B Flat Major Seventh

Charlie felt sick.

Sick to his stomach.

In fact he felt sick beneath his stomach. So far down it was nearly back up in his kidneys. Outside it was dusk and he had been sitting in this shitty little room on the solitary wooden chair for around eight hours. At that moment the sun chose to start poking its head up from beneath the massive buildings that towered on the horizon and the light darted from their reflective exteriors, trying its hardest to play some fucked up mind game with him.

The coffee sitting in its cardboard cup on the small wooden table to the left of the window had long since gone cold and despite the girl who served him’s remark that it would cheer him up it had spectacularly failed to do so. It was freezing in here, and that made it worse.

He moved towards the rifle that was leaning reassuringly against the peeling wallpaper to the right of the window, shouldered it and looked intently through the infra-red sights at the scene below.

Nothing moved.

No-one walked past.

Not yet. But he would come soon enough and then Charlie would have to do what he had been paid to do. All of a sudden he felt another of those twists in his sub-stomach area and thought he might have to desert his post to visit the little boys room. No, he couldn’t, he would have to shit himself and be done with it because this was one job he was going to have to finish.

He never used to be like this. He remembered well the times when he could stalk someone for weeks, strike the fear of God into them before finally taking out the target. It was a real rush, a total danger sport; not like paint balling, bungee jumping or any of those so-called men’s games. He was the real thing, the man with the golden gun. Even called himself Bond for a while in the early days, but it never really stuck with his employers. They always laughed and that wasn’t the kind of reaction you wanted from someone who was going to give you hundreds of thousands of quid for putting a bullet between someone’s eyes. So he was always just Charlie after that. Didn’t try to inspire fear, didn’t try to be pretentious, his reputation spoke for itself. Still does. Still speaks for itself, he told himself.

But for him it was different. Now he’d done so many hits he couldn’t even remember how many people he had killed. He used to like painting, that was always his passion but his mother had insisted that the modern world still needed people with a trade; a trade is a commodity, if you can do something that no-one else can then you will always be in demand, that’s what she had said. So in a roundabout sort of way that’s what he’d done. There was certainly a lack of his profession. You couldn’t just walk down any high street and find your local assassin’s guild. That was all just fairy stories. It was just that he’d had enough.

Out of the corner of his eye, Charlie glimpsed movement down below in the street. He stepped to the side of the window and carefully looked to see what was happening.

A removal lorry had pulled up in front of the building opposite. Was this someone else muscling in on his job? Perhaps an escape route if the target had been warned? He stood still just watching and waiting, waiting and watching. The van had all the hallmarks of a real removal van, with Stravinsky & Son stencilled in red on the shabby green side of it. The two men who got out of the truck had matching shabby green overalls with the same moniker badly outlined on them. One man was oldish, perhaps late forties and the other younger in his early twenties. Stravinsky, no doubt. And son.

He took a look through the gun sight, checking out what the men were doing and other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time there was nothing strange about them. Just removal men doing their job. What struck Charlie as being odd was that such a sizeable removal van would usually pull up at the front of the building, not next to the fire exit. He once again put the gun back in its resting place against the wall before standing back in the darkness of the room and watching the two men at work.

Being a removal man would have been a profession. Being a removal man wouldn’t give him acid indigestion so bad he felt like he had been eating raw chillies non-stop for twelve hours a day. Maybe he should just give it up, pack the rifle into his courier-bag and fly off somewhere where they wouldn’t find him.

But they would find him, he knew that. You can only disappear if you’ve finished the job, otherwise you’ll be on the receiving end for the next job. The only reason Charlie knew that so well was because the last thing most hit men expected was to be hit when they went to ground. It was all about planning and once the getaway was made most of them felt safe. He knew it wasn’t like that in reality but if you had never killed a killer then you wouldn’t know, would you?
Another vehicle pulled up outside, this time to the right of his field of vision; a crane, big, orange and suspicious. This was getting more complicated by the minute. Basically there were two choices, would he stay and do the job, risking being seen by the workman in the crane and the removal men or would he put it off again, just the same as he had the last two days?

All he had to do was tempt this guy out into the open and that would be it, one squeeze and one small-time politician would never make it big. Joe ‘Lucky’ Luciano would never be a senator. Bugger it, there wasn’t any real choice about it, he had to do the job and do it now. The removal men were carefully wheeling a grand piano out onto some kind of net on the pavement. Charlie picked up his mobile phone and phoned the front desk of the flats opposite.

