The Professional
By
UCSBdad
Disclaimer: I do not own Castle, professionally or otherwise. Rating: K Time: In an alternate Castle universe.
He picked up a half a brick from the pile and began on the next course of brickwork. In his career he had had to learn many, many things, but he had never thought he'd have to learn to lay bricks. He scanned the work he'd already done. If the old Cuban who'd taught him back in Miami had seen this, he would have called the work barely adequate and that he was far too slow. Well, he didn't have to lay bricks for a living, thank God. Just for this job.
The man began to wake up. He tried to move and found out he couldn't. He struggled against the restraints, but accomplished nothing.
"No point in trying." He said. "The chair you're in is made out of six by sixes bolted together and bolted to the floor. Your arm, leg and head restraints are steel, also bolted to the chair."
"Who are you?" The man demanded.
He shrugged. "Let's just say I'm a man doing a job."
"What kind of a job?"
That caused him to laugh. "You ought to be able to figure that out. It's not like this is totally foreign to you."
"Why?"
"Usual reason. The money. Good money, too. More than I'd usually make and I usually make a lot."
"I have money. I can get more. Lots more. Whatever you're being paid, I'll pay more."
He shook his head. "I'm a professional and it may surprise you to learn that I have professional ethics. But most importantly, I have a keen sense of self preservation. You see, some people I kill are killed openly in public, or at least with witnesses who'll talk about it. But some, quite a lot, just have to disappear, like you and your friend. Now if word got around that I was backing out of a deal, and word of this sort of thing always seems to get around, clients who hired me might wonder if the people they paid me a lot of money to kill are actually dead. Considering the kind of clients I deal with, they'd put a round in my head, just like that. No, backing out on a deal is just not in the cards."
He nodded upwards. "This client wants proof, so I have a phone up there to take a video."
"I know who your client is."
"That puts you one up on me."
"What do you mean?" The man said.
He smiled coldly. "You don't know as much as I thought you did." Getting no reply, he went on. "This is not like hiring a plumber to fix your leaky sink, or something. You don't put an ad in the paper, or online, asking for a hired assassin, get a couple of bids and make your choice. You have to find someone who knows someone. Then that person also knows someone and after a while, they get to someone who knows me. The client and I negotiate between a number of third parties. I don't know who the client is, the client doesn't know who I am, and the go-betweens don't know anyone but other go-betweens. Safer that way, for everyone."
The woman moaned and tried to move. As with the man, she found she couldn't.
"What the fuck is going on?"
The man explained, briefly. "He's a hired killer. He's going to kill us."
The woman looked around and began to scream for help. She screamed long and loud, and he let her. Eventually, she stopped.
"Look around you." He said. "This basement is sound proofed. Plus, it's in the middle of no place. The guy who used to own it thought he was a blues guitar player. A white B. B. King, or something. There's a whole recording studio down here, all soundproofed. I listened to some of his stuff. Half the teenaged garage bands out there had better guitarists than he was. And the crazy old fool left behind three undated wills, none of them mentioning the same people. So, they're all suing each other. It'll be years before that gets resolved. And it gets even better. Back at the turn of the twentieth century there was a chemical plant just down the road. It closed in the late fifties, early sixties, but back in those days, they just let any old chemicals at all flow towards the river that runs by this place." He stopped and thought. "Maybe the chemicals killed him and screwed up his brain. More lawsuits, I guess."
"You're going to just seal us in here and let us die slowly?" The man asked.
"No, not at all." He said, starting on another course of bricks. "That would be very unprofessional of me. When I take a job, I guarantee that the targets will be dead." He put down his trowel and held up a .22 caliber pistol. "The magazine for this pistol has been modified to hold .22 caliber BB cap rounds. That's about the weakest pistol round around. But, it's got enough punch to go through the nasal bone and into your brain, and it'll bounce off the inside of your skull and destroy your brain. I always use two shots just to be sure." He laughed. "I once shot a guy and the round came out of his right eye and hit me in the arm. Hardly a scratch. For me, anyway."
The woman spoke. "You only have to kill him. He's the one you want to kill, not me. I can be very good to you." She did her best to push her boobs out as she spoke. There was no doubt she was very attractive.
"Sorry. I do research on jobs, you know. You're a very dangerous woman, and if I'm in the mood later, I can hire a woman who I don't have to worry about."
The man tried again. "We're a lot alike you know."
He kept laying bricks. "Just because I'm going to kill you doesn't mean you have to be insulting."
"No, really. We both have a fascination with death. We're alike."
"Not a bit. I'm what they call an adrenaline junkie. I'm never so much alive as when I'm facing death. I killed the head of the Mayan drug cartel, his wife and his chief enforcer. His people chased me for six days though the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula. I killed four of them before I got away."
He got a faraway look in his eyes. "I killed an African warlord once who kept raiding a multi-national corporation's operations. Try making a getaway when you're the only white guy for a hundred miles."
"And you? What do you do? You sneak up behind women and strangle them. Anyone could do that. You wouldn't last ten seconds in my world."
"Think about it. I could help you." The man was pleading now.
"Brickwork is high enough now."
He held the pistol right between the man's eyes and shot. He ejected the spent shell casing and fired again.
The woman screamed obscenities at him, but she died as well.
He disassembled the pistol, wiped every bit of it with gun oil and threw the parts in next to them. Then he finished the brick wall and removed the phone he'd had covering the two of them. Lastly, he replaced the soundproofed wall so that no one would know it wasn't the original.
He checked the phone. The video of the death of the two was fine.
He was a professional and he had done his research. There was only one person with the money and the desire to have these two killed. He hoped Richard Castle was happy with his work.
The End
Author's note: I'm still working on the Pilots and the Frontier, but this very short story popped into my head and I had to write it.