51.

1 July, 5:15 MP, Czernograd, Hotel Casino

It all started with a noise outside Jake’s door. And it all finished with a noise outside Jake’s door.

In between these two book-ends there elapsed a period of time, probably no more than a minute or so, yet when he thought about it later, recalling every step, every move, thought, action and reaction, it seemed to him that the sum of the parts was much bigger than the whole. The quantum of out of the ordinary.

So it started with a noise outside his room.

He probably would not have heard it if the TV had been on, but an hour earlier, bored with channel surfing, he switched it off. He decided to take a nap, but the sleep would not come. Too many things on his mind, the brain insisting on continuing its internal monologue.

Then a voice outside his door interrupted that monologue. He did not know who it belonged to, except that it was male and loud.

Then came a sound he could not identify, followed by a noise like a sack of potatoes crashing onto the floor.

Jake sat up in bed, his brain all of a sudden gone quiet.

Then another noise, something bouncing off the wall outside his room, so hard that the vibration skewed the picture of a peaceful mountain landscape, hanging next to the door.

Jake was on his feet, and at the door, his ear to the glossy smooth surface, as if the wood were some magic amplifier that would made him hear everything so much clearer.

But all he heard was nothing. He counted the second. Two... five... ten... fifteen.

Then he did something instinctive, and stupid. He turned the lock and twisted the door handle.

Still nothing.

He pulled the door ajar an inch or two. No sound, and nothing unusual in his restricted field of vision.

Somehow emboldened, Jake opened the door and stepped out into the corridor.

His guardian today was lying on the floor, his head half-propped against the wall, the chair overturned next to him. His eyes were open, looking somewhere ahead, mouth part open too. And then there was the dark red patch on his chest, staining his white shirt.

“Oh Jesus,” Jake whispered, or he though he whispered. The world swirled in front of his eyes, and then his legs took over control and started carrying him back, one step, then another one.

And then his foot encountered and obstacle while the rest of his body kept moving, and he fell backwards, arms flying around, trying to grasp and hang onto the air.

His back connected with the floor, and even the plush carpet in the corridor couldn’t take the sting out of the impact. He gasped and swore. Through the pain and panic his mind still managed to register that his legs were entangled in something.

He scrambled frantically up, his stomach up his throat and his heart pounding inside his head. A few more steps backwards and he would have fallen back again had he not managed to steady himself against the wall just in time.

What he tripped over was another man, younger than the police guard, blond hair cut short, face turned away from Jake’s line of sight. He was dressed in a sports coat, jeans and white sneakers, and his limbs were splayed awkwardly like a marionette with cut strings. But even in his fall, his right hand did not lose the grip on a black pistol, its already sizable barrel elongated even further by the familiar – until now only from the movies – shape of a silencer.

Jake couldn’t remember whether he again took the Lord’s name in vain – though he would have thought that if any circumstances justified it, these did – or whether he merely referred to excrement. But he did take another step back and bumped into something that did not seem as flat and smooth and hard as the wall.

He recoiled as if scolded, pirouetting around to see the obstacle.

He was standing face to face with a figure about his height. All he could tell in that fraction of a moment was that whoever it was, was dressed all in black, including a balaclava with only two holes cut out for eyes.

Jake could not tell what colour the eyes were. He did not have enough time to look. Before he could say or do anything he felt something cracking into the back of his head, and then the whole world, not just the figure in front of him, went black.

Photo by Dima Pechurin on Unsplash