I, Death

Brecht: 7

The call came at about four o’clock one Sunday afternoon from one of Brecht’s Toronto area contacts. A teenager vaguely matching O’Mallick’s description had been repeatedly spotted in the same neighborhood over the course of a single week.

The next call came from Jordan, one of his higher ranking members, stating that two members of Brecht’s gang had turned up dead.

“Is this likely the work of Fitz and his crew?” Brecht said to the phone.

“It doesn’t look like any targeted hit I’ve ever seen,” Jordan said. “Sorry boss, but I’ve never seen anything like it. The one guy was bleeding from the eyeballs as if some sort of poison had been shot into them. The other guy’s head seems to have exploded. Yet there was no entrance wound and no gunshot residue on him.”

Brecht was silent.

Jordan went on. “The Fitz gang usually slices their throat, and, you know, they like to leave their calling card.” Jordan was referring to the Fitz Root Beer labels Fitz’s gang were known to leave, particularly whenever taking out someone in Brecht’s gang.

Back when they were working together, Fitz got his nickname from a soda he had been obsessed with and was constantly drinking. Though he had to import it at quite an expense, the premium root beer made in St. Louis was the only root beer — hell, the only soda pop — he drank. And about the only other obsession he could remember about Fitz, one that drove Brecht nuts, was the way Fitz would carefully peel the label off the bottles of root beer and carefully stow them in an envelope he kept handy at all times.

Brecht remembered asking him how many of those fucking things he had. Fitz only laughed. The labels, of course, made the perfect calling card, the perfect statement — particularly since Brecht knew where the labels came from — that the hit was personal.

“Yeah, I know.” Brecht said, more to himself than to Jordan.

He looked across the room at the suitcase he had lying on the couch, already packed when he first started devising his plan. “Okay, make arrangements for me,” he said. “I’m coming down.”

He hung up the phone then he said them once more.

“I’m coming down.”

[The rest of this novel will continue to be rolled out on a regular basis here on Wattpad, but if you can't wait to read it, the print and eBook versions are available through all major online retailers. Publisher Atomic Fez's page (with links) is here:  http://www.atomicfez.com/book-catalogue/9781927609033.html]