Other Side of the Gun

OTHER SIDE OF THE GUN

Mikey was good at his job. Very, very good. If you asked Mikey he'd say
he was fucking good. You see, Mikey was a man of few words. Fuck was
the word he used to make up for the lack of all the others. Pretty much
so anyway, and he was using it quite a lot today.
'FUCK !!' he half-screamed and half-hissed.
Actually, had Mikey been the inventor of scrabble and not a gangland
executioner, fuck would only have been worth four points, and yes, you
would be able to use it under his rules. Not that there would probably
have been much point having seven tiles to select a word from. Thinking
of a word over five would have been a major achievement. But that was
scrabble and this was downtown Chicago. Mikey was never going to be
much of a wordsmith, especially now. Given the chance at this very
moment in time he may well have swapped roles with the game
creator.
Mikey was a very unattractive half-American, half-Irish pitbull of a
man. Short and squat, his whole persona shouted shifty at you.
Definitely a guy you would cross the street to avoid, or leave a pint
unfinished if he walked in the bar you drank at. Everyone knew Mikey.
Everyone tried to stay out of his way, and it was probably true that he
could start a fight in a nunnery.
Even so, he didn't look quite so tough now.
'Fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK !' he raged again.
He looked down at his bloodstained ragged shirt. He had shot so many
people in his lifetime, he seldom gave a thought to how badly it must
have hurt. Specially if he made a mess of it and it took two or three
bullets to finish the job off. He reserved that for rare occasions
though. You could never afford to take your time savouring your work in
this business, no matter how much you wanted to. It was almost like a
factory job, a police siren taking on the role of signing off
klaxon.
But now he knew just how much it hurt. It was literally painfully
clear. He clutched his hand to his stomach tighter. A quite futile
action. Blood rolled freely over his hands and through his fingers. It
was more an action of trying to suppress the pain. To push it into a
smaller area. His whole stomach was a burning agony, ripping through
him, every nerve exploding shattered shards of glass inside. He pulled
his hand away an inch or so, inspecting the damage done.
'Oh, fuck,' he started crying.
The hard man had started crying.
It was a hole as big as his fist, , maybe bigger. It was difficult to
tell because of all the blood. The pain creased his vision too. He felt
sick. He pushed his hand back against the sodden hole, trying vainly to
hold entrails in that were trying to spring out of their confines. He
was also pretty sure that the damage didn't stop there. The jacket he
was wearing was probably the only reason the wall behind him was still
a neutral washed out colour. Could he walk, would he dare to walk. It
was agony doing nothing, how much more could it hurt than it did now ?
As he tried to push himself up, using the wall behind him for support
he quickly realised how much more it could hurt.
'Fuckin' come on !' he urged himself as his vision threatened to black
out completely.
The shards of glass feeling inside became huge, burning hot pokers,
sizzling and frying at his insides. He could feel his cooling blood
running, soaked into his trousers and wondered how much blood he had
lost. He had heard that you always think you've lost a lot of blood
just because it's not contained. But this, in his own words, was a lot
of fucking blood ! Bucket loads of the fucking stuff all over the
floor. Dripping through the fucking ceiling of the apartment below. He
was, still in his own words, fucking scared.
His mind began to drift as he struggled, desperately to the door. A
saying. "There's always someone better out there." But there had been
no-one better than Mikey. Never had been, never will be. He was a
craftsman, an artist, a student of the fine art of turf defence. Hired
by the best to take on the second best, depending on who they were from
week to week, he honed his skills to the peak of perfection. Yet here
he was, cursing and leaking large amounts of bodily fluid over the
floor.
He kept thinking to himself that someone must have heard the shot and
they'd come running and banging on the door, finding out if he was all
right. Then another image flashed into his brain. His boss would
realise that he hadn't called in and would send one of the boys over to
smash down the door and find his dead body in a wide pool of
claret.
He threw up. "Fuck," he thought to himself. "A pool of blood and
fucking sick ! And I'll probably piss meself too."
Surely someone must have heard ! He reached a blood-soaked hand down to
the door knob. He couldn't get a grip, and he just kept slipping around
it.
'Jesus Christ, why didn't anyone hear the shot ?' he groaned through
his pain.
He recalled, the gun that shot him had been muffled. Hidden in a coat
pocket to stifle the sound. It would have been unlikely to have been
heard even in the corridor outside. He pushed himself up to the door,
racked with unbelievable agony. He still couldn't believe that in all
these years as a henchman, without so much as a scratch, this could be
his last few moments. As he slid down the wall again something
dislodged. Falling out of his pocket, the tip covered in blood, was his
gun. The moment it hit the floor it went off again. This time it made a
hell of a noise, he was sure someone would at least hear it now.
Unfortunately it also created a lot of pain. A bullet smashed through
his left leg, spraying a fine mist of blood and gore against the wall.
He remembered now the reason for the first shot.
'Fancy leaving the fucking safety catch off when I sat down.' he gasped
as his vision closed out.