. He made no friends. The slum people were scared. To them, he was the dark shadow that slunk around the streets. He was the reason why children were afraid of the dark. He was the lonely one, the waiting man.
He shut the thoughts out of his mind. That was in the past. He focused again on the hotel door. He could hear laughter inside the building again. It sounded louder, coming closer to the doors. He shut the rest of the world out, leaving only him and the rich, booming laughter that was coming from the hotel. A woman’s voice joined the laughter. The waiting man showed no emotion. He never felt any emotion. He hadn’t since the day his mother had been bludgeoned by his father with the big hammer from the workshop. He had just sat there as his father smashed his mother’s face again and again, mangling her beyond recognition as the mother who had cared for him. He had been sitting there, still, as his father’s alcohol-rotted brain worked out what he’d just done. He had watched as his father, mad with alcohol and grief, put the gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger. He was still sitting there when the police arrived, an hour late, took in the scene and called for homicide. They did nothing until the other police came. Then they went home, still discussing the baseball match. He had done nothing until someone had taken him by the hand and led him away from the scene. They had taken him to the nursing home, and he had stayed there until he was fifteen.
The big glass hotel doors opened and laughter erupted onto the street. From his pool of darkness the waiting man could see the fat man and the lady walk out of the doors. His right hand slid slowly to the bag at his side. The laughter died in the burst of fire from the silenced machine pistol in his hand. There was the soft sound of the bodies hitting the floor, the heads bouncing from the pavement as the laughter died on their lips. Then the city swallowed them up as the waiting man slowly drove off, just a single pool of darkness in the black ocean of the city.
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"Very enigmatic. Who was he - a madman, a paid assassin? We are left to draw our own conclusions. Powerful stuff," -- Moya Green, Tamworth, UK.
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