The Card Trick

The Card Trick

Edward Deppil franticly darted down the long hallway as fast as his spindly white legs could carry him. He was in trouble. A lot of trouble. So much trouble, in fact, the suicide was beginning to look pleasant. He never should have gotten involved in the black market. In fact, he never should have even taken his first hit of cocaine at that party fifteen years ago, he never should have dropped out of school, and he never should have turned to drug dealing. But most of all, he never should have murdered Don Vinchenzo’s son. Taking out the Godfather’s son over a little dispute about the correct price of meth didn’t actually win him any points with the Mafia.
But what was done was done. Vinchenzo’s son was lying at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, Vinchenzo was pissed as hell, and with Vinchenzo’s henchmen hot on Deppil’s trail, Deppil needed to get out of the USA as soon as humanly possible. Mexico was supposed to be extremely nice around this time of year. Deppil figured, he’d run to Mexico, live in a cave somewhere, and then, when Vinchenzo died, he could come back to America. He could start over, and have a wife, 3.2 kids, and a dog. He could get a job as a manager of a company, or a millionaire, or something.
Dippel forced any thoughts of a grandeur future out of his head. With his record, he’d be lucky if he got a job as a janitor at a local waste management company. Besides, he’d have plenty of time to plan his life while living solitude in a cave. Right now, the most important thing to do was give Vinchenzo the slip.
Deppil had reached the end of the hallway, and stood facing an ominous metallic door. He took a deep breathe, and rested a trembling hand on the doorknob. His heart pounded in his ears. There were two possiblities behind the door: he would either be pumped full of metal by a bunch of tripped-out mafia freaks, or he would be able to get his car and drive towards freedom. Deppil swallowed the uncomfortable lump that bulged in his throat, and wiped sweat away from his brow.
3, 2, 1, He thought tersely, and then he gave the door a thrust, and it swung open easily. Deppil gave an involuntary flinch, but when he recovered, he was able to see the warehouse.
It was empty.
With a sigh of immense relief, Deppil trotted down the metal stairs, heading for his red corvette in a corner of the warehouse. He was free. He was safe. He was going to live. He-
“Edward Leonard Deppil?” A soft voice slid from the shadows of the warehouse, and Deppil almost wet his pants. He whirled around, and gave a small squeak of fear. Three feet away from him, a dark figure stood on the edge of darkness. It wore a long trench coat the brushed the ground, and a wide-brimmed hat hid its face.
“Yes?” Dippel managed to whimper out in a high, strangled voice.
The figure stood still for a couple minutes, and then it took a step towards him. Its foot made no sound as it met the warehouse floor. The figure took another step, and slowly began to lift its face to look Deppil in the eye. Deppil’s heart pounded rapidly. He hoped he would have a heart attack. It would probably be a more pleasant way to go then whatever this… thing was planning on doing to him.
“Mr. Vinchenzo isn’t happy, Edward.” The figure’s dark eyes were now looking directly into Dippel’s, and he could see its entire face. He stared in shocked disbelief. His mouth hung open and drool began to dribble down his chin.
The figure facing him was not the muscular brute with scars all over his face the Deppil had imagined. The figure facing him was a female. Not only that, she didn’t look like she could be more then eighteen. The commander of the biggest criminal organization in the world had sent a child to murder Deppil.
The girl in front of him was silent as she observed him with mild curiosity. She had dark skin, with black hair and eyes. She was slender, and in a strange way, she was very beautiful. But that wasn’t what made Deppil laugh. The girl’s trench coat was wide open, so he could see inside. The girl carried no weapons.
Suppressed snickers rocked Deppil’s body. Vinchenzo was a fool if he thought that a sassy-mouthed teenager could take out a rough-and-tough drug dealer.
The girl’s eyebrows rose ever so slightly. “May I enquire as to what you find so amusing?” She asked in a soft, quiet voice.
