Fillius Glint

2. The Gun That Was Probably Real

Chapter 2

The Gun That Was Probably Real

Somewhere in a Tenth-Tier Universe…

LuizI wasn’t an addict.

I sat on my sofa and took a puff from the roll at my fingertips, bluish-gray smoke trailing off the end in anfractuous wisps. Keesh helped me unwind and took the edge off of life. I only used it on super shitty days, and today had been the shittiest. The stocks had tanked, my girlfriend had broken up with me, and my car was dead. Today was a keesh kind of day.

After another hit, I mellowed out, forgetting about my problems and not caring about the drug’s side-effects: killer hangovers and vivid hallucinations. The trips weren’t that bad; most of the apparitions were only visual except for one— the spiders. They always made physical contact, crawling all over my skin and digging through my hair with anarchic precision.

The doorbell buzzed, and I waded toward it in slow motion. Thankfully, there weren’t any ghost bugs on me now. Thinking about them made my face itch, but my visitor pressed a .45 pistol into my ribs before I could scratch. The pressure on my chest where the barrel rested didn’t wiggle, sprout fangs, or burst into miniature unicorns. I may have been tripping balls, but I was pretty sure the gun was real.

The man behind the gun had a melting wax face and glowing red eyes. He was also my newest client. The keesh had rendered his features in phantasmagoric detail, but I recognized him by the scent of his cologne: a gentle musk mixed with cinnamon. He leaned in close, his breath spewing cauliflower clouds all over my face.

“Mr. Alvarez,” he hissed at me, “I really would hate to cause a scene. So why don’t you invite me inside like a good fellow?” My heart hammered against my lungs and squeezed a tight knot of air up my throat. Panic, panic, panic. But I fought my base instincts and opened the door to my apartment a little wider. I wasn’t about to argue with a man holding a gun, especially someone associated with The Business.

“Much better.” Mr. Victor holstered the weapon and entered the main room, the heels of his leather shoes clicking on the hardwood floor with every step. Five black tails flowed underneath his gray suit jacket as I shut the door behind him. I felt underdressed in my Quick Money t-shirt and checkered boxers. How unprofessional of me. Speaking of which, I hid the burning blunt behind my back. Maybe he hadn’t noticed.

His eyes swept across the space, narrowing at the coffee table littered with drug paraphernalia and widening at the life-sized sculptures in every corner. He gestured at the latter. “Is this your work?”

“Look, if you’re here about the deal we had—”

Mr. Victor held up a hand to silence me. “Do stay on topic, Mr. Alvarez.”

I shook my head to the beat of his swishing tails. “I only dabble in art. A friend of mine made the sculptures.” My ex-girlfriend, to be exact.

Mr. Victor nodded and continued his tour of the room, tails clacking against each other. They were getting on my nerves. I knew the extra appendages weren’t real, but I couldn’t blink them away like I could with most other hallucinations. Instead, the tails changed color with every blink: teal, gold, red. I shook my head again, picturing what my client really looked like. He was a scarecrow man with a wide, knobby forehead, a wart by his nose, and skin like pickled white yams, but he was completely human. (Not that I had a problem with non-humans. Especially Crenosiyos— their food was delicious.) Mr. Victor looked like he could be taken down by a toddler’s swift kick, but I knew better. He was bad news. I should never have taken the deal.

Last week, he had stridden into my office and caught me by surprise: my feet propped up on the desk, tennis ball whizzing toward the wall where I had been bouncing it for the past half hour. He didn’t even knock, didn’t bother announcing himself as I scrambled to my feet and let the tennis ball bounce itself into a corner. Straightening my suit and tie, I held out my hand for an introduction. He handed me a business card, instead. It read:

Richard Victor

Official Representative of

The Business

I sat back down, mouth agape.

Mr. Victor looked amused. “That is most people’s response upon meeting me for the first time. Quite entertaining.” He lowered himself into the seat across from me. “Once you’ve recovered from the shock, I have a business proposition for you.” And did he ever. The Business would pay me double my usual commission if I could increase their investments by ten percent in one week. At the time, markets had been on an upswing with no signs of stopping. It seemed like easy money— how could I say no? We shook on it, and he left. But before I could retrieve my tennis ball for victory bouncing, there was a hesitant knock on the door.

