Pool_2

unsuspecting head straight up into the roofing nails impaling that viper's skull, stuck there. "TOO SHORT," before turning to check the trap door, "NEXT," Marcus whispered to himself with a lightening twitch of his hand. Mick's scream was just silent air escaping from his slit throat. Marcus again flashed a brief recollection of Frank Aver standing there with a broken coal shovel in his hands. Hank Aaron. Frank should have used a Hank Aaron. This rat wasn't shrugging off this hit. He was laughing to himself. There was definitely something missing. That something was fear. He didn't see me coming. Marcus's mind was a screaming blaze of churning solutions for the endless uncertainties that might follow. No fear. Just purpose. Purpose consumed fear. He was in a virtual world of solutions and insight, of next moves and choices. Mick's gun was already in his hands even before the throaty hiss stopped and studied in a crack of light cooperating through a vent. Safety on, safety off. Ought to work. "Thanks, Zee Zee." Marcus pulled the stiletto out of Mick's gaping windpipe then wiped it on his lifeless crotch. Mick looked like he was kneeling, still at his game, what with his head stuck to the nails. Gathered insulation was rolled into a muff as Macaluso crawled back to, around, and just past the trap door - laying low on the short opposite side like a panther in the dark. His eyes smiled as he waited prone, wedged in the narrow eaves wrapped in darkness. "It's OK," he thought, "I know where you live. Come to papa." Time goes slowly when you are waiting to kill or be killed. It seemed like years. But for a while he felt whole. I can do this. This bastard is mine. He waited. But in the swirling mind storm of solution and counter-strike an abrupt unknown slipped in. Shannon. Did she also have visitors? "Got to warn her. Got to warn her," his mind persevered despite his single unstraying purpose. "Come-on you bastard. Come to