Project Sabertooth

and immediately banged my head on the car door, which brought me out of my dreamlike state in a real hurry. My throat was dryer than baked Sahara sand and my underwear was already wet from another bout of flatulence, which if I ignored would further fill my jeans with other unwanted specimens of my bowels, as was my expert opinion on the subject of colon cancer. So I got out and almost slammed the car door in my haste to run into the field of knee high corn to contribute my share towards world hunger in the form of fertilizer. Walking back to the car I realized that it was just starting to get brighter in the eastern sky and hoped the farmer wasn’t all too pissed off when he discovered a soiled pair of underwear in his field. When I got back in and quietly closed the door, I opened both windows regardless of the cool night air. It was better to get the chills than smell what had already soaked through my pants and into Moby’s drivers seat. Then I thought of the water bottle and reached for it like a dying man in the desert. Getting it opened, I simply let the cap fall to the floorboard and proceeded to quaff the entire bottle down at one shot. It tasted like heaven, although a little on the warm side but who’s going to complain? I threw the empty into the back with the rest of my accumulating garbage, (and now I understood Ishmael), and felt it coming from my stomach! I had just enough time to turn into my jacket with my mouth to muffle the sound before the burp came, and it was one for the Guinness book of Records for sure! Now I felt much better, with an empty stomach full of water but now with a raving desire for a stack of pancakes swimming in a ton of maple syrup, I settled in for the next round of observation.

  I once watched the sunset on the ocean and it fascinated me that the entire process takes approximately one minute for the sun to fully submerge into the water, but this morning it was taking its good old time coming up over the horizon as I sat totally bored in this dreary mind-numbing monochromatic gray of the early dawns light. And in my boredom, I remembered the idiotic stairs in the hospital and how they led to nowhere, so I started to sing the few words of the song `Stairway to Heaven´. The rest of the song I just hummed and for some reason, I felt truly peaceful! That was, till I seen some people come out of the second house and started to walk down the driveway in my direction. I stopped my serenade and tried to focus on them. There were four of them and the first thing was that they stopped to light their cigarettes and then they simply stood around talking. From this distance in the early gray dawns light I couldn’t identify any of them. I started quietly humming again and waited, hoping that time would be on my side this time around. Then one of them passed something out to two of the others, and the two turned towards the rising sun, probably for the sake of Mecca, or some other thing I couldn’t and never would understand. I stopped humming as I caught my breath, and like a flashback in time, I seen the two with their prayer beads praying to their god. It was when I seen the prayer beads that I knew I had to do something, anything, to get those two as fast as possible. They finished and after hugging and kissing the other two men, they started the walk down the driveway. I was now in shock at seeing the prayer beads, but at the same time, so afraid of what they was going to do and also getting angrier by the second, that I actually started to cry. Like some kind of wimpy baby. Wiping my eyes of the tears as they started to turn onto the street, I saw that it was my photo boys’ number one and five.

  And in all of that stress and crying, my stomach started to cramp, but just lightly. So I figured, as the singer says; “It’s now or never...”, and starting the car I rammed the stick into first gear. With the gas pedal to the floor the motor screaming and I passed over second gear and jammed it into third gear, utilizing the downhill to acquire speed. And as I watched them I noticed something strange, they were so caught up in conservation that they were oblivious to the car speeding in their direction. I proceeded without so much as a whimper of thought to the consequences of the car or Ishmael becoming caught up in all of this, and in exactly the wrong moment, one of them dropped something and took a little step to the right to stoop and pick it up. I drove at full speed and at the last second they, in their nescience, turned and seen death hit them head on. The man standing was first knocked over and rolled the full length of the undercarriage of the car, while I only banged into the other one which was in the process of standing up to run away from sure death. I put all the power I had into the brakes and also utilizing the hand brake, stopped the car. Everything was now blurred as I took in the situation of one man surely dead, one slightly injured on the road, and the motor sounding like it was going to join them in death. My eyes started to tear up as I rammed it into reverse and poor Moby’s motor screamed like some Arabic mother ululating over the deceased one which lay there. The other one attempted to get up as I rolled backwards over him. Apparently he got caught somehow on the motor or exhaust, because he banged around quite a lot before he finally appeared in front of the car, and although I’m no doctor, he was definitely road kill. When I tried to stop the car, the brake pedal went straight to the floor, which made me realize that the second one had ripped one of the brake lines loose. So I pulled as hard as possible on the hand brake till I finally stopped. When I looked forward and seen the carnage I had brought about, it made me laugh hysterically, for I was more worried about the oil stain on the street which ran from the second man to the front of faithful Moby, than what I actually had just done. Then the motor died with a very loud bang, and I knew from the oil loss that it would be fruitless to even attempt to start it. That and the fact that after all of the concentration of my driving skills faded away, my intestines cramped up as if the Incredible Hulk had hit me, and I watched the street go black as I passed out.

