The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Recruit
One

On an ordinary Tuesday evening in late October, Jimmie Yarborough, CPA, wiped his slick hands across the taut fabric of his jeans and wondered how killing an old woman could make him sweat so much.

Especially, since he hadn't been able to do it yet.

Kill her, that is.

If he had been a man likely to see the humor in a situation, he might have laughed at the picture of himself standing chest deep in a thatch of overgrown, nearly dead forsythia in a suburban backyard, clutching a rifle that looked as if it had been fashioned for Han Solo.

But Jimmie Yarborough was not the kind of man likely to see the humor in any situation. He was a CPA. So, the image of an overweight, 45-year-old divorced accountant crouching within a bush and clutching a rifle did nothing but make him slightly more nervous.

Even the beret he wore cocked at a jaunty angle atop his round head didn't elicit a smile. It was, simply, the only black hat he owned. And he felt strongly that, if one was being sent to kill someone--especially at night--one needed to wear black.

So, Jimmie Yarborough wore a black beret and stood behind a simple two-story suburban house, close to the neatly stacked woodpile, and waited.

Waited to kill an old woman.

While he waited, he did not ponder over how he had come to this. He didn't spin events over and over in his mind, wondering how he might have avoided this.

No, to pass the time while he waited on this cold October evening, with the smoke from a dozen suburban chimneys curling black-grey into the clear night sky, he calculated the mileage costs it had taken him to get here at 32.5 cents a mile.

He figured the interest accruing on the $50,000 they had given him to kill this woman.

And he calculated what his total hotel bill would be for his single night in this town, complete with the honor bar's two tiny bottles of Chivas Regal and the small glass container of macadamia nuts he intended to celebrate with once he returned.

After he had killed this old woman.

In the distance, dogs barked intermittently, punctuating sentences that no one else could hear.

Jimmie fidgeted in his duck blind, and his sweat-slick hands nearly slipped on the long, smooth barrel of the gun they had given him, a Heckler & Koch PSG1 with a silencer bulging like a tumor from its narrow tip. He fumbled the gun back into position, cradling it across his expansive chest, feeling its metal penetrate through his clothing as if the cold emanated from the gun itself.

He took a deep breath, wiped his palms against his jeans again, looked across two backyards to the house he knew she lived in.

Alice deKuypers, an 87-year-old German expatriate living alone here in this house to be near her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They had given him little additional information, other than the fact that she took her dog out every night prior to turning in for bed. While the dog did its business, she smoked two Marlboro Lights (her compromise with a bout of lung cancer that had necessitated removing her right lung two years ago), crunching the finished butts out in a chipped, ceramic ashtray fashioned by one of her great-grandchildren years ago.

He had been sent here to kill her.

As to why her, they had never said.

Perhaps, he mused, she had been married to some high-ranking Nazi officer during the war, a prison camp commandant or, worse yet (and this is what he chose to tell himself), a death camp commandant. Perhaps she had climbed eagerly into this man's bed every night, knowing what was going on there, having watched him supervise the slaughter of hundreds or thousands of people in a day.

Perhaps she spread her legs for him, returned his ardor as freely as if he had been her first, innocent lover.

Perhaps...

Now, years later, here she was, living the good life in America, holed up in some moneyed suburban enclave, smoking her two Marlboro Lights a night, surrounded by a family that either didn't know what grandma had done during the war or didn't care.

It was all fantasy, really. Yet, for Jimmie Yarborough, it was the only way he could bring himself to kill her.

Jimmie Yarborough was not a killer, at least not yet.

And that was precisely why they had sought him out.

Movement from the house two yards down drew his eyes.

A small shape shot from the house, darted across the dark lawn, circled crazily.

A small light snapped on near the back door, and a short, thin figure strode out on stiff legs.

His hands shaking now, Jimmie tucked the barrel of the gun under his neck to steady it, fished a picture from his pocket. At this moment, he wished he'd worn a pair of jeans that weren't quite so tight. But they were they only black jeans he owned.

The light of the stars and the distant porch light didn't make it much easier to see, but Jimmie could tell that this was her.

Her hair was an indeterminate shade of grey, wavy and impeccably neat. She was thin and elegant, holding her head up high and sure. She looked for all the world, he thought, like a female version of all of those thin, arrogant effete Nazis Hollywood populates its war movies with.

