NO QUARTER
Jett doesn’t feel the pain in his knuckles on the first punch. Nor the second. Nor the third. Holding the man by the collar of his shirt, Jett strikes again, breaking the man’s jaw. “Stop!” Kat would yell at him were she here. “We aren’t killers! Stop!” Where she here, Jett might have listened to her. Where she here, Jett might have stopped on the third punch.
But she’s not.
Crack! Jett lands a right hook, breaking the man’s nose. “Stop!” Kat would yell again. “Please stop!”
He can’t. He won’t. Grunting, he strikes again, harder, faster, his mind swarming with memories and visions. Memories he’s never told Katja of his life when he was a kid. Visions of him.
Jett screams, refusing to let his past resurface, refusing to even utter his name as he punches the man again. “Enough!” he pictures Kat ordering him. “Please! You’re killing him!”
“No!” Jett screams at her.
She doesn’t understand. She’ll never understand. Because he’ll never open up about his past. “It’s not important,” he would tell her when she asked him to share stories when he was a kid that he’s never told her before. Stories that weren’t just about the last great con he got away with. Stories that had nothing to do with their lives as con artists. “What have I told you?” he would preach to Kat. “The past is just that: the past. We have to look forward and keep our head in the game. Looking back makes you emotional and emotions—”
Kat finished the sentence. “Make you sloppy and get you killed.”
“Precisely.”
Jett broke his own rule. He looked back. He got emotional. I don’t care, he thinks, landing the eight punch on the man’s face. I don’t care about my rules. I don’t care about the consequences. I don’t care! He strikes the man’s face again and again, not stopping until he hears… the distant call of police sirens.
The sirens bring him back to reality. As if he was coming out of a violent spell, Jett stares at his trembling hands, drenched with blood, before staring at the man he was beating. He’s dead, Jett thinks, noticing one of the man’s eyes is swollen and closed shut, his nose caved in, and a few of his teeth have been knocked out. Dead. Jett must have killed him within the tenth punch. Panting, Jett shakes his head, looking at the kitchen in the dim cabin he has little memory of entering. How did I get here? He remembers getting in his car and speeding down the snow-paved highway. He remembers drifting to a stop in front of a cabin. He remembers standing in front of a porch, seconds from opening the glass sliding doors. The rest… the rest is a blur. He groans, regretting the rule he broke. I’m supposed to keep them separated. My life then. And my life now. He glimpses at the man he just killed and furrows his eyebrows in distress before looking away. One punch. The guy deserved one punch and one punch only. He holds out his right hand, trying to stop it from trembling. He can’t. God, what the fuck have I done?
Just then, he hears the wooden floor of the porch creak and Jett feels a cold rush of winter air graze his back. Fuck. Facing away from the open sliding door, Jett places his hands behind his head, expecting a police officer to cuff him soon. He waits and he waits. And when no one approaches, Jett wonders what’s taking them so long. Are the cops even here or is it someone else? Curious to find out, Jett turns around…
And gasps when he sees who it is. Someone worse. Much, much worse.
