IRONY

                                                                                                by

                                                                                            Majatel Dark

Bruno is a bulky massive gorilla who grunts out something that sounds like “See ID” to everyone who tries to pass by him. The photo ID says that I’m Malissa Moore, reporting for Modern American newsmagazine – a weekly slick that’s just a step above the tabloids.

Actually, his name isn’t Bruno. He just looks like a big dumb bodyguard character out of a mobster movie named Bruno. But then, my name isn’t Malissa Moore either. It’s Tess Derringer.

Malissa Moore is currently inebriated in her hotel room. I doubt she has managed to stir awake. If she has, she’s praying to the porcelain god. All thanks to the sleep-aid laced cocktail binge I goaded her into drinking last night. (It took very little effort, actually. Malissa Moore is a known alcoholic among her colleagues, but I did have to dig for the information.)

Coincidence would have it that she and I are the same height (short), frame, and close to the same weight. Right now, I’m wearing a short auburn wig that itches like hell and blue contact lenses to cover the obvious differences between Malissa and Tess.

I’ve worked for the past few weeks learning how to copy her (annoying) Southern drawl. The worst anyone will be able to say is that Malissa finally sounded halfway sober for the first time in six months.

Where am I? It’s eleven o’clock at the LAX airport in Los Angeles. I’m standing outside in the blistering L.A. heat. I’m wearing navy, which only increases my discomfort, but it makes me look slightly paler. Malissa hasn’t been in California long enough to get a real tan. I’m scrunched between reporters, photographers, and paparazzi seeking to get first shot at Senator Toscraine. The news conference will be held inside, but I’m waiting out here for the perfect moment to strike.

It’ll be another half-hour, possibly forty-five minutes before the plane carrying Senator Mark Toscraine (who is planning to run in the next presidential election) will land. I’m patient and I can wait. After all, I’ve been waiting fifteen years. What will a few more minutes mean?

I was eight years old that summer back in 2015. My dad was a good cop, a clean cop, and the sort that would even fight the blue wall of silence just because it was right. There were no gray areas for Brad Derringer.

He was hard-nosed detective with a head that was, at times, equally hard. He’d never take bribes or run in fear from threats. Maybe if he’d backed down a little more, Mark Toscraine wouldn’t have been contracted to kill my father.

No one knew about me and that was the way Dad had wanted it. The day he found me, I was walking the back alleys of an unfamiliar section of town aimlessly. I was lost, because the gang I’d run with decided I wasn’t of use to them anymore. I suppose I should feel animosity towards them, but I don’t. They could have easily killed me, but I was just a little kid. Even thieves have their own sense of honor and integrity, or so people say.

Dad wouldn’t have believed it. I never understood why he never obtained legal status for me. I have no social security card, no true ID. Nothing exists to suggest that there ever was a Tess Derringer. It was as if he knew what would happen.

I’d learned how to hide well from my few years on the street and unexpected visits from Dad’s coworkers. It was just a normal day, or so I thought, as I slipped into my father’s closet at the sound of the doorbell.

There were no sounds of voices or boots, merely the strange thud that I couldn’t recognize back then but now only too well now. Silencers were an old technology, but they were constantly being improved for the black market and were always effective.

Dad was already dead when Toscraine carried his body into the bedroom where I was hiding. There was a black mark where the bullet had entered into Dad’s forehead. I’ll never forget the cold, fixed expression on Dad’s face or how his eyes were so still they looked no more real than the plastic eyes you see on stuffed animals.

I watched on in silent horror as Mark calculatingly positioned the body.

The case barely made the headlines. It was closed as soon as the investigation started, labeled as a suicide, and forgotten totally in about two months time.

There hadn’t been a witness. I didn’t exist, after all. That was how everyone got away with the murder or thought they did.

It was safer for me to keep things as they were. I forced myself to stay under radar, so to speak, surviving by any means necessary.

I’ve held so many different identities over the years, but a part of me has always stayed Tess.

I’m not going to lie about my innocence. I have very little to fall back on that says I’m any more righteous than my current target. If it’s possible, the murders I’m responsible for might even rival his track record.

There’s nothing like the simultaneous clicking of at least fifty digital cameras to make you sit up and pay attention. I hooked up my own portable to the Net and started snapping photos. They’d go to my employer’s private email account. With his eclectic tastes, he’d no doubt find them amusing.

