No More Tears In The End

“Damn, why I gotta give up all that?”

“To who?”

“Like I said, last night at a strip club in Manhattan that a friend of mine dances at; she said this guy was braggin’ to her that he was a robber, and this and that, and that he’s robbed everything from banks to fish and chicken joints for small change. He does it for the rush, not the money. But she says he was flashin’ plenty of money. So she asks him if he ever killed anybody. He said if the money is right. Then he said, sometimes the robbin’ is just to cover the hit.”

“That’s all you got?”

“It’s more than you got.”

“They your people?”

“No, but I know some people that know them.”

“I hate to even have to ask you this, but this ain’t more of your personal shit, is it?”

“I hate you gotta ask me that shit too. I thought we were past that; especially after last night. If I needed you to go down with me on some shit, I would tell you. So no,” Rain said with an attitude. “This is not more of my personal shit.”

“Sorry.”

“Accepted.”

When we got to the building we went inside. On the way up the steps Rain asked, “How you wanna do this?”

“I don’t know, but I want them alive. If these are the guys, and the robbery was just to cover the hit, I want to know who hired them.”

“Then we’ll kill them.” Rain smiled.

When we got to their floor we could hear somebody blastin’ their music. As we got closer to the apartment it was obvious that the music was coming from there.

Rain and I stood off to the side of the door with our guns out and I banged on it a few times, but nobody answered. “Kick it in,” Rain suggested.

I tried the doorknob instead.

The door was unlocked.

“That works too,” she commented as I opened the door and went in carefully. The fact that the door was opened and the music was playing didn’t give me a good feeling. “Stay close to me,” I whispered to Rain as we moved through the apartment.

When we got to the bedroom I opened the door slowly, halfway expecting to catch somebody fuckin’.

“Damn,” I said and walked in the room.

Rain came in behind me. “Shit.”

There before us in the bed lay two naked men; one with long dreads. They weren’t fuckin’, they were dead.

“From looks of it, somebody got them with an automatic weapon.”

“So was the music to cover them fuckin’ or to cover the sound of shooting?” Rain asked.

“I don’t know, probably both.” I walked over to the bed and tried to get a feel for how long they had been dead. “This happened sometime this morning.”

“How do you know?”

“Rigor mortis has begun to set in. It begins about three hours after death, and lasts about seventy-two hours.”

“That nice, but how do you know this?”

“Rigor mortis is caused by a chemical change in the muscles after death, causing the limbs of the corpse to become stiff. Come here, feel this.”