  Present

  “So now you understand the workings of an insane mind.” Marcus said with a smirk on his face. Walter asked; “Did anybody tell you what happened afterward?” “Nope.” Marcus said. “They arrested me, I guess. When I awoke, I was in the prison hospital. With your smiling face grinning like Garfield the cat looking over at me from the stool.” “Well,” Walter continued. “I talked to one of the police officers who were the first at the scene and he said that if it wasn’t for the fact that they make regular patrols in that area due to the refugee situation, you would have been killed. They had heard the bang and naturally thinking that it could be gunfire had gone to check it out. When they seen the strewn bodies on the road and your car, they went straight over to you. Instead of immediately opening the car door, they were suddenly busy with keeping the others who live there from getting to you, and killing you. They had to wait till back-up came before they could check you out, and seeing your condition, called for an additional ambulance.” “You telling me the others didn’t need one?” Marcus asked smiling. “Oh they called for one but they straight called the Medical Examiner after checking out those two. Yours was a special transport to Asperg prison hospital.” “And what about the car, and about Ishmael?” Marcus asked. “Because I’m awaiting trial and the unfortunate fact that I will have no more time left to attend it, nobody’s been telling me anything!” Walter smiled and answered; “I have no idea exactly who this Ishmael is, for his name isn’t mentioned in any of the court protocols or police reports. And as far as what you told me about the car, the VW Beetle was yours. Registration and insurance all in your name with your address. Even the signature is yours, because they suspected that you received help from someone, so they checked it against your signature on the apartment contract. It’s your signature. And you tell me that it belonged to some guy named Ishmael, but I have to believe what is black and white on paper!” “And do you know anything about my cat Sabertooth?” Marcus asked. Walter replied; “There was no cat in your apartment, no food dish, nothing. In fact, for a single man your place was absolutely spotless clean! You said that the cat had destroyed the curtains on the balcony window, but I pulled the curtains back to look out at the view when I was there with the Inspector, and if there were any scratches from a cat, we would have seen it, wouldn’t we?” Marcus just smiled and commented; “That old
man is a really sly fox!”

  “That’s really all there is to the whole situation“. Marcus said. “Yeah, but you was going to tell me about what the old man said about this contract killer.” Walter said. “Not that I can utilize any of the information, but it interest me how these people work.” “Oh sorry.” Marcus said. “I totally forgot about that. Probably due to this Morphine I’m getting. I’ll give it to you as I heard it from him, if that’s okay with you.” “Go ahead!” Walter said.

  Ishmael's uncle was relieved that Marcus agreed to quit, so he told him what he knew about the elimination specialist. “This man looks so normal, so average, that you couldn’t pick him out of a crowd of people. That’s how bland and ordinary his face is. He is supposedly working on orders from one single man, and apparently that man is one of the most powerful figures in the world. It is a fact that his boss will sometimes put out a contract on a mass murderer, despot, or other people who kill for no reason, but