365 DAYS 365 TALES

A Night Out

The gun felt uncomfortable in the boy's hands because the weapon was heavy and strange. And in the hands of a boy who usually spent his time working on the computer, the gun actually felt weird.

The boy had tears in his eyes as he remembered how many years back his father had reluctantly taught him to use the weapon. And that was just because the boy had pestered his father repeatedly. His father had been unwilling at first, but then his father could never refuse him anything. His father. The man who had raised him. The man who was now lying dead in the hospital, with a bullet wound.

And from his car, the boy saw the man whom he was following had got out of his car. And for a second the boy gasped. Because the man who got out of the car was a small man, with twinkling gray eyes and thick wavy hair. Nothing about the man stood out exceptionally. And the man did not see anything around him as he walked towards the seedy hotel. Admittedly, there was nothing to see at one o'clock, in the night. Nothing at all, except for a boy in his late teens with a raging heart and a loaded gun.

The man walked inside the hotel. There, the man woke up the sleepy hotel manager and a few minutes later, the man walked inside as the boy lost sight of the man.

From his car, the boy saw lights of a room in the first floor of the hotel come up and could see the silhouette of the man inside the room.

The boy was shaken out of his reverie as another car honked loudly from behind and drove inside the parking of the hotel.

The light in the first floor hotel room was on for a few seconds and then there was darkness.

A cold darkness.

The man was sleeping peacefully after what he had done, the boy thought savagely as he pulled the gun and slipped it inside his pocket because he honestly did not know where else he was supposed to keep the gun. For a brief second, the boy wondered who the man he was going to kill, really was. Because his father had never told him that. "I work for a man with many names. Considering what we do for a living it is necessary. But I work for him because he respects life. He does not believe in violence and does not keep weapons at all. Because he believes that weapons take away life - An act that can never be undone." Despite what his father did for a living, the boy's father was never frivolous about life. In fact the boy had never even heard his father talk about life or death.

And this man was responsible for killing my father, the boy thought angrily as he pulled on the muffler he had brought from his home and put on his gloves, as he got out of the car. He saw that the man's room in the first floor could be reached by jumping on the parapet.

And the foolish man inside the hotel room, had kept his window open, the boy thought as he walked towards the side of the hotel not noticing the basic fact that no one seemed to have gotten out of the other car which had come inside after the boy had come inside the hotel.

**************

The man inside the first floor hotel room, went by many names, but today he was just plain, old Shyam Karthick. No one knew whether that was his real name. But for today that was his name.

Shyam pushed the window open as he heard the noise from below. He then walked towards the bed and was lying on it. Shyam was thinking about who it could be. There was something about this job. Right from the time, Hari had approached him giving him information about the stone in the museum, to the actual steal, today. Something was just not going right and Shyam could not believe that the scrap with the cops today was just because the breaks went against them.

Shyam heard someone climb inside his window.

"Don't make any stupid moves," The boy snarled as he came very close to Shyam.