“What do you think I find amusing?” cracked Deppil. “They sent a little girl to kill me? They must think I’m really sweak, don’t they?”
“No…” the girl responded in her melodic voice. “They only think that I’m exceptionally strong.”
Deppil’s laughter withered away into an uneasy silence. There was something very unnerving about this girl. An aura of malevolence seemed to surround her, hidden under a calm exterior. The two stood in silence for a bit longer, and then Deppil shook his head. “Pft. I don’t have time for this…” He grumbled. “Tell your boss that if he wanted to kill me, he should have sent someone more… better. Or at least given you some sort of weapon. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a plane to catch.” Deppil turned from the girl and began to head to his car. He was stopped dead when the girl reappeared in his path so quickly he barely even saw her move.
“Mr. Vinchenzo is not my boss, Edward. He is merely my client. And I am deadly capable, as you will soon see. Also, I won’t allow you to leave, Edward. I’m afraid my orders are to kill you.”
There was something terribly wrong with this teenager. She talked so casually, as if she offed people everyday. Of course, working for the Don… maybe she did. Dippel took a step back, staring at her. “Are… are you insane?” He muttered nervously. “You don’t even have a weapon.”
“I don’t?” She asked coolly.
Dippel shivered, at a loss for words.
The girl didn’t say anything for a few tense moments. She merely continued to look at him with an eerily composed expression smoothed over her face. Then she relaxed her jaw and spoke: “Would you like to see a magic trick?”
Dippel stared, unsure if he’d heard her correctly or not. “What?”
“Would you like to see a magic trick?” The girl asked, as if she hadn’t just told him she was going to kill him.
“Uh…” dumbfounded, Dippel found he could only goggle at her, feeling like an idiot.
The girl smiled, and reached into a pocket of her trench coat. Dippel grimaced automatically, but all she pulled out was a single card from a 52 card deck. She twirled it around in her right hand, and asked him, “How many cards am I holding?”
“Uh…” Dippel tried to blink himself out of his trance. What the hell was this?! Some little bitch came waltzing in proclaiming she was going to murder him, and then, a couple minutes later, she was entertaining him with card tricks. This was idiotic.
“One… one card.” He responded. Hold on, what was he doing?! He wasn’t actually going to play along with this, was he? This was insane. But… there was something strange about this girl that made him want to stay. It was scary the way she remained so tranquil through their entire encounter. He was curious about her, simply put, and Dippel had never believed in the saying, ‘curiosity killed that cat’.
“Very good,” intoned the teenager. She extended her arm and offered him the card. He accepted it. Maybe the best way to get her to leave him alone was to just play along. He was interested to see where this was going. Besides, she seemed to be really into the trick. He knew he was going to have to kill her later, so there wouldn’t be any witnesses to his departure. At least, this way, he could kill her after letting the girl do some stupid card trick cons.
“Study the card.” The girl ordered. Dippel looked down on it, but kept an eye on the girl standing in front of him. Her fingers moved slightly, but she made no move to attack him. Dippel noted that the card was the King of Clubs. Great. Fascinating, he thought sardonically. He really didn’t have time for this. He handed it back to her, praying she would get on with it.
The girl showed him the card again, rotating it back and forth. “How many cards?” She asked again.
“One!” Dippel snapped impatiently.
A smile crept across the girl’s face. She held the card up in her hands, and with a flick of her delicate fingers, she pushed her thumb along the back of the card. On either side, two other cars appeared from behind the King of Spades. They were Aces, Dippel observed.
It was a good trick he had to admit, and he smirked. “Very good. Now-“
“Don’t you want to know how I did it?” The girl phrased it as a question, but it sounded more like a command.
Dippel looked longingly at his car. Just kill her and run, his brain screamed at him. “I thought magicians never reveal their secrets.” Dammit! What was wrong with him! It was as if he’d lost the ability to think logically.