Suddenly, in my mind, I formed that old familiar thought again. I was glad that in just a short span of time Mark Toscraine would be dead. I would happily be responsible. I wanted nothing more or less than his death at my hands.

I jerked the camera suddenly down and it seemed to tremble at my side. My arms had started to shake. Me, being nervous over a simple kill?

The images tore through my mind like thoroughbreds thundering down the track at Churchill Downs. There was a crash… then an explosion… so many people were dead. My body had already started walking briskly towards the doors of its own accord as if sensing something was wrong.

That was when it all started. The horrible sounds of metal skidding down the runway broke me from my trance. Heat sparked out from under the engine. People screamed and panic rose in waves that drove me to the brink of nausea. Bruno and his cohorts formed a human barrier to prevent anyone from running out towards the danger zone.

Everyone got ushered quickly (and not too gently) inside by Bruno and the other security guards. I watched from the windows of the airport’s waiting area. In just a few seconds time, the fire had ensured that there would be little left of the plane except shrapnel. When no one was watching me directly, I nodded in satisfaction.

So it hadn’t been me with these poison-tipped acrylic nails. Mark Toscraine was dead and it really didn’t matter that fate had taken care of the situation. I refused to think about how I had known that the plane would crash. My life was complicated enough to begin with.

I slipped out of the airport unnoticed in all the commotion and sped away in my ’02 Buick before the cops could arrive. I didn’t want to chance going through the explanations. Eventually, someone would piece it together that Malissa Moore had been suffering from a devil of a hangover and had never left her hotel. I would be long gone by then.

My employer is very gracious, always eager to provide private transportation. Teleportation is as close to an exact science as you’re going to get these days, despite the garbage that the American public has been fed.

The portable controller beeped as I opened a connection to the end-receiver in my apartment. The rental car was, of course, in Malissa’s name and I ran it into a ditch as a precaution. Someone would think she’d been driving drunk … and she’d managed to get a cab to drive her to the hotel.

The dispelled energy from the transference had an amusing aftereffect; it always turned my TV on.

It was the twelve o’clock news, as luck would have it. I couldn’t remember the reporter’s name. She was some annoyingly thin petite blond who always made me consider scheduling some extra appointments at the gym and spoke in a nasally, high-pitched voice. “So far, the only reported death from the L.A. Coroner’s Office has been that of Senator Mark Toscraine, who was scheduled to give a public speech in the LAX airport this afternoon. Mark Toscraine, the lovable Senator who originated from Texas, is survived by his wife, Carrie, his daughter Telise, and his son, Dover.”

The photographs of the quiet, dark-haired girl stared back at me with Mark Toscraine’s dead eyes. Was history repeating itself even now? So what if my hand hadn’t been the one to destroy Mark? Would Telise Toscraine be the one to end my life as I sought to do to her father?

A slight buzzing sensation forced me to reach for my hip. I flipped open the phone and stuck it to my ear. “Rachel Forester. Talk to me.”

“Ah, how very good to reach you my dear Reaper.” The chain-smoker on the other end of the line was my most recent employer. I didn’t care about his name and he’d never asked me for my identity. It was against the rules. They all knew, however, that the Reaper had trained since childhood to kill… not so much for the money, but for revenge. “Does not the faint irony of this situation amuse you, sweet lady? Will the daughter of our dear fallen Mark come for you later in a swirl of vengeance stronger than the might of our female death incarnate?” The connection clicked.

He’d gotten to me, he knew it, and it probably gave him a thrill.

Still, the money would be there in my offshore account. I’d dealt with him before. As long as the target was dead and there was no evidence leading back to my illustrious smoking client, he would pay the agreed amount.

Maybe this time the Reaper would do something feminine… and take a jaunt to Paris dressed in pink of all colors.

You can’t have a conscience when you’re me. My dad tried to tell me once that vengeance wasn’t justice. I didn’t listen, but Mark is dead and that should make me happy, right?

I couldn’t stare at the faces at the faces of the grieving Toscraine family anymore, so I turned off the TV. I stripped out of the evidence (my “Malissa” costume) and teleported it all to a local incinerator.

The phone buzzed again. I instinctively knew it was another client. I also knew that I would take the job. So much for having a vacation, eh? The thought itched in the back of my mind that part of me was still Tess Derringer. I had to believe that even thought it probably wasn’t true.

                                                                                    THE END