It was my boss, Franco. Pasty by nature, he looked paler than normal. He wrung his hands and dabbed at the sweat on his balding forehead as he entered my office.

“Wh-what exactly did you tell him?”

I had never seen him this spooked. Franco Ramirez was one of the most stoic, cutthroat investors I knew. My mouth went dry. “He wants me to set up a discretionary account and increase their investment by ten percent by the end of the week. The markets are healthy, so it’s not like it’s a big ask.” I wiped my palms on my trousers.

Franco dabbed. “Sure, markets are good now, but there’s no guarantee they’ll stay that way. Doing business with … well, The Business is bad. Very bad. What if they know something we don’t? What if they want us to fail?” He was shaking.

I picked up the tennis ball and squeezed it in my hand. “Maybe they’re just looking for a quick buck. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

“I hope you’re right.” He wiped beads of moisture from his upper lip. “Because we’re all at risk now if you fail.”

I opened a desk drawer and dropped the ball inside. “Don’t worry. I’ve got this.”

Famous last words.

Over the last week, I’d overseen a thirty percent drop in The Business’s investments. And now Mr. Victor was in my apartment. With a gun.

He stalked toward a bronze sculpture, arms clasped behind his back like a cultured museum goer. He wasn’t a short man, but the artwork dwarfed him, its sinewy curves coiling up to a massive serpentine head, claws reaching out for vengeance. The same creature was tattooed around my left forearm— carefully hidden under shirt sleeves whenever I went to work.

Donna Stek-Murray, my ex, had created the sculptures and convinced me to get ink to match a week later. She had been fascinated by the folklore of my people, drawn to the romance of our all-but-dead culture. Wealth, which I had plenty of due to my grandfather’s taco tree empire, did nothing for her. My exotic roots, however, really turned her on. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. At first, I had just been glad she believed me. Most people didn’t think I had foreign roots; they guessed I was pure Meash— thanks to my dark hair and barely brown complexion. But my grandfather was full Habindi. High cheekbones, small stature. These were his genetic gifts to me.

Donna was my physical opposite: pale, heavy-lidded eyes and buttery skin. Her non-Crenosiyo half was generic Tolt, the dominant human ethnicity on Aisaphora. According to her, the Tolt and Crenosiyo imagery were boring and overdone. She drank down the Meash and Habindi stories like fine wine. I shivered. Thinking of her now brought a hollow ache that bled through the haze of my keesh cloud. I turned my attention back to Mr. Victor.

“Guatán, if I’m not mistaken. Habindi god of war, is he not?”

Technically, it translated to “struggle,” but I nodded anyway. The blunt had smoked down to a nub and burned my fingers. I dropped it on the floor and stomped it out— with my bare feet. I hissed and danced from foot to foot until the burning in my soles cooled off.

Luckily, Mr. Victor was still facing the statue. “Quite appropriate, seeing as you and I are at war.”

I gulped. “We are?”

He simpered, and a purple gecko crawled out of his mouth, down his black silk tie, and into his crisp, gray pants. I blinked furiously as the cloth of his pants bunched and bubbled wherever the critter went.

Misreading my expression, Mr. Victor tsked. “You lost me money, Mr. Alvarez. You lost The Business money. And stealing from The Business is a declaration of war.”

I held up my hands and took a step back, wincing as my burnt foot hit the nub again. “Whoa, I didn’t steal from anybody. The markets just took a downswing. If the Grand White Mage hadn’t—”

“So, you’d like to add treason to the list?”

I swallowed. “Look, I can make you your money back, all right? Just give me another week. No, a month. We need time for the markets to recover.” I was spit-balling. I was high. I was making excellent life choices.

He drummed his fingertips on the grip of his holstered gun. “The Business does not extend mercy without collateral.”

“Collateral?”

