He heard footsteps coming decisively along his back. He realized quickly that this was no good time to raise the glass that the waiter had just left on the bar. This time the drink should wait. Business before than pleasure. Question of priorities. Even more so when business becomes the best of pleasures. Yes, because Joe wanted nothing more than to break the face of the first son of a bitch who dared to attack him in the back. He turned right at the moment when the poor bastard raised his right arm with the idea of dropping it with all his might on his head. Joe had no doubt that the empty bottle of «Glenlivet» hadn’t any purpose but to open his skull. The fact is that the asshole had been caught with the raised arm and left his right flank fully exposed.
Up to the hilt. The dagger slipped between her ribs as easily as it would sink into Grandma Rose’s meat pie. The jerk dropped the bottle. He put his hands to the wound and fell to his knees. The blood soon spread across the floor, mingling with the shreds of the bottle. He drew the dagger and wiped the blade on the idiot’s jacket, still on his knees, denying his fatal and accurate destiny. Joe watched him amused, savoring the pleasure that always invaded when he sent a new soul to hell «Satan, with all the suckers I’m sending you, I trust you treat me very well when I stay at your home.»
He sat down again and now he took the drink that was waiting patiently above the bar. However, the tequila was choked to the height of the throat with the last breath of the dying man. One last word. Then silence. Joe turned quickly. His eyes wanted to confirm what his ears had just heard. In the idiot’s rictus he found the silly smile that confirmed that he hadn’t heard wrong. That last word had closed over his heart like a fist of stone. Joe ran out of the bar and while he drove over to his ex-wife’s house, he cursed his stupidity. How he had been so stupid as not to think that one day they would discover her secret. He should have known that one of his many enemies would finally find his only weakness. He was never aware that, even though he despised death, there was a being whom he could never bear to see suffer. He ran as he didn’t remember before. «How can you be so cruel», «It’s impossible, it must be a bluff». Incredulity, hope, terror, all these thoughts mingled in the shaker of his head.
And he finally discovered it. He opened the door of his ex-wife’s house with a key she didn’t know he had. He ignored the two lifeless bodies that he had to get around in order to enter the small room. He opened the door and saw his baby. «Desi.» The threat had been done. The head turned unnaturally made it evident. Someone had broken the neck of that poor innocent creature. Finally they had found his Achilles’ heel. It wasn’t his ex-wife, whose brain was scattered all around the living room. Her body was next to her boyfriend’s corpse. No, really, the apple of his eye was «Desi», the white-and-brown-haired pet that He let with his wife whe they started to live apart each other. It was a hard decision that he had to take thinking that his enemies would never discover his weakness. What a fool he was. Now the poor hamster rested peacefully in the back of his cage, it would never come to spin the wheel again, but Joe will never forget its death. You know, who lives by the sword …
J.A.P. Vidal