Sleeping with the Fish

1:15 am

            Johnny took point and led us through the warehouse in the meat packing district. Unfortunately for Harold, it was a fish packing warehouse and all those dead eyes stared at him like he was the one who had caught them and taken them from their homes. Harold had a thing about fish, a thing that made him uneasy. Their smell made him want to puke. Their sheen made him shiver all over like a ghost had passed through him. But their eyes, those eyes just reminded him of all those people he had killed.

            They had those glass eyes, those dead eyes that were soulless and devoid of personality. They held no emotions and those were the eyes of the people he had killed. Sure, they all had life in them before he had killed them, but it was their look afterwards that disturbed him, that still disturbs him. Harold can’t look at a person he has killed after he has killed them; he does his job and leaves as fast as he can. He doesn’t take pleasure in it, it’s just work. It’s just like the work him and Johnny are about to do, just like it.

1:45 am

            It took five minutes to chase little Georgie through the warehouse, and another ten to beat him senseless so that it was easier to tie him to a nearby chair. Harold ran back to the car to get the supplies. He was strong enough to carry it all himself, and it’s not like he wouldn’t have volunteered to go back to the car either. He would rather get fresh sea air than stay in that stuffy fish filled warehouse. But even then he couldn’t get Johnny’s kicks out of his mind. Johnny had some strange rituals he liked to perform on his victims, and those little fetishes made Harold sick to his stomach. It was bad enough that they were killers, but to actually take joy in the work? It made Harold look down the barrel of his shotgun every morning and wonder what it would be like in Hell that day.

            As Harold made his way back with the supplies, he could hear little Georgie screaming and he could hear Johnny laughing in a sick pleasure that made Harold sure that Hell would have been a good place to be at that moment.

3:00 am

            Johnny was sputtering and spewing curse words left and right. Harold’s face was set in stone as he lowered the bleeding, broken, middle-aged man into the burning cold of the sea below. Little Georgie shivered in the back of the backseat of the rusted blue 1984 chevy caprice. Harold had given him his coat and the kid looked like he belonged in the movie “The Thing”. Poor kid was battered and frozen from having been tossed around in the freezer. But Harold supposed that was the kid’s fault for hiding there.

            The cement hadn’t really hardened around Johnny’s legs. It was still a bit wet and Harold was sure that Johnny could get out of it if he kicked hard enough. Harold prayed that he wouldn’t kick hard enough. Now, either God wasn’t on Harold’s side, or he just didn’t pray hard enough, because Johnny got his legs free. He kicked against the wall and tugged at the ropes binding his arms, just another thing that Harold prayed would hold that didn’t. Johnny tried to fight his way back up the wall while Harold tried to lower more rope down.

            The rope had been tangled around his legs because he was freaking out over having betrayed Big Mitch, their boss. He should be lowering the kid down into the sea, not Johnny. That’s what Harold should be doing, but he snapped and freaked and now he had Johnny rising up to kill both him and the kid. The steam coming out of Johnny’s mouth, combined with the hellfire in the man’s eyes was enough for Harold to lose his grip on the rope. Thus, dropping Johnny into the sea, and dragging Harold along for the ride.

6:15 am

            Little Georgie was found by some fishermen. He had fallen asleep in the chevy and some cops were called. He told the cops his story and he was sent home to his parents. It seemed that Little Georgie would make his court date after all. Harold and Johnny slept with the fishes after that night, and Harold most likely thought, at the end, that it was definitely better seeing those dead eyes around him that watching the lights go out of his victims eyes.