The King of Killers

Rufus Balthazar, a 9 Story Hotel WIP 0draft

Andrew Robert Colom asked me a question in a podcast about how we compete with video game violence.

I said write better violence.

That’s an entirely different essay, but here’s some violence.

Balthazar The King of Killers

Whispered rumors and ghost murmurs make paraboloid arcs and spirograph overlapping circles through the 9 Story Hotel if inside the building soul one is awake, and among the sleep to dreaming too. All valid, some vague, some fabrications. But when seen in the lobby or wandering a dim lit hall, the sight of one man can lower the tone of the rumors to subvocal.

“Did you see him in the lobby” mouthed with hands doing shadow puppet dance.

“Guy at the table smoking” someone signs in ASL.

“You know who that was?” written on a passed note.

“Rufus” a symphony of silent communication in communion about this one man.

“Balthazar” not to be invoked any louder than a dying breath.

“That’s him” light a candle. “The Prospector” say a prayer.

“Family business” leave an offering.

“The one other assassins are. Fucking. Terrified. Of.” By the end you, baby criminal, aspirational killer, Craigslist Hitman, you realize your hands are shaking. Palms clammy, moist and frigid from holding onto the ice of the knowledge. Tachycardia clamps down just knowing he’s in the same building.

“The King of Killers…”

---

The ride to the next floor distends time, elevator falling up into a black hole, surrounded by nothing. Counting breaths. Smokes rolled. Ephraim says by the sound of it Balthazar has on a long coat, and he gets a nod to a blind man in return. Not your usual sartorial choices tonight, Mr Balthazar, and he gets a nod to the blind. But, when I came to wait for you I knew already it was no regular night. Ephraim smiles, snowblinding teeth, eyes covered in silk, genuine, his smile knows more than anyone should. Even for the 9, he says, the French accent of his colonized first language pressing out harder than he thinks, this is no regular night.

“No ding if you would,” Balthazar says, putting in his personal earplugs.

Ephraim taps his umbrella on the floor of the lift twice, last second reach and stops the elevator before it hits even with the next floor and makes a noise, levers to open the doors, slow, smiling, the joys of an elevator from another time. The doors and accordion bars behind them slide open so quiet they may have been lubed with petroleum jelly while the lift waited for Balthazar.

The floor of the elevator is offset horizontally from the hallway it opens out to by one and a half vertical inches.

Both men nod to one another, and Balthazar steps up into the hallway. His shoes touch the faded, worn raw, begging to be Persian carpet lining the floors. A neuron fires, and time dilates so he can remember one minute 14 years ago.

You only get this one pause.

Him and Vlad, lobby, chess mat unrolling. Vlad saying that chess is not a game of strategy, but memorization and pattern recognition. My friend, there is no looking six moves ahead, there are patterns that change with every move leading to more patterns, you memorize, you see the pattern, you make your move on reflex. “That’s true, the conception of chess in the culture is upside down,” Balthazar said. Vlad nodded and tapped the table saying my friend, your problem is you ARE thinking six moves ahead. Your play is artful, elegant, but right at the moment when you should, you don’t. “Doesn’t sound like art or strategy put like that,” Balthazar was setting up the pieces. That’s your problem koresh, you’re an artist. “Am I?” Bal put the black queen in her place, the last piece. Yes, Vlad said, and you are very good, but the chess board is not your canvas. Balthazar moved a white pawn and Vlad moved an opposite black pawn and said white pawn to e4, black pawn to c5, Sicilian Defense. But I know who you are, and I know your art. “Do ya now?” Balthazar was going to take minutes to move another piece. Yes, and god help anyone not playing you in fucking chess. The Russian threw down a shot of vodka in a cut crystal glass. “Learn something new every day my friend,” Balthazar swirled a Rusty nail in a rocks glass in front of his mouth. Left out was the part about there being no art in chess. A mild disappointment for a self educated man who preferred to be feel like he thought right about things, including how chess worked.

A half second dreamtime before time happens all at once.

Balthazar stands, his heels hanging just back off the edge of the floor. Good broke in leather boots, Navy pinstripe pants, white shirt, no tie, suspenders, knee length charcoal wool captain’s coat. He has on 1mil thick black nitriles. Momma if you could see me now. And a black gaiter around his neck. Four count, in through the nostrils, and back out. He flips the stiff coat collar up and brings the gaiter over his nose, now properly looking like his rumored outlaw lineage. His head sways left once, right once, eyes closed.

