We’re successful at what we do because of our special interests. Mine: revenge and murder. Also dinosaurs, but that doesn’t help with the murder so much.
Some blood got on a book across the room. It’s an illustrated book about the tyrannosaurus. In most cases, if we get blood on something, I burn it or Carlos sanitizes it somehow. In this case, I wipe it clean and put it in Carlos’s bag with the bloody sheet.
Gary drives us because aside from murder his special interest is cars. He’s seen each of the movies in the Pixar Cars franchise so many times that he stims by reciting lines of dialogue between Lightning McQueen and Mater. “He won three piston cups,” he says as I hop into the car next to him. Then he responds in his attempt at a hillbilly drawl, “He did what in his cup?” He takes his foot off the brake, and we begin to move.
Carlos flies into the back seat as we’re rolling. His special interest is sanitation, which makes him essential for clean-up, but also means he takes forever after a kill unless we threaten to leave his ass. That might sound like OCD, his interest in cleanliness, but it’s not. He’s not into it because he’s afraid of the consequences of poor hygiene. He’s into it because he loves it. The shit brings him joy. And in addition to making people pay for the shit they’ve done to other people like us, that’s what I’m about – bringing joy.
Sometimes joy comes from the ritual of wiping blood off cheap linoleum and making sure none of your dandruff fell on a target after you slit their throat, but sometimes it comes from knowing the CEO that discriminated against someone because of their learning disability isn’t going to do the same thing to anybody else, ever.
The next morning, I get up with the sun, stretch, go use the bathroom, and greet my terrier mix, Charlie, who rolls on his back in a plea for a belly rub. It’s an essential part of his morning routine, and obliging him is part of mine. He knows last night went off without a hitch because he would smell my stress otherwise and would have slept up against me with his head in my ribs. Instead, he slept in his own bed with his head on his stuffed rabbit.
I drink a glass of water, eat a banana and a few nuts, and take my medications for my many comorbidities – asthma, high blood pressure, depression, attention deficit disorder, anxiety, anemia, and vitamin D deficiency. Some day a doctor will find the physiological relationship between these comorbidities and the autism spectrum, but I will always maintain that the cause is living in a world not meant for us.
I put Charlie’s harness on. It says he’s an emotional support dog. When we leave the house we have to make a right because there is a German Shepard that lives to the left that once hopped the fence and chased us home. Charlie resists whenever I try to go that way and I’m not going to force him into a situation he’s not comfortable with. I believe I understand his fears and past hurts more than anyone will ever understand mine.
We walk a few blocks to a convenience store where I make my coffee and wait in line. The staff know us and pet Charlie. I nod. I would be even less social if not for him. I hear someone towards the back of the line say, “I hear anybody can get one of those support dogs these days. I guess you don’t even need to be disabled.”
I turn to a woman beside me. She’s wearing medical scrubs and has her wallet in one hand and an energy drink in the other. I make quick eye contact with her and I say, “You know what I hear?”
She tilts her head like Charlie does when I say a word he recognizes like “park,” or “treat.” I don’t think she’s interested in morning conversation. “I hear anybody can pretend they know what they’re talking about, even if they’re a fucking moron.”
Let the asshole say something to me, I think. I’ll rip his heart out and show it to his children. But I think the tone of my voice tells him all he needs to know about me, because I don’t hear a response.
We continue on our walk and by the time we’ve reached Charlie’s favorite park I’ve finished my coffee. I’m tapping the beat to Black Sabbath’s “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” against my thigh and singing the lyrics. “The people who have crippled you, you want to see them burn.” Tell me about it, Ozzy. Fucking tell me about it.
At the park, I check the encrypted messages on my phone and tell the client the job is done. They thank me and tell me the remainder of the payment is on its way.
I have another message, a request. Normally, I wouldn’t ask my team to do a job so soon after one finished, but this request bounces off me like a ball down some endless cavern. It resonates with memories I’ve tried to bury, the shadows of which inspired my career of violence for hire.
Charlie sniffs around the park while I message Gary and Carlos. They agree to the job when I explain the background. They also agree to giving this person a discount, even though I left some of the more brutal details out. They do need to sleep, after all. But I knew they would go for it, even the made for TV version, because their pasts are like mine – abandoned fields filled with unmarked and easily triggered landmines waiting for reasons to blow and claim as many victims as possible.
I head towards the park exit, but Charlie lingers, sniffing for animals. I let him search for foxes as long as he doesn’t hurt anything or himself. There are concrete tubes left out by the public works department where he frequently scares off rodents. I allow him to be a dog as much as I can because anything else would be suppressing who he is. There’s nothing today, so we keep walking.
As we walk home, we pass a crowded bus stop filled with people on their way to work. I look the other way, allowing Charlie to guide me as I shake my hand in beat with Sabbath again. I used to commute into the city via bus before I opted for permanent disability. After too many meltdowns and too many threats to fellow passengers making too much noise, I decided I needed to spend more time at home where it was quiet and safe.
Two blocks down, we pass a school bus stop. There is a group of kids huddled together talking and on the other side of the street there is a kid standing by himself. He has a blonde crew cut and the rest of him is all legs. He’s crossing and uncrossing his fingers, standing on his toes, and talking to himself. I know what he has even if his teachers, his parents, and his doctors don’t. I see a woman watching anxiously from a nearby car and assume from her blonde hair and facial structure that she is the boy’s mother. I’m grateful he has her, more than I had, but I know that still won’t be enough to make his life easy.
At home, I read through the book I stole on our last job. It’s out-dated, so it says large dinosaurs had two brains, the second one being in their hips somewhere. Despite my interest in dinosaurs, I’d only learned this was an error recently. It’s not that I abandoned my childhood passion only to rediscover it in middle-age. It’s that after the fifth grade I was forbidden from reading about them, told it was a childish interest and that I needed to grow up.
