Blood brothers

/ Doug Jacquier

This piece was written for the Six Sentence challenge with the prompt word of ‘shift’.

The longer the years stretched out, the sooner that Garth expected to receive the call that it was his turn to remove some heinous citizen that had escaped the clutches of the law and thus thought themselves not only free but invincible against any attempt to exact justice upon them.

Nonetheless, when the call came, it not only surprised him but terrified him that he might fail the Brotherhood that he had called upon in his own hour of need, after his son was left brain damaged from an unprovoked beating by a steroid-enhanced nightclub bouncer, who had walked free on a technicality.

Whatever the target had done, it was not for Garth to question his assignment; the Brotherhood had assessed the case and unanimously agreed that the deed needed to be done, although they left the timing and the methodology to the assigned terminator.

This particular criminal against humanity was a surgeon with a reputation for turning up in the operating theatre drunk and recently a woman had died on the operating table during a routine operation that he’d botched, only to see the profession close ranks and exonerate him and, most gallingly, have the Queen touch her sword to his shoulder and tell him to ‘Arise, Sir Gregory’.

Garth studied his quarry for several days to establish his pattern of movements, his family and friendship networks and the times and locations when he was most likely to be alone and settled on one of the doctor’s clandestine late-night visits to a high-class call girl.

The deed done, fittingly with a scalpel, Garth fancied a pint or three at his local pub and, when he entered, one of his cronies noted that he hadn’t seen him for a couple of weeks and he replied calmly ‘I’ve been on Knight shift.’

28 thoughts on “Blood brothers”

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.