The music starts for him. Only for him.

The work and craft transcends to art once a perfection of style and precision is attained by the practitioner.

Balthazar takes a step out of the elevator into the hallway, into view, startling men posted on each side of the elevator to guard it. They, distracted until he enters their peripherals, him silent death taking the stage.

A man with only one picture of him known to exist, taken with his permission knows how to dance.

The men posted both jump a bit as the elevator creaks shut industrial clashing loud behind him in opposition to how slick it opened.

Balthazar flips a Benchmade Infidel out his coat sleeve, the spring loaded blade sliding from the handle into place as it enters his grip, an extension of himself. His weight shifts right foot heavy, arm an extension of his shoulder, viper fast, and the infidel cuts every bit of the right side guard’s throat from near his spine forward. Can’t even gargle on the way down. Before the dead man’s knees hit ground Balthazar’s weight has shifted to his left foot, pushing off with his right. Black Nitrile hand over startled mouth, ten stab wounds and a finale up through neck, blade popping out of throat on the inside. Hand over mouth, knife in place, he eases the man down to the ground slow like.

No noise. Any noise, and this is blown.

The light thump on the carpet of the other man dropping reads as background.

Bosch knows there may be a storm coming for him, but only maybe. Assume 90 second radio checks across the floor. Assume sixty seconds plus or minus ten to get from a southeast elevator to Bosch’s double at the end of the northwest hall, just around the final corner before the back stairs.

Could have taken the stairs. Stairs don’t prove a point.

Taking the stairs would have been artless.

His back is only to the open hallway for a breath before he’s turning, coat whipping, one foot on the ground for the pirhouette, and shouldering a Russian VAL “Threadcutter” specialized automatic carbine. Black polymer with a folding stock, whole barrel is a specially designed suppressor. Fires Gucci subsonic ammunition. Vlad told him about them. Balhazar loves the things.

The way a suppressor sounds in a movie, that little thwip noise, that’s the sound the Threadcutter actually makes.

If fast is slow and slow is smooth The King of Killers doesn’t care for or need the middle of a military operator’s aphhorism. When both of his feet hit the ground and he’s got the short thick barreled rifle up he’s off on a sprint.

Hugging the wall.

An average hotel has 48 inch wide hallways.

Not a footstep heard.

The hallways in The 9 are sixty inches wide, allowing for furniture outside room doors and still room for two people to walk abreast down the corridor.

Not a camera caught glimps.

A Holiday Inn Express has 30 yard long hallways in any direction.

Three men down the hall, Balthazar at a sprint, blue dot sight, thwip, thwip, the farthest two men’s brains splatter the dirty wallpaper pointillist red.

The 9 Has two wings, north and south. Two main corridors, 100 yards long. Three inches off from exact middle of that hundred yards is a blind cross corridor 60 yards long and 60 inches wide.

He hurdles a wingback chair and at the jump’s apex thwip, kills the closest guard with a bullet to the middle of the forehead.

Passed the cross corridor a bit ago, an unfilmable blur, figuring anyone to hit the north hall would think twice with five corpses sprinkled about like cigarette butts.

Balthazar slows sprint to trot to stop with his back against the wall just west of the final north branching corridor. Breath steady, not winded, 17 rounds in the magazine. Head check east, just corpses.

There will be more men closer to Bosch. It’s known that if the bastard puts you on hall duty you’re a canary in a coalmine, one job being to sound the alarm so the phalanx can form Spartan wall tight around Mister fucking Bosch. And if you stop the threat? Hey, have a candy bar and a Pepsi.

The King of Killers sees everything. Up the end of the hall about six yards west above the back stairs marker graffiti Pinch would throw a fit over in a delicate calligraphic script reads “spem omnem relinquite qui huc intratis”

Well, broken clock is right twice a day anyway.

Balthazar closes his eyes and he hears everything. Sets of feet shifting weight, heavy and light footed, yelling in one of Bosch’s rooms, Vlad and Bosch taking turns sounds like. A sadist like Bosh wouldn’t listen anyway if told torture of any kind wasn’t going to break that giant Russian bastard. Bal had traded war stories with Vladimir, sounds like he’s had worse.

As evidenced earlier, the hotel is a giant bitch of an old building. But ask even any five permanent residents how big it really is and they’ll say it’s really goddamn big.

Balthazar hears eight separate overlapping breath patterns in the hallway outside Bosch’s room, along with shifting weights, mutters, a radio check, slapping the bottom of a walkie talkie. Call it nine to be safe.

