For those of you interested in continuity, this story takes place during the first half of the final season of The X- Files. It's a sequel to my story
'The Four body Problem' in the sense of being set after that tale and making reference back to it, but you don't need to have read that one to follow this one.

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MARRIOTT HOTEL,
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

It was her walk as she strode into the main bar that had first attracted Darryl Johnson's attention, a walk he was later to view appreciatively from behind when the woman led him back to her room.

"I don't normally do this sort of thing," he'd said, as he went over to where she had settled herself on a stool at the bar and introduced himself. And he didn't. Darryl Johnson was a happily married family man with two young children, and he had never fooled around. Until now. The woman had given him a look as she sat down, a long and appraising look, and it had turned him on.

Darryl was almost forty, balding, overweight, and with few illusions about his attractiveness to the opposite sex, so to get such an obvious display of sexual interest from a woman like this one was something he didn't expect and couldn't resist. Even as he had made his way over to the bar Darryl was feeling guilty he was even thinking of cheating on Joan, his wife of twelve years, but he knew the chances a young woman as foxy looking as this would ever show such interest in him again were low to non-existent. Already into his mid-life crisis, Darryl knew that if he didn't seize his chance now it might never come his way again. He loved Joan and would never deliberately hurt her, but he needed to prove to himself that he was still attractive to other women, that he still had it. Thus he rationalized, and thus was he lost.

Lying naked on the bed in her room now, his hands cuffed to the bed frame, his eyes blindfolded, Darryl was beginning to have second thoughts. He wasn't really into this kinky stuff. They had kissed, and gotten naked, and in the heat of his lust Darryl hadn't raised any objection to the handcuffs or the blindfold, but then her ardor had cooled and she had stepped into the bathroom. Darryl heard her return, and started involuntarily as she dropped something cold on his chest.

"Sorry about this," she said, dropping something else on top of the first item, "but I'm on a tight schedule and don't have time to fool around."

Darryl started to panic. Whatever was going on here it wasn't the afternoon of passion he had anticipated. He was feeling strange, odd sensations rippling through his body. Something was happening to him, something terrible. He began to scream but this was brutally cut short as a gag was rammed into his mouth. He was at the woman's mercy. There was no escape.

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DEL FLORIO'S BARBERSHOP,
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

The barbershop off Forest Street was only a stone's throw from the state penitentiary & city jail, a fact that amused Vincent Clay every time he came in for a trim. The Baltimore cops and the feds would love to see him locked behind its imposing walls and had indicted him on criminal charges related to racketeering on five occasions now, but he had beaten the rap every single time. It helped that he had the best lawyers money could buy, but what helped even more was how key prosecution witnesses had a nasty habit of either vanishing without trace or turning up dead. The authorities didn't even try to go after him anymore. He was effectively above the law.

Clay looked up as the door opened, ringing the bell above it. His bodyguards' hands moved to the bulges in their jackets as a man in his thirties entered. He gave them a disinterested look and turned right. There were chairs either side of the door where you waited for Mr. del Florio to get to you. As he reached the chairs, he suddenly spun on his heel, pulling a silenced handgun from his coat pocket with his left hand and firing several shots. It happened too fast for the bodyguards to react, and both crumpled to the floor, unable even to reach their own guns before being cut down. Without missing a beat, the killer strode over to Clay, pressed the silencer to his head, and fired two shots into his brain.

Thus ended the long, violent life of Vincent Clay.