"Hello,” said an overly enthusiastic Canadian woman’s voice on the other end of the line. “How can I be of service.”
Charlie took a deep breath, preparing himself.

"Hi, buddy,” he drawled in his best Humphrey Bogart voice. “We’ve got a piano to hoist up here, which floor is it going to again?”

"One moment sir,” the line went dead, then blasted some cheesy rock music for a couple of seconds. “Well, its going to the top floor so if you guys take it to the roof, we’ll take it from there.”

"No problem,” he felt himself slipping back into his native tongue. “Cheers.” Charlie hung up before the receptionist noticed his newly acquired English accent.

"Tits.” said Charlie under his breath. He looked out of the window and up to the floor where his man lived. The lights in his flat were on now and he could see movement inside. He once again picked up the rifle and aimed its sight at one of the windows of Luciano’s flat. He could see Luciano wandering around inside in his trademark grey suit.

Charlie couldn’t do it. He started to sweat. His heart began to beat so hard it felt like it was trying to escape through his throat. Shit. This wasn’t right. He couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t do it.

He sat down.

He stood up.

He would do it.

Probably.

He targeted the other of Luciano’s windows this time, looking for movement in case there was anyone else in there. No-one but Luciano. And a flying grand piano. He put the gun against the wall again as the crane hoisted the piano past Luciano’s second floor flat, past the third floor, fourth, fifth and then ground to a halt at the sixth and final floor.

Charlie watched.

A window opened and a man leaned out. He was inspecting the piano before they winched it all the way to the roof. The removal men had locked up their van and were making ready to leave; first Stravinsky, then son got into the van, stalled it once and drove off.

OK, this is it.

Charlie began fingering the mobile phone in his pocket. It was time. Couldn’t put it off any longer.

He lit a cigarette and sat on the floor.

"One last time,” he closed his eyes and took a long, hard drag. “Just this one last time.”

He walked to the window and opened it. This is it, he thought. He flicked his half-finished cigarette out of the window. It slowly spiralled down the two floors to the empty alley beneath.

He took the phone out of his pocket and dialled the front desk of the flats again.

"Hello,” said the same voice as before. “How can I be of service.”

Charlie took a deep breath.

"There’s a bomb in the foyer,” he said in the thickest Belfast twang he could manage. “We will not be ignored. We’ll blow your fuckin flats up.”

"What’s the codeword?” asked the woman.

Charlie fumbled slightly. This didn’t usually happen.

"Bomb.”

He hung up. The fire alarms started blaring.

He pocketed the phone, grabbed the gun and took the safety off.

The fire door on the ground floor flew open and five people came tearing out. The staff.

The flats were so bloody elitist.

Two more people bolted out of the door. The first floor occupants.

There was no way they would risk letting the occupants out the front. They had money to make and dead people can’t pay rent.

Charlie was going to be sick. Definitely.

He looked around for something to be sick into. There wasn’t anything so he just had to swallow it back down.

One more person came fleeing out the door. Probably the second floor occupant.

Charlie felt like his head was going to explode. His heart had reached such a pace it was in danger of breaking the land-speed record.

It was time.

He couldn’t do it.

Yes he could. He bloody well had to.

A man who looked about six foot seven walked out of the door. It was all going to plan. He was Luciano’s body guard.
The body guard blocked the view of the door but Charlie waited in the darkness, ready to put him out of a job.

Charlie waited. The bouncer looked left.

Charlie waited. The bouncer looked right.

Charlie swallowed more of his own vomit. The bouncer turned and spoke to someone behind him. He began to move left.

Luciano walked out in slow motion. Charlie had him in the crosshair now. Luciano’s life was hanging by a thread. Charlie took his final aim, braced himself for the kickback from the rifle, closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger.

There was a noise that sounded not entirely unlike a B flat major seventh.

Charlie opened his eyes to see the two men, Luciano and bodyguard, had both been crushed by the grand piano.

Shit, was this good or bad?

Charlie’s head began spinning. So what had he hit?

He dropped the gun to the floor and stared at the scene beneath him.

The piano had a gunshot wound in the centre of the keyboard.

Charlie passed out.