He slinked toward me on wiry legs, stood close enough for me to take in the tang of his cologne. “All in due time. Come, Mr. Alvarez.” He grabbed me by the arm. “You simply must show me the rest of your wonderful home.” He steered me toward the first door he saw and pulled me through.

We were in my bedroom.

Mr. Victor dropped my arm; it throbbed where his fingers had been. He stepped forward and executed a slow turn, arms extended like a ballet dancer. “Some would describe a man’s bedroom as the seat of his soul: witness to his most sacred acts, his vilest sins.” He brought his arms back down to his sides. “The front rooms of a home are but a mask. They tell one how a man wishes to be seen. But his private quarters? There, a man keeps what he holds most dear.” He reached into a pocket and, in a flash of silver, withdrew a knife. Terror overtook my limbs. I instinctively backed away from him before realizing I was not the focus of his deadly intentions. Instead, he pointed the blade at the painting that hung over my bed. “The placement of this object speaks volumes, Mr. Alvarez. Placed anywhere else, it is merely a painting like any other. But here? Here, it is the first thing you see upon waking and the last thing you see before falling asleep. I do believe this will suffice, but to be on the safe side—” He stepped onto the clean linen of my bed with his dirty shoes and plodded toward the wall where the piece hung.

He was a breath away from slashing the work to shreds when I fell to my knees. “No!” I screamed, my throat raw with emotion. He stopped. Smiling, Mr. Victor pocketed his knife and eased the painting off the wall with both hands. I gasped a sigh of relief, exhaustion flooding my bones.

The force of my feelings for this painting confounded me. It wasn’t like someone had skillfully rendered the piece: it had a flat yellow background with no attempt to simulate lighting and shadow. The subjects was a stuffed bear with a bright red scarf. And on that scarf, someone had stenciled my name in dark brown letters. It was more kitsch than art. No, the painting, in and of itself, was of little value at all. The painter, however, was priceless. This small canvas was all I had left of my grandfather— the only person in my entire life who had accepted me at face value— that wasn’t related to taco trees. He’d painted the bear for me before I was born, had loved me for who I was even then.

And now, by some villainy, Mr. Victor had figured it out. He lowered himself from the bed, the painting tucked under and arm. “You have one week, Mr. Alvarez. If you do not honor our agreement within that time, this painting will suffer. I will cut it once a day for every day you are late until there is nothing left to destroy.”

I couldn’t respond. It was as if every word I’d ever known had been sucked out of me. But it wasn’t all from emotion; the drug was timing out, looping me into its warm, sleepy embrace. I tried to pull myself to my feet but stumbled back over. My body felt so damned heavy.

“I can see your drug-addled brain is in no state to continue this discussion, so I’ll let myself out.” Oh, he had noticed I was high. Mr. Victor paused in the doorway. “By the way, don’t think you can feign ignorance if you sober up and don’t remember this meeting. I will leave a note on the coffee table to preclude any such incident. Good day, Mr. Alvarez.” I didn’t respond. I couldn’t. Even my eyelids were lead weights, and I was desperate for sleep. If Mr. Victor left, I didn’t hear him go. Darkness became my world.

When I awoke, my mouth tasted like death, and there was an obnoxious crick in my neck. I had no idea why I was on the floor, but at least I had made it to the correct room before passing out. But was it the right room? My bed was here, but something about the space felt off, felt empty.

And that’s when I remembered that Donna had left me. The piles of clothes, stacks of magazines, hairbrushes, bobby pins, and makeup weren’t around anymore. All of her clutter was gone. I never thought I would miss it, but I did. Pins and needles rushed into my right forearm as I slowly sat up. I absent-mindedly rubbed some life back into my arms as I made my way to the bathroom. The least I could do was remove the dead turtle taste from my tongue. As I brushed my teeth with a lonely toothbrush, light streamed in through the window and shone over the old-fashioned claw tub to my right. Judging by the sunlight, it wasn’t morning. I rinsed my mouth and shook the cobwebs from my brain. Some dreams clung to me like memories, and some memories whispered to me like dreams. They spoke of tails, geckoes, and guns, oh my!

