Griffin #4
The man takes an envelope from his pocket. “Room 307. The key is at the front desk under your name. A doctor will arrive in ten minutes. Do not leave the room.”
He gets out of the car. The other man opens my door.
I get out. They’re not dragging me or threatening me. Strange. They just watch me cross the lobby and get the key from the receptionist, who doesn’t even blink at my condition.
I get in the elevator. Then, into room 307. It’s an executive standard: king-size bed, clean carpet, a minibar with supermarket-brand vodka bottles.
If a hitman isn’t going to walk into this room in the next hour, I have no fucking idea what’s going on.
This silence—besides a cough from the next room—has a strange, viscous texture that seeps into the base of my skull. It makes me want to laugh. Silence, on this level, never comes for free.
I inspect the lock, the handle, the peephole. I test the handle three times, listening to the click. Who had the brilliant idea of giving me a room where the biggest danger is myself?
I open the minibar. I grab one of those little hotel vodka bottles and weigh it in my hand. Cold, small, perfect for a projectile or a shiv. I press it to my forehead, listening to time pass.
Ten minutes. Punctually. Two light knocks.
“Room service,” a muffled voice says.
A lie. I didn’t order a damn thing.
I hold the vodka bottle, position my body behind the door, press my ear against it, and listen to the sound of a key turning in the lock.
Of course. The room isn’t mine, never was.
The hotel is theirs, or at least, the entire floor is.
The handle turns slowly. When the door opens four inches, I make my move: I shove it with all my might, grab the arm of whoever is entering, and pull them into the room.
I advance, using my body weight to pin him against the hallway wall. My left hand grabs his throat, and I raise the vodka bottle, ready to smash his skull.
The man lets out a scream that dies in a wheeze. He’s a middle-aged guy, with glasses, wearing a wrinkled white lab coat and holding a medical bag that fell and burst open, scattering gauze and vials across the carpet.
“Doctor! I’m the doctor!”
I maintain the pressure for a few extra seconds, just to watch the panic in his eyes. This guy just looks like he’s about to piss himself. He’s probably legit.
I let him go. He slides down the wall to the floor, coughing and gasping, trying to gather his things with trembling hands. If he were a hitman, he would have reacted by now. If he were a cop, he would have drawn his gun. If he were crazy, he would have bitten me.
(A small part of me is disappointed he didn’t.)
“Go on, do what you have to do,” I order.
He obeys. He sets up his station on the bed and signals for me to sit like a dog being told to stay. While he cleans the blood from my stump, the antiseptic sting barely registering, I break the silence.
“Who sent you?”
The doctor flinches without taking his eyes off my wound. “The investor.”
I roll my eyes. “Does this guy have a name, or should I just call him Daddy Warbucks?”
The doctor’s mouth clamps shut. Got it.
“The guy I beat,” I continue. “The one with the face full of my arm. Is he alive?”
He nods quickly. “Yes. Multiple facial fractures, a severe concussion... he’ll need reconstructive surgery. But he’s alive. Stable.”
“Shame,” I mutter.
He decides, wisely, to pretend he didn’t hear me. He begins to stitch the torn skin with the precision of someone who’s done this under pressure before. He says nothing more, asks nothing more. He just works.
When the doctor is finished, he packs everything up with impressive speed, hands me two vials—one of painkillers, another of antibiotics—and leaves in a near run. I don’t thank him, don’t tell him to go fuck himself. I just let him go.
When the door closes, the silence returns. Is someone waiting for me to do something? You don’t stitch a person up just to kill them later, do you?
I stand up. My vision is still spinning, but I ignore it. I stumble around the room, looking for anything. A clue, an answer. Some hidden message in the pattern of the paintings on the wall, or a microphone hidden in the light switch.
I search everything.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Except there’s a smoke detector on the ceiling, but it has a black dot, almost invisible, in the middle of the lens. A glassy glint. A hidden camera. It’s not a small one, not state-of-the-art. It’s old, looks like it came from a cheap spy kit. But it’s there, working.
