Chapter 19

19

Shaw swung before the target could blink. He caught him flush in the side of the throat just below his left ear with a full inside forearm and the sudden club-like blow smashed perfectly into Emilio's carotid artery, immediately stunning him.

Stepping forward Shaw seized his left wrist in a steel grip and spun him around. As he did this, he slipped his other arm in under Emilio's chin and when his elbow was snug against his throat, Shaw hauled back with everything he had.

Emilio shrieked and tried to throw him as the crushing vise of muscle and bone cut off his oxygen. But Shaw cinched down harder and swung them both around in a nimble pirouette, bashing Emilio's face off the back of the front door.

That had calmed him down some, Shaw thought, as he saw twin rivers of blood begin to stream copiously from Emilio's nostrils. Shaw dug down and squeezed even harder on his windpipe. A second later, he felt Emilio's knees begin to buckle even more.

"That's it. Don't fight it, buddy. It's so much better when you just go along," he urged in a calm, soothing voice in Emilio's ear.

It took three minutes in all for Emilio to go deadweight on him, but Shaw kept up two minutes more on his carotid to make sure.

He gently laid the dead man down on his front hall floor and went into the kitchen. He peeled free some paper towels by the sink and mopped at the sweat on his face and came back out.

The bag of weed he took from the inside pocket of his motorcycle jacket was several ounces. He tore it open and sprinkled some of the rank-smelling stuff in the hall toward the living room and some in the kitchen. He remembered that in the kitchen by the sink was a butcher's knife and he went in and took it off the sticky plastic cutting board.

He went back into the hall and tossed the knife by the door. Then he knelt and pressed Emilio's fingerprints on the plastic of the weed bag before he tucked it underneath him. He didn't bother pressing his fingers on the knife handle since they were already on there.

The play was a botched robbery.

Emilio's record included some drug busts when he was in his teens. So presumably, Emilio was selling some weed and things got out of hand. Maybe pulled a knife and someone got the best of him and then ran panicked away. Happened all the time. Especially in a neighborhood like this one.

What was perfect was the lack of security cameras in the shit-box building, Shaw thought. Cops wouldn't have a clue. As if they ever did.

Anything else? Shaw thought, tapping at his ski-masked chin with a leather-gloved finger as he surveyed his work.

Shaw went into the living room where the TV was playing. On the screen some blonde was getting onto a bush plane.

Netflix and chill , he thought. Emilio would be chilling all right. To room temperature.

He found Emilio's phone on the arm of the recliner and pocketed it. That would stump the cops even further. Make them think the killer was known to Emilio so they took his phone.

Arriving back at the front door, he looked down at Emilio again. What the simple enough, seemingly knockaround dude had done to warrant a high-dollar death sentence, he wasn't sure. They already had a thick jacket on him from multiple hours of previous surveillance which was why he knew to pick him up from his job at Hunts Point.

It must have been something though. For a red ball, Shaw earned two hundred K.

He was really proud of his first contact, he thought as he stared down at the body some more. No thought, straight to grip through instinct through flow. It had been easy. Almost no effort, no exertion. He had just placed himself in the right space, had understood without thought how to get his body there and it was over.

There was an inevitability to it, Shaw thought with a nod. Emilio had felt it, too, just given himself over.

Shaw rolled his neck to get the kinks out.

What separated the good from the great like him was simple really.

"Practice, practice, practice," Shaw mumbled as he finally reached for the doorknob to get the hell out of there.