The Killing Floor Blues by Craig Schaefer Page B

could both have a go at me. The second killer was eager, too eager. He took a wild swing, his knife slicing the air as I ducked, and he didn’t have time to recover before I threw myself on top of him. We landed on the wooden bench, rolled, landed hard on the floor, almost nose to nose.
    I saw a heartbeat of terror register on his face. Then it was too late.
    The black maggot spat from my iris like a bullet. It left no wound in its wake, and it didn’t leave a visible wound on him either. Not when it chewed its way into his eyeball, and not when it dug into his brain like a diamond-tipped drill.
    He dropped his knife and clutched his face, shrieking, feet pounding the floor. The confusion bought me a precious second, just enough time to snatch up his fallen blade and jump back. I came up in a crouch as the first hitter, the one with the fractured arm, lunged at me. I grabbed my shirt from the bench and swung it like a whip, snapping it at his face. Then I darted in and slashed, shredding his shirt and drawing a thin red line from his nipple to his gut with the tip of the blade.
    He broke and ran, cradling his arm. There were no alarms, no pounding of guards’ booted feet, and the security camera in the corner hung as a mute and witness. Nobody was coming. The guards had been bought off or warned off. It was just me and the second hitter, pressing his palms to his eyes and screeching like a newborn baby as he thrashed on the floor.
    A kinder man would have put him out of his misery. I wasn’t that man. Besides, I needed to make a statement to the entire prison. He’d do. I toweled off, pocketed his knife, got dressed, and walked out of the shower room, letting the door shut on his terrorized wails.
    *     *     *
    Out in the yard, they were playing cards at Brisco’s picnic table. Sounded like a raucous good time, at least until they saw me coming.
    A metal detector checkpoint stood between the hive and the yard, so I’d stashed the knife in my cell before I came out to play. That was all right. By now, they’d have found the second hitter, and word spread fast on the prison grapevine. I waited just long enough in my cell, before heading outside, to make sure the story got around.
    Fear was my best weapon.
    Ray-Ray and Slanger found someplace else to be, fast. The others could tell something was up but looked more confused than anxious; they must not have been in on the hit. Brisco, he just turned into a statue, his eyes going marble-hard.
    “Hey, Brisco,” I said, “what’s up? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
    He leaned back a little, shoulders tensing.
    “Guys,” he said, “need a minute here.”
    His buddies cleared off, orbiting the table at a respectful distance. I sat down across from Brisco. And stared, without saying another word.
    He tugged at his collar like a suspect sweating it out under an interrogation-room lamp and looked everywhere but straight ahead.
    “It wasn’t…it wasn’t anything personal,” he finally said.
    “Funny,” I told him. “When somebody tries to screw somebody else over and fails hard? That’s always the first thing out of their mouth. ‘It was only business.’ ‘It wasn’t personal.’ Thing is, to the guy
getting
screwed? It’s
always
personal.”
    “You—you don’t understand.” He wrung his hands on the table. “I’m trying to save
lives
here, man. The browns are itching to go to war, and it’s all because of you and those fucking Calles. No you, no more problem.”
    “Except those hitters weren’t CCs. For one thing, they were Asian. Korean, maybe. Second, they were genuine operators. Where’d they come from, Brisco?”
    He looked up at me and shook his head. “Outside. Don’t know. Didn’t ask. They said they’d been hired to take you out, and they came in with fake jackets. I know they had some bent guards covering for ’em. They said…they said if I set the scene and pulled my protection away, they’d move in and seal the