Free Don't Order Dog by C. T. Wente

band around it before shoving it into his backpack. He stood up from the barstool and slowly stretched his arms over his head and yawned, enjoying the feeling of his tensed muscles as he wrung the exhaustion from his body. He then glanced at his watch.
    2:42 a.m.
    Six hours working on the package. Six hours straight. No piss breaks, no smoke breaks, no fifteen-minute porn channel jerk-off breaks. Six hours of calm-handed, clear-eyed, mind-focused, dick-flaccid attention. Some in his profession might call this heroic. Most would call it insane, but in an awed, reverential, brilliant sort of way, like Leo standing tirelessly in the dining hall of the Santa Maria delle Grazie while he toiled away at The Last Supper for hours at a time. Dublin would call him feckin’ daft. But then, Dublin was a selfish corpulent prick.
    The package itself sat next to him in the chair at the kitchen bar, just inches away. He examined it with a critical eye and smiled. It was an inanimate mass of subtle brilliance. Then again, there was nothing subtle about the way the package itself looked. Were a stranger to mistakenly walk in to suite 805 at this moment, one look at the object planted on the expensive, high-backed leather barstool would leave them suspended in the kind of paralyzing fear that usually starts with soft spoken gibberish, ignites into involuntary shaking, and concludes with bowel-releasing spasms. It was the kind of sight that would immediately tell them that the small little corner of the world they just happened to walk into was undoubtedly the worst mistake of their lives; producing that gut feeling that this tiny circle on the map, and every unfortunate thing inside it, were about to be fully and irrevocably fucked.
    Luckily, he’d never had that happen.
    He walked over to the window and stared down into the dark and nearly deserted streets of the city. Market day had long since ended, taking with it the usual teeming crowds. The service gate of the hotel stood directly beneath him, brightly illuminated by a high row of sodium lights that painted the seated, half-slumbering security guards in a pasty shade of jaundice yellow. Just outside of the tall, razor-wire-topped security wall stood a motley collection of rogue-looking boys intensely preoccupied with smoking cigarettes and staring into the night. He watched for several minutes, curious why the boys fidgeted nervously, until the flickering light of a match from the darkness of the opposite street corner faintly illuminated a large gang of young men; their dark faces fixed menacingly on the boys along the fence. The scene stirred another old childhood memory in him – a warm summer day at a nameless lake, his small figure standing along the shore, watching silvery bands of panicked minnows schooling in the shallows as larger fish flashed just beyond in the murky depths.
    The predators wait patiently for their prey.
    He walked back to the kitchen and picked up the folder on the counter, flipping quickly through the instructions and documents given to him by the men in Al Jubail. He paused on a page containing several images of a short, thin older man with deep-set dark eyes and a slight build, unknowingly taken from various angles, revealing his facial features in a variety of expressions– laughing, serious, aggravated, and even a photo where the man appeared to be shocked– or terrified. Across the top of the page was a quickly scrawled “#1” written in heavy permanent marker and circled. He lingered on the last photo before glancing up at the package, then quietly closed the folder and tucked it into his backpack.
    He was done. Installation complete.
    He stumbled into the living room and fell onto the wide leather couch, rubbing his knuckles into his closed eyes for a moment before grabbing his cell phone and texting a brief message.
    Batter Up.
    He tossed the cell phone onto the coffee table and sank into the soft cushions. The click of the entry door’s