"Calm down and make pee-pee so that mama can get back inside," she growled in a thick voice, still heavily accented. "It's so damn cold out here."

"Iz so dem cohd oud here," was how she sounded.

She flicked at a disposable lighter, brought it to the first of her two Marlboro Lights, already perched between her thin, dry lips. The cigarette flared, and a wisp of blue smoke curled up, vanished above her head.

Jimmie swallowed, licked his dry lips.

Here it was, the moment of truth.

He frowned at his shaking hands as he moved the gun into position.

No one had demonstrated the gun to him nor had they instructed him in any way about its use.

And although he had practiced holding and aiming it for two evenings alone in his apartment amidst the dirty laundry and the trash can overflowing with empty Lean Cuisine packages, it still seemed as alien a thing to him as it did when he had unwrapped it.

He shouldered the butt, drew his head down to the scope.

He closed his left eye, pushed his right eye forward, and the world became emerald green, its secrets revealed by the night scope.

There she was, so close now that he could count the wrinkles in her face, read the writing on her cigarette package. She still wore a small wedding ring on her left hand, and it sparkled brilliant green in his scope when it caught the light.

"Come, schatzi, hurry. Mama is freezing to her bones now, ya?"

Jimmie fingered the trigger, breathed out, his breath twisting away from his lips like a ghost anxious to be rid of him.

Now, there were no bills or mileage to calculate, no interest to accrue.

There was just the killing.

Would you kill a person if you knew you could get away with it? they had asked him.

At first, he had hedged.

Someone I know?

He had thought of his overbearing mother, with her sharp criticisms and harsh judgments.

No. Random murder. We select.

Someone I'd want to kill? he'd asked.

He had thought of his ex-wife, who had grown slimmer and more calculating as the years had made him fatter and more lethargic about what went on about him.

Does it matter?

In the end, after the money and the veiled threats, it didn't.

Yes, he had answered.

Yes, he could kill. Easily.

Happily.

But that answer had been made a week or so ago, in the warm, familiar confines of his favorite restaurant.

Now, he was here in a distant city, wearing a black beret, shouldering a sniper rifle and preparing to blow an old lady's head off.

And he wasn't so sure...

A voice inside his head took the opportunity to ask what it felt was a pertinent question.

"What if you simply gave the money back? You haven't spent any of it yet."

The reasonableness of this question shone like a light in his mind for a long time before being unceremoniously pissed on and extinguished by a second voice.

"People who hire you to kill someone aren't generally the forgiving, understanding types. They won't need you to give the money back. They'll kill you and take the money back, and then hire someone to kill the old Nazi bitch. Either way, she dies. Why not live through this and make a few bucks?" said a second voice.

As he wrestled with this, he saw her stub her first cigarette out, fish a second from the pack she grasped in her right hand. Her lighter flared again, and she drew in a raspy breath. Jimmie could hear how hard her remaining lung was working even from where he stood.

The dog yipped from somewhere within the dark sea of the yard, and she crouched slowly to greet it. The cigarette clamped tightly between her lips, she uttered quiet endearments to the animal, ruffed the fur of its neck, its ears. Jimmie could not tell what kind of dog it was, only that it was small; what he usually called a "kick" dog.

He could not do it.

There it was, as simple as that.

He had his answer.

He could not kill her.

He could not kill a person even if he was assured of getting away with it.

Even if he thought--no matter how far-fetched--that she deserved to die.

It wasn't the ordinary kindness to her dog or the sight of her pulling herself slowly to her feet or even the fact that, no matter how evil she might have been, she was now nothing more than an ancient husk of that person.

He felt, in this regard, no more loathing for her than he would for the discarded skin of a venomous snake.

No, it was none of this, just as it had been without much of a reason that he had agreed to kill her. It simply came to his mind, as clear and plain as the total of a column in a spreadsheet program.

I cannot do this.

I cannot kill this woman.

His heart ticked off the seconds it took her to drag down the second cigarette to a small glowing nub.

When she stubbed out that last cigarette, she stubbed out any opportunity for him to finish this job tonight.

Vaguely, Jimmie wondered what would happen to him.

Neither of the voices in his head spoke up.

The answer was evident.

Taking a deep breath, he lowered the gun, started to walk away.

