Dead Man's Trivia

By Dax Christopher

Up close and personal, or softly from a distance, Sunshine will see to it that your problems disappear once you hand over your money, no questions asked. Unless, of course, she feels like having a little fun on the job...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dax Christopher
• Release date: Jan 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310398797

Dax Christopher

Multi-genre fiction writer and game designer creating fun and immersive experiences for lovers of stories and games.

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Dead Man's Trivia

Dead Man's Trivia

A Tale from Devil's Playground

Dax Christopher

Dead Man's Trivia

A Tale from Devil's Playground

Copyright © 2016 by Dax Christopher

Smashwords Edition

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

          Firearms are the world’s great equalizer; there are no weight classes in a gun fight. Picture two guys, one big and one small, one athletic and one scrawny. Now picture them fighting. You can’t see the little guy winning without forcing the image, right? Tipping the scales of your imagination to grant him superhuman reflexes or a lifetime’s worth of training? That’s what it would take for him to win in close quarters. Now give both guys guns, and viola! The match is suddenly even, because no one is bulletproof. Every time I kill someone, I am reminded of that one humbling fact. And the bigger the target, the more humbling the experience. 

          I was set up on a rooftop, a few blocks away from the unfortunate gentleman on street level who was about to round a corner and walk into the two most lethal places in the world at the same time—a chalk outline on the ground like you see cops draw around murder victims, and my field of vision. It wasn’t just any chalkline, of course; it was a chalkline without a body, a dangerous portent of some poor soul’s impending demise, put there by a local legend who had earned himself the moniker, Chalkline. Guess why. I’ll wait.

          The location of the outline on the ground had been carefully chosen to allow me a rare line of sight into the alley system where he wanted his guy to go down. It isn’t easy seeing into those alleys from a rooftop, especially at a long distance. You have to align yourself with whatever direction the alley happens to run in, and even then you have to lead your target far enough away from the corner so that he reveals himself beyond the roof edge of the closest building to him in your direction. It was a lot of unnecessary trouble to go to, or so I thought. When Chalkline hired me for that little job I had told him that it would’ve been easier for me to just wait around in the alleys for the guy and spray him with bullets from my Big Guy Be Good Special, otherwise known as an IMI nine millimeter carbine model A Uzi. For reasons he didn’t feel the need to make clear to me, though, he insisted that he wanted to make sure the guy didn’t feel anything when it happened. True enough, Uzi at mid-range doesn’t exactly translate into clean, painless death, and the customer is always right. It was an odd request for a guy who seemed to take a peculiar kind of glee in dreaming up thousands of unusual, and usually painful and embarrassing, ways in which to end someone’s life story, but hey, if he wanted quick and painless, I could give it to him. Something else that confused me about the job was why the city’s most notorious killer would hire someone else to do his dirty work. If he was so particular about how the job got done, one would think he’d just do it himself. Most of the time, when all the factors in a situation don’t quite add up to something that makes total sense, it’s an indication that there’s foul play involved somewhere and you should be looking over your shoulder for the inevitable double cross. I liked to think, though, that there was a feeling of mutual respect between him and myself, and I decided not to put too much stock in my concerns. As far as I knew, we had no quarrel. Also, trying to think ahead of a guy who called his shots as accurately and consistently as he did was probably a waste of time anyway.

          So there I was, set up on a rooftop and staring through the scope of my much subtler Sharpshot International NATO .308 Winchester rifle, otherwise known as my Rockabye Baby. It might not have been as clean in the end as poison or a plastic bag, but if Chalkline wanted a quiet, swift kill from long range, that was as good as it was gonna get. Sure, it made some noise, but the target never heard it. And speaking of targets,