“Holy shit, what’s your issue?”

“My issue is that you might just be the worst assassin in all of Ohio,” Tomas snapped at me.

Tomas was basically the oldest, nastiest, most wrinkly and miserable man between here and the Pacific. And wow, he was really acting like it tonight. He continued:

“Dewey—“

“Drew’s fine.”

“You need to stop vandalizing victim’s homes. Do you know how astonishingly awful of an assassin you have to be to get complaints after the murder?”

Vandalizing was a strong word, but I didn’t bother to correct him. I instead gave him a drawn-out sigh and leaned back into the back-breaking wooden chair Tomas had so kindly set up for me. Currently, we were in a dismal, disgusting, disheveled wooden cabin right on Lake Erie, staring out at the lake’s gloomy darkness. At least, we would’ve been staring out at the lake if Tomas would get out of my face and sit his sorry ass back down.

“Tomas, these people deserve—“

My phone began to ring. It vibrated ever-so-softly in my left pocket besides a thin dagger of mine. Most people wouldn’t have noticed, but Tomas did; freaks of nature were good at that sort of thing.

He looked at me expectantly as I moved to silence it.

“Oh no, I insist, Dewey.”

I gave him a slow blink and mumbled, “They’ll call back; they always do.”

“No, no, pick it up and put it on speaker.”

I stared dead-eyed at him.

“I wasn’t aware you knew what speaker phone was,” I snapped back.

Before I knew it, he had shoved a pudgy hand into my pocket and picked up the phone himself. I’d give him that—he was the quickest freak of nature I knew.

“Hello?” he bellowed, holding the phone between the two of us.

I began slowly, “It’s only silence. I think it’s some advertisement or scam defect. You wouldn’t understand—“

Something shifted on the other side of the line; my face paled.

Quietly, a hauntingly pained voice began, “Dewey?”

My throat went dry; my eyes went wide.

I tried to speak; with a whisper, I mumbled, “Mom?”

Tomas still held the phone; I didn’t try to take it from him. He began going a shade of deep, violent red.

“You said your mother was dead,” he demanded.

“I thought she was!” I cried, grabbing for the phone, “Mom? Mom, are you there?”

He held it out of reach of my desperate hands.

The line was dead. There was only silence now, the same deafening silence there had been every day for years.

“Dewey, I gave you this job because you said your mother was dead,” he growled.

I looked at him in disbelieve, tears welling up in my eyes.

I grabbed my phone back; he let me.

“Tomas,” I breathed, “I need to go.”

“No, we’re not done here.”

“I have so much work to do,” I whispered.

Behind me, the man screamed profanities and demands as I closed the door to his miserable cabin in the woods. The night was bitter and I wasn’t sure how to get back to the city from here; but tonight, tonight it seemed a little less lonely.