Carlos lectured me about taking the book. “You like it so much,” he said, “I will buy you a copy.” I burn the book in a trash can on the side of my house while Charlie sniffs in the backyard. I message Carlos and tell him, add that if he really wants to get me a book he can get something with updated science. Knowing Carlos, he probably will.
We met in a support group for newly diagnosed adult autistics, me, Gary, and Carlos. None of us knew we were on the spectrum until our forties. We bonded over shared experiences: friendships ending with no explanation; bullying; job losses, also with no explanation; public meltdowns and the resulting humiliation; and enough abuse to fill a volume of encyclopedias. We came to the collective realization that we would never get over what we had been through. We would never heal.
The closest thing we would ever get would be the satisfaction that came from making people pay for what they’d done and from stopping them from doing it to others. “It would be like pulling weeds from a garden,” I told them both one night while we sat in Gary’s basement. “You have to do it to let the flowers grow.”
And this latest weed would be a joy to rip from the earth. I had read about the case before we landed the job – 30 years ago a non-verbal autistic kid had been beaten habitually by his foster parents. They were suing the state now, but no criminal charges could be brought against the couple given the time that had passed.
Sometimes there are voices in my head that tell me what I do is wrong. I tell them what abuse does to a person’s brain, how the connections become wired in such a way that they can’t make good decisions or feel safe. I tell them how a person that endured that amount of abuse is likely to have trouble in relationships for the rest of their lives because they can’t trust anyone and don’t know what normal is. Never will.
I spend much of the next week preparing for the job. I have a heavy bag in my basement I use to practice my punches, kicks, knees, and elbows. Most jobs never come to fights though. I try to end them fast with a knife through the throat and out the back of the neck, cutting the airway and severing the spinal cord. I do my best to avoid the carotid arteries since there are few things Carlos hates more than washing arterial spray off our clothes and gear.
The client sent a description of the house layout. They told us the best entrance would be in the back where there was a sliding glass door with a weak lock from foster kids sneaking in and out for decades. They said the guy never fixed it because he spent the money he got from the state on horse bets.
Aside from loving cars, Gary’s also a tech wizard. The night of the job, he hacks the local internet providers so the wifi in the target’s neighborhood goes down and nobody’s ring camera can record us. Just in case somebody has a camera that records to the device directly, he picks us up in a beater van with no plates and the VIN number filed off.
He parks out front, leaves it running and in drive. Carlos and I put on our ski masks and put cloth over our boots. We hop out the back and make sure the doors close gently and don’t latch. Attached to my belt are knives of varying sizes and bear spray. Gary has a stringbag carrying a bed sheet, bleach wipes, and a battery-operated small vacuum in case things get messy.
We run to the side of the house. I scale the fence and wait on the other side. I can tell by how long it takes Carlos to get over that he hasn’t been working out. I shake my head and we run to the back door. I give it a hard yank and it pops open just like it is supposed to.
I pray the rest of the job will go down just as easily.
We make it to the master bedroom. I pause. I slow my breathing. The hunting knife is in my hand. Carlos turns the knob.
A bed in the center of the room. A man in the center of the bed. He’s naked aside from the CPAP machine attached via full face mask. Carlos tosses the sheet on him. I lift the knife in the air, grip it with two hands, and plunge it down. There is a brief spasm of struggle. The sheet slowly changes color. The CPAP machine is still humming and pumping air.
There is a shuffling sound somewhere. I see double doors, a closet. Something scrapes one of the doors and they bulge open, the end of a rifle pops out. I tell Carlos to get down. Instead of doing what I tell him, he turns his head to look at me and gets shot in the face.
On the floor, I watch Carlos crumple to the ground and hear a woman’s voice. “I told that dumbshit you fuckers would be coming for us.”
I’m under the bed army crawling my way to her. She’s too slow to point the barrel at me when I’m in her face and I block it with my left forearm. She fires into sheetrock and I slice her neck. Red sprays me and Carlos’s dead body. “I’m sorry,” I tell him, and I’m out of the back door, over the fence, and into Gary’s van.
We’re burning the van somewhere in a swamp and it hasn’t hit me that we lost Carlos. Logically, I get it. I know he won’t message me back tomorrow. I know he’ll never be able to get me that dinosaur book. But, emotionally, I don’t feel it.
People often say those of us on the autism spectrum don’t feel empathy, but they are very, very wrong. Some of us have trouble showing it. Me, I take a long time to process. I might not feel Carlos’s loss immediately, but trust me, I’m going to feel it.
And when I do, will I decide that what I do isn’t worth it? I don’t know.
The next morning, I walk Charlie. Just like always. Either I stick to my routine or I disintegrate.
When we reach the school bus stop, I don’t see the mother in her car watching her son. I see the other kids circled around the boy with the blonde crew cut. Another kid throws an empty soda can at him and it bounces off his head. I yell and tell the other kids to leave him alone. Charlie emulates me with barks and they run away.
“You’re going to have to learn to defend yourself,” I say to the kid, “because the rest of your life is going to be a fight.”
Stanton McCaffery is a writer, editor, publisher, and nonprofit communications professional from Central New Jersey. His short fiction has appeared in Dark Yonder, Mystery Tribune, Shotgun Honey, Mystery Magazine, and Guilty. His story, “Will I See The Birds When I Am Gone,” appears in the Best American Mystery and Suspense, 2024, edited by SA Cosby and Steph Cha. Under his real name, he is the Editor-in-Chief for Rock and a Hard Place Press. He has published two novel, Into The Ocean, and Neighborhood of Dead Ends.