Bogart & Sons

At a glance, walking alone into a terrorist base to save their hostage seems like a supremely unwise endeavour.
But.
It depends on your point of view. We shrinks call it acceptance of the status of victim.
Genet trained me out of accepting this role – and taught me how to force it on my opposition.
I raise a KA-BAR (less chance of anyone connecting this slaughter to me) and take a deep breath. From now on, they are the scared little people fooling themselves that staying inside makes them safe.
I am the scary thing out here in the dark.

“Oh my god!” are Mithra’s first words when we sneak into Cato’s house. “Is that a white tiger?”
The beast is sleeping – hopefully drugged, because I like my limbs attached. It’s six hundred pounds of white and grey lethal beauty.
“Of course not,” I reply dryly. “There are, like, five specimen on the whole continent. This is a normal tiger; the colour came out in the wash.”
“Shut up,” Mithra hisses, trying not to laugh. “This stinks.”
“Yeah.” I look around the palatial hall. “Bet you they forgot it in the washing machine when they were laundering all this money.”

I hate surveillance.
It’s like concentrating on nothing and everything at the same time, all the time, and I like my concentrating a little more concentrated.
“You got the doohickey?”
“What?”
“That thingamabob-”
“Can’t you call it by its name? It’s the transmogrif-”
“Not in public, you moron! Dr Cato would have our heads!”
I’ll take that as confession. I think we can move on to the retrieval part.
I don’t like long-distance assassination any more than surveillance (there is not much difference between those two), but at least by sniping terrorists I end my day on a high note.

“I didn’t see anything,” a visibly shaken Hannah Harkonnen says at the press conference. “They kept me blindfolded the whole time.”
“Thirteen dead bodies were found at the location where you were held!” yells one of the reporters. “What do you say to that?”
Hannah blanches under her make-up. “I… I am grateful for the rescue. Thank you. I have nothing more to say.”
“Who was it?!” the audience demands.
Hannah resolutely shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
I finish cleaning my knives and turn off the TV.
It’s galling – and unexpectedly fortuitous – that my sister didn't recognise my voice.

Blood frozen in veins, I watch the TV. John – my technically brother-in-law – is begging terrorists to return his wife unharmed, and offering an exorbitant sum.
I was disinherited; I would jump off a skyscraper before I went back to my family, but you don’t fuck with someone’s little sister. You just don’t.
And I know I won’t stop at justice; I’ll go for vengeance. Rivers of blood will flow.
I need to not implicate either of my identities.
“Hey, Mith’!” I call out.
“What?!”
“I’m taking a couple days off!”
A close-up clearly shows John’s desperation.
I might like him.

What the press has called me to this date, listed by severity:
.
.
heroine – pillar of courage – modern-day-Xena’s sidekick – misrepresented hard-working citizen – Little Bo Peep on crack – the worst dressed superbabe of 2014 – victim of Mithra’s psychological abuse – deranged Fury – Stockholm syndrome sufferer – petty criminal – viable threat to society – pregnant – Jackie the Ripper – American McGee’s Dorothy – [sic] heroin – bad case of penis envy – butcher with no accountability – mass murderer – as bad as ISIS*
.
.
I can’t find the line between good press and bad press. The journalists’ opinion of me changes with the wind.
…my opinion of journalists never changes.

Mithra plops another gummy bear inside her mouth and leans over my shoulder to look at the screen. “Whoa. What’s that?”
“Some kind of carrion-eating scarabei, apparently. I think it’s how Cato disposes of bodies. They clean the flesh off the bones.” And look pretty, I might add.
Mithra chews thoughtfully. “What does she do with the skeletons?”
“Sell them to gelatin manufacturers?” I suggest.
Mithra’s hand pauses on the way to her mouth.
My eyes stray to the packet in her hand, and I have to grin. “Unless you’ve killed it yourself, you can’t be sure what you’re eating.”

“Shhh,” Mithra whispers. “Don’t wake her. She hasn’t slept in three days.”
I keep my eyes shut. The second set of footsteps passes by the sofa and follows Mithra into the office kitchen.
“It’s nice of you to tolerate her,” Quetzal says quietly.
“She’s an overcomplicated weirdo, and sometimes I want to hit her, but she’s not too bad.”
Quetzal hums.
“What was she like as a kid?”
“Always trying to please.”
“Hasn’t really lost that, has she?”
“She’s gotten better at the pleasing,” Quetzal mutters darkly.
And people say you never hear anything nice about yourself when you eavesdrop.

Do you feel threatened?
Are you desperately seeking what you lost?
Law enforcement cannot help?
Share your troubles with us – we will make sure you never have to worry about them again!
BOGART & SONS
Personal Security * Transportation * Investigative Services
~Financial Availability~
~Professional Attitude~
~Competence~
~Young and Flexible (Except Morally)~

If you could go completely off the rails... release that dark, unabridged, unencumbered thing inside... what would you become? A hero, a villain or a lazy overweight TV-addict? Who are we in our very cores?
“Let’s try something different,” the shrink says with a plastic smile. “Tell me one positive thing about yourself.”
Is that fundamental thing – soul, katra, Id, whatever you call it – how people are sorted into good and evil?
I grip the folded switchblade in my pocket.
Am I evil? Will it be fun?
I shrug. “I’m not the worst thing that can happen to someone.”
Yet.