Unpopular Science

“What’s this all about?” Pincay hissed.

“Shut up. We’re supposed to stay silent,” Portillo said. He looked around to make sure no one was within earshot. There was just the grassy lawn, the sparse patches of garden that couldn’t possibly hide an attacker and the glimmering sliver of the Mediterranean off down below.

“But why does Allessandro think something is going to happen today?”

Portillo shrugged. He didn’t believe anything would happen today, but it was a nice day for standing outside.

“Why don’t we have a real plan for defending the estate?” Pincay demanded in a whisper. “He’s got us scattered all over the place.”

“I don’t know,” murmured Portillo. The only bad thing about today was spending it with Pincay, who refused to keep his jaw from flapping.

“We’re sitting ducks.”

“You are not worthy of being called a duck,” said a new voice.

By the time Portillo looked up, the owner of the new voice had silenced the voice of Pincay permanently. The throat had been cut most of the way through, including the spinal column, so that Pincay’s skull flopped backward on a skin flap and the back of his head hit between his shoulder blades. The exposed neck column was a spurting fountain of blood until the corpse collapsed amid a pair of jade trees.

“A duck,” explained the killer, “has value. You do not.”

The old man slashed at him so fast Portillo never saw the knife, but he saw his own severed hand jump into the grass still holding the detached bayonet.

“Poke,” said someone else entirely, and at that moment Portillo felt the unbelievable sensation of a steel spike penetrating his skull case and driving deep into his brain tissue. He heard and felt the squish deep between his ears and then the lights went out.

Remo leaned the one-armed corpse against the wall and whacked his knees into position just hard enough to fracture the bone and jam them there. With a little creative balancing he managed to get the dead man to stand where he was, head against the building to hide the drain hole Remo put there.

Franco was very contemplative for a hit man. He was intelligent, but not the kind of intelligent that turned him into a brilliant student. He was more the kind of man who pondered life and nature and even ethical questions. He could have been a philosopher if not for all the school that a fully licensed and accredited philosopher required.

So instead he killed people. Being a philosopher, he pondered deeply the ethics of murder, especially the innocent victims. It was always easy to shrug off annihilating a rival in the drug business, but a lot harder to come up with a rationale for killing, say, the pretty young teacher who kept taking the drugs away from her fourteen-year-old students who just happened to be dealers for Franco’s boss. So after he killed her, which was after he did other things to her, Franco went into a long period of contemplation. At breakfast the next morning, after he was reading about the grisly murder in the paper, he happened to turn to the television listings and, like a message from heaven, his answer came to him.

Conan the Barbarian was on. Not the cartoon show, but the original Schwarzenegger masterpiece, which did suffer somewhat when it was dubbed in Spanish using the same actor who also did the voice for the dubbed Urkel. But it wasn’t Ahnuld that Franco remembered from the movie; it was the philosophy that was presented as the theme at the beginning of the movie. “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” said the badly photographed Spanish cue card at the movie’s beginning.

So, killing someone was a way of making them stronger, right?

So it followed that killing someone was beneficial for all mankind because it strengthened the human race as a whole by increasing the vitality of the pool of human beings. Obviously, anybody Franco tried to kill but couldn’t kill was strong enough that they deserved to keep living. Not that Franco had ever failed to completely murder anyone when he tried to, but it might happen someday.

His conscience entirely eased, he’d moved on to a stellar career as one of the most reliable and effective killers on the entire Iberian Peninsula.

“I’m good at my job because I love my work,” he would tell his prospective employers. “I love my work because I know I am benefiting all of mankind.”

Even the crime bosses of Spain didn’t buy into that, but who cared when he did such a great job?

Franco was now attached to the Cote organization, serving as a security consultant and keeping himself sharp with the occasional hit.