They called him Diamond Terry. They said he was the nastiest, fiercest, most not to be fucked with gang boss in town.
Today, he had received a surprise visitor. A man he had been looking for for months.
A man he was taking no chances with. Arms handcuffed behind his back and forced to sit cross legged on the floor of his opulent and tastefully furnished office.
“Well, you’ve certainly been very violent, haven’t you?” Terry asked “I’ve been wondering who the hell you are for six months and in answer, you walk up to my front door and tell my guards that you’re behind everything?”
Terry laughed, the disbelief in his voice making it shake with anger.
The sitting man had been wearing a thin jacket over a black t-shirt when he arrived, but the guards had relieved him of that after checking for hidden weapons. Dark trousers and well worn combat boots completed his ensemble.
The man was slightly under six feet tall, he had the muscles of a manual worker and not a gym rat, but even so, he was not the towering monster Terry had been expecting. The dark beast stalking through his business for the last half year, carving a path of blood and fire and costing him near on a hundred million dollars worth of product.
He could not be the dark shadow that stalked him, not by himself. It was too unbelievable.
“You’re the one who has killed, how many is it Chris?” Terry asked.
“Sixty three.” The giant, shaven headed chief of security answered.
“Yes, sixty three men. By yourself. Gunshots, knives, explosives. Something particularly nasty with hot bleach. You’re really are quite the renaissance man when it comes to creative and violent deaths, aren’t you?”
“I try.” The man finally spoke.
Terry ran his tongue over his elongated diamond canine, it was his signature accessory. The man didn’t sound proud or scared. He was matter of fact. Not attempting to convince Terry of something they all knew he could not have done alone. Which, perversely, made him that touch more convincing.
“Was there a specific reason you decided to wage a one man war on my operation? Or are you a genuine do-gooder? Just a somewhat more violent specimen than the average charity fundraiser?”
The man looked up, an expression of surprise on his face “You don’t know? I mean, I did leave very specific messages with the survivors. All of the survivors.”
Terry looked to Chris who shrugged “You know how we operate, they said it was one man. We didn’t believe them. We killed them.”
Terry nodded, enjoying the sharp scratch of his tooth on his tongue “True.” He turned to the kneeling avenging angel “You see, we don’t have any truck with liars. So when my men are found and they tell us one man stormed the stash house and when my people tried to kill him all of their guns suddenly had the safety on or they threw their weapons away without a reason, well, we don’t take that seriously.”
The kneeling man laughed and looked to his right, at the landscape of Chicago hanging on the wall. Terry had always liked that painting because of the cold atmosphere it portrayed.
“I told you. I said they’ll call them crazy.” The man said to the painting.
Terry, Chris and the two guards all looked to the painting, searching for a reason why the man would speak to it.
“I think we’ll call you crazy, too. That’s not even a panting of a person. If you are going to feign insanity, at least be a little believable.”
The man looked up at Terry “I wasn’t talking to the painting.” He paused, cocking his head to one side, listening to something. “That would certainly be the polite thing to do.” He looked back at Terry and grinned, it was terrifying because it was genuinely happy.
“Would you like to know why all this happened and why you’re all going to die in the next five minutes?”
Terry rolled his eyes to let the lunatic on the floor know he didn’t care about his sob story, but it was an act. There was something seriously off about this man on the floor. He was outnumbered, by people who were definitely going to kill him. His hands and ankles were bound, he was unarmed, he was helpless and defenceless. And yet, and yet, he was supremely confident that victory was on his side. He had to be mad. But madmen and methheads were the worst kind of people to fight. Better to just end it now.
“No.” Terry said, making a snap decision. He pulled the Desert Eagle from his jacket pocket, pointed it and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
The man smiled.
Terry checked the gun, the safety was on, even though he’d swear he flicked it off as he drew. Never mind, he flicked the safety off, pointed and pulled the trigger.
Another lack of gunshots failed to fill the air.
The safety was back on.
The kneeling man said “I wouldn’t try it again.”
Unbelievable. Terry flicked the safety off, held it off and pointed again.
“Third time’s the charm.” He laughed.