But how much of it had been real?

To be honest, my stomach didn’t care. It gurgled in protest and threatened to walk out and join a union if I didn’t feed it pronto. I padded with bare feet from the cool bathroom tiles to the warm wood of the hallway. My burnt soles protested the temperature change, so I tip-toed. Sunshine poured in at my back from a large window at the end of the hall and stretched my shadow out before me. The shadow grew longer with every step until it draped over one of the main room sofas and spilled over onto the clean, smooth surface of the black coffee table.

Wait. Clean?

Despite the shouting in my belly, I veered into the main room. The used rolls, crumbs, and empty baggies which usually cluttered the surface of the table were gone. In their place was a small, neat pile of unopened keesh and wrappers accompanied by a single, white piece of paper. I scooped up the page with trembling hands and went into the kitchen to make some chow. There had been something in my dreams about a note. Or had that been real? Someone had scrawled each word on the paper in a thick hand with curlicues on every tail. It looked as pompous and sure as Mr. Victor, himself. When the noodles were done, I took them into the main room with the note. With some effort, I focused on the content of the words, chewing on their message while slurping hot ramen.

You have one week, Mr. Alvarez. If The Business does not see an increase in revenues by then, your precious painting will suffer one s***h for every day you are late. Do not be late. Also, I took the time to clean the grime from your coffee table. One should have more respect for antiques, Mr. Alvarez. Think on that.

~Richard Victor

Painting? My heart skipped. I had been so distraught about Donna that I hadn’t noticed the bear was missing. Mr. Victor was holding it hostage. My stomach churned with anxiety.

One week.

That wasn’t a snarks of a lot of time. Despite my upset stomach, I downed the rest of the food and switched on the television. Stocks were particularly vulnerable now, and I needed to keep up to date on intergalactic affairs if I had any hope of recovering The Business’s investment.

A bored reporter with an asymmetrical haircut and more makeup than sense revealed that nothing had changed since I’d last checked the markets. I chewed my lower lip. At least stock prices weren’t nosediving anymore. The reporter switched from financial reports to politics.

“In the Otari System, Intergalactic Signatory planets Gobel and Karket have each declared a state of global emergency and are requesting assistance from other IS members. The Grand White Mage, head of Aisaphora’s Grand Magic Council, has pledged five trillion quadi in aid for the stricken system. This is the fourth time in the past six days our planet has responded to an extra-galactic request for aid, and groups including the Confederation of Crenosiyo Peoples and the International Church of Zorda have become wary of the impact such pledges will have on our economy.”

They had every right to be wary. Every quadi we sent to a dying planet was a quadi we might never get back. It was bad economics, but now I wondered if that was the point. Lower cash flow would stem inflation, and rock-bottom stock prices meant people would invest more on stable bets like moon-kissed salt. And who owned all of the salt-mining companies? The Grand White Mage. I snorted. Why hadn’t I seen it before?

I grabbed my tablet and opened the squirrel messenger app. There was a five-minute wait before another squirrel was available, so I grabbed a fresh sheet of paper and scribbled some instructions for my contact on the trading floor in Pungia where the markets were still open. I’d handle the Parsa markets in the morning. As I finished the note, there was a popping noise on my tablet. A pink squirrel had teleported in right on time.

“Wait a minute. Don’t move.” I scrabbled in a kitchen drawer for a spare acorn. When I returned to the living room, the squirrel was exactly where I had left it.

“Good boy,” I said, handing it the note and the acorn. The squirrel chirped as it grabbed the items and vanished with another pop.

With that taken care of, I collapsed onto the soda. My body was sore right down to my bones. A commercial come on the television: a happy couple driving down a scenic highway. I remembered Donna, the way she always insisted on riding shotgun and putting her feet up on the dash. Not wanting to remember, I rolled up some more keesh and lit up. The smoke crowded my lungs and pushed her out of my mind. Instead of obsessing over Donna, I was seized with a sudden desire to sketch something, anything. So, I went off in search of a box of coloring pencils and a sketchbook.