Maybe five people know the actual exact dimensions of the hotel, from corridor width and length, to traverse between floors, to that different floors have different height ceilings which no one ever has seemed to notice. Pinch, Malick, and Balthazar are three of those maybe five.

In his head the men are landing where they stand in the corridor pictured in Balthazar’s mind.

The Door to what Bosch would wish people call his office is always shut down tight from the inside, no point of egress. Slow to unlock and get all the barricades down from that door too. No danger. Three yards past that, the door to the adjoining room, always open. Bosch keeps office hours. Swear to god that man is shit you’d wipe off your shoe onto dry grass wearing a Rolex.

The king of killers only works for coin or over personal insult. Man’s gotta have a code yeah? Bosch is a sport killer. Vermin. Filthy rich, protected by a malevolent god only gives commandments to Pinch most times, and runs two of the three primary currencies of the underworld.

Guns, international arms dealer, who knows what protections come with that gig.

And people. A human trafficker. Just another kind of sport killing. Slower, but the outcome remains if you ask Balthazar. If you had kids you’d hate the man more.

Bal closes his eyes and places the pawns on the board. Visualization, tradecraft, part of the art. Hallway around the corner, left to right, A, B, C. four yards to the locked door, four yards to the adjoining room. Break it down into feet, divide it by 2, call those spaces 1 through 12.

Vlad said he played chess like an artist. True enough.

By the time he gets to b10, jig is up, he’ll go loud. Make an entrance. 24 feet and 8 armed men to the goal. Through the wall Vlad is cursing in Russian.

Balthazar grabs a small round side table sitting next to him on the right, places it two feet out into the hall, just out of sight of any of the men in the corridor he’s about to enter, and taps it with his foot to tip it over.

Slower than slow, could smoke a cigarette before its round edge thumps against the thin carpet, not even making much of a bump. Subtlety is an art in and of itself. Just has to be loud enough to grab everyone’s attention for two hot white blinks.

Board is all set up.

Excepting the last black Queen Bitch.

Thud flat, and Balthazar is cutting around the corner in a slick twist raising the Threadcutter. All eyes on the table, he’s a ghost. C3 takes a bullet to the skull as the King shoulders the Carbine.

Thwip, thwip, thwip, and a12, b8, and c7 take subsonic AP rounds straight through skull, brain, out back, and embedding stopped in the wall somewhere off behind them puffing plaster dust into the air. 14 rounds left in the mag.

That covers closest and farthest threats. They’re always most dangerous. Balthazar holding a glass with two fingers of Old Crow in it at the bar somewhere sometime says “Never call yourself a centrist, no man’s land just the middle ground you die on.”

He drops the Threadcutter. A4, b5, c5, and b6 are still standing, gathering wits, but there is no way to adequately describe the velocity of the King of Killers in movement. His brush moves too fast across the canvas to register at the level of reflex.

Every waking second of the day your eyes are moving, three times a second, micro adjustments, below the threshold at which you can perceive them. These are called saccades. This is how fast Balthazar sets to his work.

The Infidel slides out of his right sleeve into his hand, blade snapping out right after, and from his left sleeve drops a telescoping asp that you can only buy if you’re military or law enforcement.

From the view of his opponents a man has just twirled around the corner and killed three men they knew, now not a breath later he has an asp extended in his left hand, and a knife in his right hand. He’s pushed off in a lunge, two feet off the ground, a slow motion car crash feeling coming round, how the rollover takes forever and the airbag inflates infinitely after it’s over if you don’t die.

No luck for the men and their memories though, Balthazar lands on b4, his asp cracking pawn a4 on the neck, sending him crashing into the wall.

The NYPD did a study in the 70s to figure out why so many cops were getting stabbed.

Balthazar’s knife arm snaps straight out into the neck of pawn b5. Pawn a4 is still impacting the wall, staggered.

The NYPD found out that even with a gun drawn and aimed, if an assailant armed with a knife was ten yards or less away.

Pawn b5 leaves the board headed to his knees, grabbing his throat, and Balthazar lives up to his title, spinning counterclockwise and extending both arms to full length, with his back aimed diagonal at pawn b6. His extended arms, reversed from his initial strike position, land his blade in the back of the neck of pawn a4, brainstem slit between Atlas and Axis vertebrae at the base of the neck. Off the board. His left hand with the asp whips into pawn c5’s face, blunt force crushing an orbit.