As he pulled the trigger Terry felt his arm being jerked and the shot missed the man on the ground, punching through Chris’ stomach instead. The large caliber bullet punching a huge hole in his security chief’s back, spraying blood and spine over the imported rug on the floor.
“The fuck, Terry?” Chris gasped in shock before dropping to his knees and holding his stomach. Locking eyes the two men stared at each other in disbelief, killer and victim, uncomprehending at how this had come to be.
Chris widened his eyes, focusing his gaze just beyond Terry, but before he could explain just what it was he saw, his eyes rolled up into his skull and he collapsed face down on the rug.
Terry couldn’t believe that had just happened.
“I did warn you.” The man said, completely unconcerned about the events of the past few seconds.
With a shaking hand, Terry placed the gun down on his desk and quietly spoke to the other two guards “Kill this motherfucker. Right here. Right now.”
He looked into the man’s eyes, the son of a bitch was still smiling.
“That’s another bad choice.”
Terry didn’t reply, he just watched the guards pull their guns, point them at the man and then look for final confirmation.
Terry nodded.
The guards fired.
The man slid backwards, moving unnaturally as he pulled his untied hands from his back.
The shots missed.
The guards reacted slower than the man who slid between them. They pivoted as he drove his elbows into their weight bearing knees. The guards stumbled, ther guns slipping from their hands as they did. Both pistols flew into the man’s awaiting hands. He fired four times, twice from each gun.
Terry could only watch, open mouthed as his men died from a neat double tap for each of them.
The man stood up, his ankles miraculously free now, too. He pointed his acquired pistols at Terry, arms steady.
“You should have listened to my story. You’d have got a few minutes more life out of it.” He smiled “Plus, you’d have got a story.”
Terry nervously ran his tongue over his diamond tooth and put his hands up “Can’t we come to some arrangement?”
The guards’ guns never strayed from targeting Terry’s face “Like what? What outcome do you think will be acceptable to both of us? I’m here to kill you, that’s my only condition. What can you counter that with?”
He was going to die. This couldn’t be right. Two minutes ago he’d been King. His enemy bound before him and surrounded by his best. Now his life was measured in moments instead of years.
“How has this happened?” Terry couldn’t keep the frustration from his voice.
The man smiled “Well, you didn’t want the story before, now I don’t want to tell you.”
He stopped and looked off towards the painting again before nodding.
“Yeah, I mean, I could show you.”
“You can show me how you jammed my gun and made me shoot by head of security?”
“Yeah, think of it as a going away present.”
Confusion built on the frustration “Going away? Where am I…”
He didn’t finish the sentence, instead the guns fired and Terry stoppped at the noise, shocked by the suddenness of them.
For an instant he didn’t register the pain. Then the moment of shock went away and he fell, clutching his stomach.
Terry screamed. In pain. In fear. In frustration and confusion.
By the time Terry finished falling to the ground, his killer had already dropped the guns onto the bodies of the guards.
“Focus your eyes over that way.” He told Terry, pointing towards the painting.
Gripping his perforated guts, futilely trying to keep the blood inside him, Terry attempted to focus on the painting. The pain made it hard. It was blurry where it had once been crisp.
Not blurry.
Obscured by something translucent.
Something solid now.
A man.
A handsome Latino man who smiled at him.
“Who’s that?” Terry gasped through the pain, not understanding.
“His name was Edgar.”
Terry was getting faint “I don’t know an Edgar.” He mumbled.
He watched Edgar walk over to his killer and give him a powerful, passionate kiss.
Terry wanted to make some joke about the man not being his killer’s brother, but air was getting hard to keep. Hard to breathe. Can’t waste on bad jokes.
The world was dimming and he watched his killer kiss Edgar’s fingers and say something about “One day.”
One day what? Terry needed to know. His brain was processing the world too slowly.
Why were the colours fading out of everything?
His killer left the room and Edgar went with him.
They had called him Diamond Terry. They said he was the nastiest, fiercest, most not to be fucked with gang boss in town.
He died alone, confused and scared. Never knowing why.
© Robert Spalding 2021
Ghost Stories by Robert Spalding 