“They don’t,” the girl agreed. “But I’m only a killer, not a magician.” She was quiet again, her fingers tapping at her side. “You see,” she began. “The King of Clubs was merely a decoy. I held it up, and made it obvious, so you would see it.” Dippel was looking the girl directly in the face, plotting on how he was going to kill her. She was quite annoying. Maybe he could just wring her scrawny twig of a neck. Or stab her. He kept a small knife in his shoe…
“I made sure you were focused on nothing but the card, nothing but the object right in front of you.” Dippel stared at the girl’s face. He would attack her soon. He would break her neck, and he would leave her to die. Yes… that would work. He looked nowhere else, not at his car that stood awaiting its owner in a corner, not the pigeon that flew suddenly up into the rafters, not the dark shadows that was descending on him, silent and deadly.
“While you were focused on that one card, refusing to see anything but it, I took to other cards, and hid them in my hand. You gave the card back to me, and I slid them behind it. A place you couldn’t see until it was too late. And then, before you could speak, there was no longer one card, but three. If you’d watched the magician instead of the decoy she gave you, you might have been able to see her treachery. But you never did. And that was your mistake.”
A sharp pain screamed up Dippel’s back, and he screeched in agony. His whole back was on fire. And then, from the shadows next to the girl, another figure darted towards him, a razor-sharp knife in its hand. The figure didn’t even pause. One quick slash sliced open Dippel’s throat, and he choked as blood poured out of the wound, and down his chest like a flood. The figure struck again, and plunged the knife into Dippel’s chest, forcing it in up to the hilt.
Dippel swayed dangerously, and then dropped to the ground at the feet of his attackers. A large pool of blood spread out from him, and he drifted out of consciousness into the dark nothingness of death. Edward Dippel had lived for 30 years, he had dealt drugs for 13 years. But in the end, Edward had been murdered in a few seconds.
The three assailants stood above him, gazing down at their victim. Slowly, they removed their hats. The girl who had been talking to Dippel shook her head slowly. “Idiot.” She muttered scathingly. “It’s a wonder he wasn’t murdered before this!”
The other two stood, their shadowed, phantasmal trench coats enveloping their bodies.
The one who had stabbed him in the front looked down at the blood drenched ground and shook her head sadly. “We ought not to speak badly of the dead, Tiffany.” She said softly. “They have paid enough.”
The boy reached down and pulled his knife out of the corpse’s back. “On the other hand,” he said darkly, “they’re dead. Maybe they don’t care how we speak of them. Besides, this one wasn’t actually one of the good guys. He was a drug dealer, and a murderer himself.”
“Does that justify *our* murder, Anthony?” The girl called Mia looked at her friend.
He gazed back at her, and clapped one firm hand on her shoulder. “Mia, we’re contract killers. It’s what we do. It’s what we were built to do, trained to do. Maybe we can change, maybe not. But right now, there doesn’t seem to be much of an incentive *too* change, does there?”
Mia stared at the body a while longer, not speaking. Tiffany laid a feminine hand on her shoulder. “How…” Mia began, and the coughed, and licked her parched lips. “How do we know he really was guilty of all of those things? Maybe he was innocent… maybe we just murdered an innocent man!” Mia blinked rapidly, forcing tears away from her eyes.
“Is any man truly innocent?” Tiffany asked quietly. When Mia didn’t answer, she went on. “No matter what, every one, every person on this planet, has done evil in their lives. Are we to judge if they should live or die? Of course not. We can only play the hand we’ve been given, and see where it takes us. Who knows how it will turn out? None of us know what our lives will do for us, or what they’ll do *to* us. Some of us are murders, some of us are businesspeople. But none of us are innocent…”
And with those words, the trio turned to the shadows, and faded into the black, leaving the body of the murdered man behind them, and the three cards that had fallen from Tiffany’s hands. A King of Clubs, and two Aces. They floated in the puddle of crimson for a few seconds before sinking beneath the surface, engulfed in the dark sin that was still spreading slowly across the floor.