The Kill Room

Yesterday, early Sunday evening, Metzger had been at his daughter’s soccer game, an important one – against the Wolverines, a formidable opponent. He wouldn’t have left his seat in the stands, dead center on the field, for anything.

He trod lightly when it came to the children, he’d learned all too well.

But as he pulled on his light framed glasses – after cleaning the lenses – and read the perplexing then troubling then shattering words, the Smoke formed, fast and unyielding, more a gel than vapor, and it closed around him. Suffocating. He found himself quivering, jaw clenched, hands clenched, heart clenched.

Metzger had recited: I can handle this. This is part of the job. I knew there was a risk of getting found out. He’d reminded himself: The Smoke doesn’t define you; it’s not part of you. You can make it float away if you want. But you have to want . Just let it go.

He’d calmed a bit, unclenched fingers tapping his bony leg in dress slacks (other soccer dads were in jeans but he hadn’t been able to change between office and field). Metzger was five ten and three quarters and clocked in about 150 pounds. Formerly fat, as a boy, he’d melted the weight away and never let it return. His thi

Yesterday, as he put the phone away, the twelve year old midfielder had turned toward his section in the stands and smiled. Metzger had gri

Anyway, liquor was not the way to defeat the Smoke.

Dr. Fischer, I believe you. I think.

He’d returned to the office last night and tried to make sense of the news: Some crusading assistant district attorney in Manhattan was coming after him for Moreno’s death. A lawyer himself, Metzger added up the possible counts and knew the biggest, bluntest truncheon would be conspiracy.

And he’d been even more shocked that the DA’s Office had learned of Moreno’s death because the Special Task Order had been leaked.

A fucking whistleblower!

A traitor. To me, to NIOS, and – worst of all – to the nation. Oh, that had brought the Smoke back. He’d had an image of himself beating the prosecutor, whoever he or she was, to death with a shovel – he never knew the themes his rage would take. And this fantasy, particularly bloody and with a gruesome soundtrack, both mystified and viscerally satisfied with its vivacity and persistence.

When he’d calmed, Metzger had set to work, making calls and sending texts wrapped in the chrysalis of sublime encryption, to do what he could to make the problem go away.

Now, Monday morning, he turned from the river and stretched. He was more or less functioning, after a grand total of four hours’ sleep (very bad; fatigue gives the Smoke strength) and a shower in the NIOS gym. In his twenty by twenty office, bare except for safes, cabinets, computers, a few pictures, books and maps, Metzger sipped his latte. He’d bought his personal assistant the same – Ruth’s had been assembled with soy milk. He wondered if he should try that. She claimed the substance was a relaxer.

He regarded the framed picture of himself and his children on a vacation in Boone, North Carolina. He recalled the horseback ride at the tourist stable. Afterward an employee had taken this souvenir snap of the three of them. Metzger had noted that the camera the cowboy clad employee had used was a Nikon, the same company that made the scopes his snipers used in Iraq. Thinking specifically of one of his men firing a Lapua.338 round 1,860 yards into the shoulder of an Iraqi about to detonate an IED. It’s not like the movies; a round like that will kill you pretty much anywhere it strikes. Shoulder, leg, anywhere. That insurgent had simply come apart and fallen to the sand, as Shreve Metzger exhaled with warm peace and joy.

Smile, Mr. Metzger. You have wonderful children. Do you want three eight by tens and a dozen wallet pictures?

There was no Smoke inside him when he was pla

Metzger glanced at his computer and at his magic phone.

His pale eyes – a hazel color he didn’t care for, yellowish green, sickly – looked out his window again at the slice of Hudson River, the view courtesy of a handful of psychotic fools, who, one clear September day, had removed the buildings that interfered with that vista. And who had inadvertently, to their surviving compatriots’ loss, driven Metzger into his new profession.

With these thoughts, the Smoke coalesced, as it often did when 9/11 came to mind. The memories of that day used to be debilitating. Now they simply stabbed with searing pain.

Let it go…

His phone rang. He regarded caller ID, which reported, in translation, You’re fucked.

“Metzger here.”

“Shreve!” the caller blurted cheerfully. “How are you? Been a month of Sundays since we chatted.”

Metzger had disliked the Wizard of Oz. That is, the wizard himself, as a character (he rather enjoyed the movie). He was furtive and manipulative and arbitrary and had ascended to the throne by false pretense…and yet he commanded all the power in the land.

Much like the caller he was now speaking to.

His own personal Wizard was chiding, “You didn’t call me, Shreve.”

“I’m still getting facts,” he told the man, who happened to be 250 miles away, south, in Washington, DC. “There’s a lot we don’t know.”

Which meant nothing. But he didn’t know how much the Wizard knew. Accordingly he would steer the course of ambiguity.

“Imagine it was bum intelligence about Moreno, right, Shreve?”

“Appears to be.”

The Wizard: “That happens. That surely happens. What a crazy business we’re in. So. All your intel was buttoned up, double  and triple checked.”

Your…

Choice of stark pronoun noted.

“Of course.”

The Wizard didn’t specifically remind him that Metzger had assured him Moreno’s death was necessary to save lives because the expat had been about to blow up American Petroleum’s headquarters in Miami. When in fact the worst that had happened was a woman protestor threw a tomato at a policeman and missed.

But with the Wizard, conversations involved mostly subtext and his words – or lack thereof – seemed all the more pointed for it.

Metzger had worked with the man for several years. They didn’t meet in person often but on those occasions that they did, the stocky, smiling man always wore blue serge, whatever that exactly was, and impressively patterned socks, along with an American flag pin in his lapel. He never had a problem like Metzger’s, the Smoke problem, and when he spoke he did so always with the calmest of voices.

“We had to act fast,” Metzger said, resenting that he was on the defensive. “But we know Moreno’s a threat. He funds terrorists, he supports arms sales, his businesses launder money, a lot of things.”

Metzger corrected himself: Moreno had been  a threat. He’d been shot to death. He wasn’t is  anything.

The Wizard of Washington continued in that honey voice of his, “Sometimes you just have to move fast, Shreve, that’s true. Crazy business.”

Metzger took out a fingernail clipper and went to work. He chopped slowly. It kept the Smoke from materializing, a little. Snipping was weird but it was better than gorging on fries and cookies. And screaming at your wife or children.

The Wizard muffled his phone and had another muted conversation.

Who the hell else was in the room with him? Metzger wondered. The attorney general?