I smile, because it has to be it, and they didn’t even bother to hide it well.
I look closer—in the frame of the painting above the bed, there’s a pinhole.
Another camera. On the flat-screen TV, the infrared sensor is another disguised lens.
And on the digital clock next to the bed, one more. They’re everywhere. All pointed at me.
I think about putting on a show. Jerking off, making obscene gestures, pissing on the carpet—but the performance is wasted if the audience is bored, and I can only imagine the poor bastard on the other side of the screen, sentenced to watch me breathe for the next eight hours.
I stop inches from the black screen of the TV. I stare into the lens, see my reflection, and press my face against the cold plastic. My breath fogs it up. I poke the camera. I smile at it.
“You’re one sick son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
I don’t know who I’m talking to. The camera doesn’t answer either. I take a step back, but I can’t turn away. I just stand there, staring. Waiting for the glass to tell me its name, or anything.
I almost hit the screen. Almost. This thing isn’t going to answer me, and even I know that.
But I keep waiting, hoping that, at some point, a face will appear inside.
I didn’t notice my own exhaustion and didn’t realize I was about to pass out until I woke up.
My own bed doesn’t smell like this. This is the smell of a well-adjusted person’s laundry.
Something floral. Something that suggests a 401(k) and a healthy relationship with one’s mother.
My brain screams in high alert before I even open my eyes: this room is not mine.
Everything is untouched, and even the bedsheets don’t seem to be stained with blood from my bandage.
The bandage itself is clean. Clean. It wasn’t when I fell asleep—the red was starting to bleed through the gauze and show through the wraps.
Someone came in here while I was sleeping, someone touched me without me even noticing.
But the real message is there, on the beige leather armchair next to the bed.
My prosthesis, once thrown on the locker room floor at Marcus’s feet, now rests on a white towel—immaculate, without a drop of blood, without a speck of sweat or grime.
The titanium socket shines as if it were new.
Someone sanded down the scratches, removed the human residue, cleaned it, polished it, left it ready for use.
The only thing out of place is my cell phone, left on the nightstand. I don’t remember putting it there. I don’t even remember bringing it. It’s plugged in, 100% charged, the screen lighting up with dozens of notifications.
I finally get up. I pick up my phone and look at the messages.
47 missed calls from Leech.
112 messages from Leech.
It’s Marcus’s contact. I laugh. The guy was always like this. I open the first message, and it’s already in all caps:
GRIFFIN FOR THE LOVE OF GOD ANSWER
I scroll down through the messages, all variations of the same desperation: “wake up”, “what the fuck happened last night”, “call me”, “are you dead?”, “they’re gonna come after me”.
I decide to call. The screen barely registers the touch before Marcus answers on the first ring.
“Griffin?! Holy shit, you’re alive! I thought they’d thrown you in a meat grinder! I called and called, no one answered, I thought I was next, that the offer was a trap to get me too!”
“What offer, Marcus?”
“THE FUCKING OFFER! They called again! That investor guy! He wants another fight for you! Griffin, you don’t understand, they... they offered double again! DOUBLE!”
I stare at my reflection in the dark glass of the hotel room window. Double the double.
“This is disappear-off-the-map money!” he yells through the phone.
“You said the same thing last fight, Marcus. ‘We’ll disappear from Sacramento, Stumpy.’ Where are the women without STDs?”
“Fuck, this time it’s different! This is real money! But what if it’s a trap? What if the next guy is a bear with a machine gun?!”
“We’ll worry about the machine gun when it shows up, Marcus.”
“But... what do I tell them?! They want an answer!”
“Say yes,” I say, and the words leave my mouth before I even think them. Because, in the end, what else can I do? “Say fucking yes.”
Double. That would be forty thousand for the winner, twenty thousand as an appearance fee.
