A Nice Surprise

a crime short

Michael worked for a government department. He liked to joke that telling you what he did wouldn’t mean that he’d have to kill you, but he would have to file a report on your unfortunate mishap in the shower that morning.

He sat at his colleague Joseph’s desk, past midnight and alone in the glass-and-steel skyscraper, finishing reports that Joseph had had to delegate when emergency called him abroad.

He heard a movement from somewhere on the same floor. Ever the paranoiac, an image crossed Michael’s mind of Joseph setting him up, luring him here…

Nonsense, he told himself, but as footsteps sounded down the hall he wondered. They’re like the mafia, he recalled a colleague saying. One man blabs to his mistress and doesn’t even see the gun as it’s raised to his neck the next day…

He started printing the last of the reports. A woman knocked at the door and then started to open it. ‘Mikey…’ she said, before being thrown back through the aperture by a silencer’s blast.

Michael walked to and stood over Beckah, firing again at points across her body, including in the head, before flinging the gun back into the office. He crouched, opened her handbag, and took her phone, on which she’d recorded his indiscretions while they’d snorted cocaine. He put the printed reports from Joseph’s computer inside the bag and resealed it. Won’t he have a nice surprise when he returns, he thought, grinning.

He walked to the lift, stripping off his blood-spattered trench coat as he did so.