As he did, he heard a flat "phut-phut!" from nearby.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the old woman's body slam against the side of her house, slump to the ground.

For a moment, he looked down to the rifle he held in his limp, moist hands.

Did I do that?

Did the gun just go off?

A tremulous moan pushed past his lips, and he stepped through the tangle of forsythia limbs.

He saw her body, twisted at an odd angle, spread across the foot of the stairs leading back into her house. The body did not move, though the dog circled it, whimpering as he did.

Almost without conscious thought, he moved through the yard toward the body, stomping through more plants, his feet crunching on the frost-hardened grass.

He ignored the lights from the houses of the yards he crossed; the wavering blue pulse of televisions, the warm golden glow of fireplaces.

His eyes remained fixed on the unmoving--dead? he wondered--body of the woman.

There were no fences to separate yard from yard, and he quickly found himself standing self-consciously within the pool of yellow light cast by her porch light, breathing hard, heart laboring and sweating ... sweating.

The dog, a Pekinese he saw now, remained near its master, its voice alternating a continuous low whimper/growl.

Breathing hard and still clutching the rifle, he took two small steps nearer the body, lying on its back.

A dark pool spread around her, black and glistening in the dim light.

Two impossibly small stains on the front of her blouse showed where the bullets had entered her.

A smell reached his quivering nostrils, penetrated his brain and erased all other smells that crisp fall evening--the tobacco-like sweetness of the neighborhood fireplaces; the sweet, musty tang of fall leaves dying, decaying; the whiff of the old woman's lavender sachet.

This new aroma was a smell he remembered, wired into his brain nearly 30 years before. It was flat and dull and metallic, and he tasted it on his tongue, on the roof of his dry mouth, at the back of his clenched throat.

He looked at the glistening pool on the ground, then at his own thick fingers.

It was the coppery smell of pennies, and it took him back to his first job as an assistant teller at a bank, sealing pennies within paper cylinders. This was in the days before mechanical counting devices, and Jimmie had counted them all by hand, returning home each evening with his fingers stinking of copper.

This was the same smell, wafting up from the midnight pool that crept across the concrete beneath the old woman.

Although he was just a nervous CPA, he had little doubt that she was dead.

He barely had time to turn his head as the vomit scorched up from his gut, scoured his throat, erupted from between his lips in a single, dizzying blurt.

Steaming, it splashed over the yellow and orange mums planted around the concrete patio.

Too numb even to wipe the runners of bitter spittle from his chin, he straightened, dropped the rifle.

It clattered to the concrete, came to a silent rest beside her, strange companions.

And when he saw it there, he realized, perhaps for the first time, that he had not somehow inadvertently killed her.

Someone else had.

Jimmie Yarborough lifted his beret-clad head to scan the yards butting up to the one he stood in.

He never heard the second "phut-phut!" from nearby.

No one did, just as no one had heard the little blurts of air that had marked the killing of Alice deKuypers.

Jimmie never felt anything as the bullets struck.

The first entered his larynx, filling his throat with gurgling blood that burst from his lips and sprayed the frightened dog.

The second lifted his scalp off and a handful of white glop from beneath it, slapped it against the home's vinyl siding with a sound not unlike a grocer slapping a raw steak onto a counter top.

It slid slowly down the butter-yellow plastic, congealed on the ground.

Jimmie Yarborough teetered for a second. Then one leg buckled and he collapsed atop Alice deKuypers, rolled off her dead body.

His last breath curled from his lips, and his sweating hands left wet marks on the cold concrete.

Seconds passed, and the little dog curled in the crook of Alice's distended neck.

A shadow moved in the yard, and the little dog peered up over Alice's unmoving chest to see what it was.

Fearful, she buried her head into her master's shoulder, did not look up again.

The shadow surveyed the scene quietly.

Bending, it patted Jimmie Yarborough's body with gloved hands, found a set of car keys and the flat plastic card of a hotel room key.

It took these things, slid them into its own pocket.

Reaching over Jimmie's body, the gloved hand closed around the rifle Jimmie had discarded, lifted it, slid it within the folds of its long, dark coat.

Quietly, the shadow slipped back into the night.

Alice deKuypers's dog cautiously raised its head, sniffed the air, moaned.

As if in response, half a dozen neighborhood dogs lifted their voices in sympathy.