That’s a lot. I hear a noise on the other end, a choke, a scream.
I don’t know. Marcus is experiencing a wave of relieved ecstasy, one moment heading to the gallows and the next having his death sentence canceled with a twenty-thousand-dollar bonus.
“By the way, where did that guy take you? I went to the—”
I hang up before he can say anything else.
My train of thought is surprisingly clear: the new offer came through Marcus, but the hotel and the creepy limb-polishing service clearly came from the ghost investor. The two aren’t talking. Or one of them is playing very, very dumb.
I toss the phone on the bed. At least the routine makes some sense. Another fight. Another fat check. The same predictable shit, just with more expensive carpet. Money. Fight. Survival.
That’s when I hear it.
Things happen in the span of less than a minute. It’s not the maid. Maids knock.
The sound comes from the wall, from the connecting door, the side I didn’t even think to check when I came in.
The door. The fucking connecting door. How did I not see the fucking door?
It opens, and a man enters. A silent giant, dressed in black and a balaclava, with a knife in his hand. I only see his dark eyes and a split eyebrow from a scar.
Assassin. Only assassins enter like that. This fucker is an assassin. But why? They paid, they took care of me, they fixed the prosthesis. Now they want to kill me? What kind of bet makes sense of that?
He approaches. I know I wasn’t supposed to have noticed him.
But they have cameras, they know when I’m awake.
Why the hell would he be surprised? The questions keep hammering as my body reacts on instinct.
I back up, throwing the armchair in his path.
The prosthesis is on the other side of the room. Too far.
They paid me. They fixed me up. They gave me a doctor. For what? To send me to a clean slaughterhouse? What the fuck kind of investment is this?
The giant sidesteps the obstacle. The blade cuts the air. I dodge. The metal passes inches from my face.
This doesn’t feel like settling a score.
Karpov would send a gang of noisy brutes, not an impersonal professional.
I may not know Karpov beyond Marcus’s descriptions of the organizer, but I know the pattern people like him follow; the pattern of the ridiculous spectacle, of the scene that satisfies their petty desires.
I kick the small table. I throw a lamp at his head. He barely blinks. He just keeps coming.
Who pays for a guy like this? The same guy who pays for the hotel? The same guy who fixed my fucking prosthesis?
I’m cornered near the bed.
His arm tenses, the knife comes in a downward arc.
I twist my body, the blow grazes my ribs, and the force of the movement pushes me toward the armchair where my prosthesis is.
I reach it, but there’s no time to attach it.
So I grab the metal piece, anyway I can, and hold it like a hammer.
The assassin closes in, shifting his weight.
He doesn’t realize that, standing like that, he’s close enough.
Did they fix me up just so I’d be well-rested for the slaughter?
When he advances, I use the momentum to throw what’s left of me forward—and with the strength of desperation, I smash the prosthesis against the bone of the hand holding the knife.
The blade flies across the room. The guy tries to retreat, but I keep swinging—with every hit, the sound is of tearing flesh and cartilage.
He still tries to defend himself, but then I hit his face.
Hitting a human face with a metal bar is always ugly.
Blood sprays, the nose flattens, eyes sink.
He falls to his knees, and I don’t stop.
Not until the movement ceases, not until the silence returns.
I stand up. The assassin’s body is on the floor. I’m holding my own arm like a weapon. And the confusion doesn’t lessen.
I look around. At the broken-in door. At the blood on the carpet. At the smoke detector on the ceiling. At the camera lens.
I weigh my options. Stay and wait for the next one? Run? Call Marcus?
I wonder if it’s worth putting the prosthesis back on. The blood is already starting to clot on the new wound, but there’s no time to stop. If someone else is coming, they’ll be here soon.
I open the assassin’s door and see that there’s nothing there. The entire hotel is dead quiet. Nothing. Just me and the dead man.
And, I guess, the fucker watching from the ceiling.