Free Diary of an Assassin by Victor Methos Page B

test, and Gustav pretended to break the marker he was using. The doctor, not thinking, gave him a pencil. You should have seen what Gustav did to him. He lost both eyes.”
    “If he’s that dangerous , how did he get out?”
    Nicolas shrugged. “Who knows how things really work? L’oublier, que pouvez-vous faire?”
    Gy threw the cash up in the air and caught it again. “See you tomorrow.”
    Nicolas nodded and returned to what he was doing.
    As Gy drove through the streets of Paris, he thought he would stop and buy his wife a box of artisan chocolate from Patrick Roger, her favorite chocolatier. The traffic was terrible , and he called to tell her he was going to be late. He left a message and made his way to the store.
    The store was crowded, as it always was, and they were giving away samples of a new lemon chocolate. Gy took one and loved it. He ordered a box of ten and paid with the cash Nicolas had given him. Halfway out of the store, he turned around and bought another three for the ride home.
    The night air was cool and the sky was black except for a slit of moon. Gy never gazed up to the sky in wonder. He was worried about practicalities, and theory never interested him. In school, his favorite subject was car mechanics and he had no interest in subjects like literature or mathematics. He was happy in his little corner of the world, with a guaranteed paycheck, four weeks of vacation a year, and a good retirement.
    Not to mention the money that would trickle in every month from the inmates. Pay ment for protection or for a blind eye to drug activities was something that had always occurred and he felt no guilt over being a part of it. One time, however, a man had been killed on his watch because he had been paid to be elsewhere. He had thought it was for drug business, but instead a group of inmates had stabbed a man to death. For that he felt some guilt, but assured that the man was scum, he conceded that he deserved to die.
    Gy passed the small farm that neighbored his home and glanced inside before pulling into his driveway. He had no garage but it didn’t matter, as it rarely snowed. He took his chocolates and his cash and got out.
    As he walked along his driveway to the moderately sized home, he saw something out of the corner of his eye on the sidewalk. It was a pinpoint of red in the darkness, and it would go up and burn bright and then lower and grow dim. It was a cigarette.
    Gy pulled out the knife he kept with him and put the chocolate and the money down on the steps of his porch. He walked over to the man, who was clearly standing on his property. As he neared, he could make out his face in the moonlight.
    “You!” he spit.
    “Oui ,” Gustav said, “me. How are you, Gy?”
    “I’m going to cut your balls off and then call the police and have you thrown back into your hole. We’re going to have some fun there, you and I.”
    “I don’t know if you’ll want to do that. You may want to try to stop the bleeding while you can.”
    “What bleeding?”
    Gustav smiled and Gy’s eyes went wide. “No!”
    Gy turned and ran for the house. He stood at the doorway and saw what had occurred inside. Dropping to his knees, he began to weep.
    He screamed and jumped up. He sprinted at Gustav, tears running down his cheeks. He swung with the knife, aiming directly for the throat. Gustav stepped out of the way as if he were a child avoiding a bee. He jabbed his fingers into Gy’s throat and then slammed his fist into his temple before striking full force into the nerve near the armpit. Gy’s arm went dead as Gustav swept his legs out and stood over him.
    “I thought about this day a lot, Gy, my friend. I thought: would it be better to kill you or simply let you live with the death of your family? I decided it would be better to let you live. I think you will destroy yourself with alcohol and prostitutes and perhaps even kill yourself when you realize truly what you’ve lost. So it is, as the Americans