Short Story: The Cleaner

Short Story: The Cleaner

The car crawled up the darkened driveway. I stopped just short of the house, switched off the engine and sat there listening to the steady tick-tick of the metal cooling in the night air.

I had the lock picked in seconds, feeling the tumblers click into place through my latex gloves. I moved through the hallway and up the stairs, careful to avoid potential trip hazards. The bedroom was at the end of the landing with its door lying half-open. I nudged it with my elbow and waited for a moment, assessing the room. A humped shape lay curled on one side of the double bed. I paused to check the safety on my silenced pistol before creeping over and pulling back the duvet. I leaned down, and pressed a finger behind the sleeping man’s ear.

‘Time to wake up,’ I whispered.

My gloved hand clamped over his nose and mouth. His wide eyes darted around until they finally fixed on the gun. Now that I had his full attention, I spoke again.

‘I’m going to take my hand away in a second and when I do I don’t want you to make a sound. Understand?’

He nodded. I could hear him gasp for air as the glove came away from his mouth.

‘Let’s go downstairs. We have a few things to talk about.

I sat him down at the kitchen table and brought him a drink. A faint smell of dinner still lingered.

‘Here you go John, get that down you – it will help wash the taste of these out of your mouth.’ I waved a gloved hand at him.

‘How do you know my name?’

‘I know lots of things but that’s not important,’ I said. ‘What is important is that you’ve been telling tales out of school and certain mutual acquaintances of ours want you to stop before the damage you’ve caused gets any worse.’

‘So that’s what this is about?’ He shook his head. ‘People have a right to know when their government is lying to them,’ he said. There was a defiant note in his voice.

I clapped softly and smiled.

‘Spoken like a true idealist. Unfortunately, the truth is people out there don’t give a shit. As long as they have their television, their mobile phones and their celebrity gossip 99% of them wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire in the middle of Oxford Circus.’

He face crumpled. ‘Who are you?’

‘Let’s just say I’m a cleaner, John. I take care of unfortunate messes.’

‘And I’m the unfortunate mess, I take it?’

‘Correct.’

‘If you’re trying to put the frighteners on me you’re doing a bloody good job.’ He laughed a little. I smiled back at him.

Suddenly we were both chuckling away like a couple of mates enjoying a bit of banter in the pub. I let him go on for a few seconds then I let the smile fall from my lips.

‘I’m not here to frighten you John. We’re well past that stage.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re about to undergo a terrible attack of conscience and decide that the best way to redeem yourself is to take matters into your own hands.’

I put the gun down within easy reach and took a piece of paper from my inside pocket and passed it to him.

‘You can’t be serious,’ he said as he scanned through it.

‘I assure you I am.’

‘Nobody will believe it’s from me - nobody types their suicide note.’

‘That’s why you’re going to copy it out in your own writing,’ I said. I felt like a teacher explaining things to a particularly dull student.

‘What if I refuse?’ He tossed the letter onto the table.

I picked up the gun. ‘Then I’ll have to shoot you in the face and your pretty daughter will have to come down to the morgue to identify what’s left. I’ll also make sure that these are posted to the right people in the tabloids.’ I tossed the surveillance pictures down on the table. ‘Funny, I wouldn’t have pegged you as having a thing for red heads.’

He snatched up the pictures. I could see the colour draining from his face as he looked at them.

‘You bastard.’

‘I’m just a little cog in the big machine, John - it’s nothing personal, but if you want your little girl to see her daddy dining on the muff of some trollop that’s your decision.’ I looked at the pictures. ‘Tsk, you’d think a man on your wages could afford a better class of tart.’

He lunged at me. I shifted my chair out of his path and left him floundering on the floor. By the time he was able to turn and face me again I had my gun held at his head. You could see the angry red circle forming around where the silencer touched his shiny forehead.

He stared at me, his jaw muscles clenching and unclenching. I held out the pen. ‘Be a good boy and finish your letter. Confession is good for the soul.’

He started to write, the pen scratching out his last words.

‘One day it will be your turn,’ he said. ‘They’ll clean you up one day too. I’m sorry I won’t be there to see it.’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘We all have to die some day.’

My first job had been a lot different.

She had been a secretary to a top Civil Servant. She’d got wind of a bit of scandal in the corridors of power too juicy not to leak and one of the broadsheets had paid her to stay in a hotel to keep her away from the competition. I was supposed to go in and make it look like a pills and booze overdose.

Unfortunately, she had come out the shower before I had finished spiking her drink.

I shot her.

It sounds simple but those three little words don’t tell you about the look on her face when she saw the gun or the way her eyes widened beneath the lids until they were nearly all whites. She had tried to grab the gun and I shot her again in the stomach - pure reflex action, angry that I was screwing things up. She lay groaning and clutching at her midriff. Little hot splashes of her blood landed on my face, burning my skin.

I wrapped her body up in a shower curtain so I could dump her somewhere. I had caught sight of myself in the mirror. The blood had stood out as livid splotches on the pasty canvas of my face. The smell of burnt fabric from her dressing gown mingled with the gun smoke.

It had gotten a lot easier after that.

The garage door squealed and creaked in the stillness. I laid out an old bit of tarpaulin along the ground to block the gap at the bottom. With my ear against the cool metal, I could hear the car engine quietly purring away. If I strained, I could just about make out John yelling. The more he yelled the more carbon monoxide he was inhaling.

I went back inside the house to finish the job.

The house was burning. The heat from the flames danced across my face. It reminded me of hours spent sat in front of the coal fire in my granny’s front room. I could see the eager tongues of flames begin to creep along the blackened edges of the windows and reach out to taste the night air. There was a loud crack and the roof began to sag in the middle. I had left the dossier and the pictures in the kitchen. Like John, they had outlived their usefulness. By morning there would only be a smouldering, blackened shell filled with ash.

I smiled. I loved to watch things burn.

I began to walk the few short steps to my car, my feet crunching gravel.

The engine coughed quietly into life. The dials and gauges looked like alien eyes staring back at me in the dark.

As I drove away, I looked at the burning house in the rear-view mirror one last time. The flames lighting up the windows and doorway reminded me of a grinning Halloween lantern.

A few miles down the road, I stopped by a post box I had passed and popped John’s letter through the slot.

‘One day it will be your turn.’

I drove off into what was left of the night.