The blade pulls out easier from between vertebrae than lodged in solid bone, and Balthazar turns the knife over in his hand reverse grip, and drives it straight across his front into pawn c5’s thoat knocking him into the other wall. Pawn b6 has started to lunge. No one will ever know why, but Balthazar whips the asp underhanded catching Pawn b6 in the balls, completing a full rotation. He pulls the Infidel’s blade out of b6’s throat and stabs him six times in the soft of the neck, taking him off the board.

B6 eats shit on the carpet between Balthazar’s feet. Off the board by default, one nut an exploded bleeding swelling tragedy, The King takes a moment. He closes the asp against his thigh, shakes his head, and bends over lighting fast and surgeon precise, severs b6’s spinal cord like he did Pawn a4. Mercy killing there, and the man didn’t even have time to groan in pain.

A bartender could barely pour a drink in the span end of those men’s lives. One long Russian epithet was cutting through the entire exchange.

There’s two more men in the room, one on each side of the door to the adjoining room where Vlad’s getting tortured. Balthazar pulls down the gaiter to around his neck like a scarf and pulls out a cheroot. Lights it with a Zippo he grabs when he drops the Infidel into his coat pocket.

The smoke is fresh air to his lungs.

Once Pinch told him that if there was a charitable and kind god, certainly, Mr. Balthazar, people like you wouldn’t exist. He exhales pure white cloud. He’d said “Same rules apply to you Arthur.” And Pinch had said it would be worth it.

The detail left unspoken, sartorial nature being odd that the blind Elevator man had been referring to minutes before was not any of the clothes Rufus wore, which none were out of his norm. He meant the low slung holster hanging against his left hip. Jet black, shining, known to the blind man by a distinct noise it made against Balthazar’s thigh that would only be noticed by someone with senses attuned to the loss of a primary navigator of the world. The oddness noticed by the elevator operator indeed, Balthazar was carrying his pistol, The Contessa.

His ancestors had been outlaws somewhere back in history, true, and another reason he took well to the name Prospector. It fit the milieu. But as a man who rolls his own gnarled cigarillos and calls them cheroots, enjoys whiskey, and is quick by all measures, and quicker with a pistol, he was prone to some anachronistic affectations.

The Contessa was a heavily modified Chiappa Rhino revolver. Usually milled from solid aluminum alloy, his is forged and blued steel with a handle of carved bone, rumored to be from a dead man, with a nickel plated cylinder. He wanted a break top that he didn’t need antique ammunition for. The only revolver that could take the abuse of high grain loads, modern calibers, and seemed built for being a break top was the Rhino. Fires from the bottom of the cylinder, not the top, and figured that if forged properly instead of CNC milled the skeletal frame top lining the low barrel would make a good breaktop.

The Contessa is his bride, any woman in his bed, just a consort.

He puffs coal engine clouds and walks through the doorway to the room adjoining Bosch’s office, where Vlad is yelling that his torturer is a little bitch with a small dick. The two men on either side of the door start to raise their arms when they see Balthazar unmasked. Before their hands are halfway up their chests they’ve taken rounds through their hearts and The Contessa is back in her holster. They fall and slide potato sack dragging bloody streaks down either side of the doorway. Balthazar ashes his cheroot.

In the other room the thunderclap of .40 cal Smith & Wesson makes a WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?! From Bosch, sounding completely agitated and out of sorts. Rare is this day.

Balthazar takes to the doorway, not entering the room, leaning on the frame, puffing his smokestack. The bellows work blowing white out of his nose and mouth so you’d think it’s his first smoke after sixty days on lockdown in a cell in county.

He sees Bosch; legs wide, straddle stance, over Vlad; taped to an ugly chair, knocked over, bloody all over. In one hand Bosch has a hook end disposable scalpel, in the other, a Sig P229. Eyes up, Balthazar sees the gun is already pointed his direction. Used and broken disposable scalpels and their foil wrappers litter the rug, needle ends in gauges from blue plastic end to yellow and red plastic ended, but nothing orange, no one piece jobs you shoot dope with. Just the big sterile screw ons they use in hospitals that come wrapped in strange little rolls stuffed in cardboard boxes

“Vlad,” Balthazar says around his smoke.

Vladimir can’t see him, but knows the voice. Balthazar, my friend. The Russian is doing the best job Balthazar thinks he’s ever seen of keeping it together considering the bloody near dead pin cushion sliced up mess he is. Blood is soaked through the chair, pooling on the floor. Could you tell Mr. Bosch that he can kill me or kindly cut me free.

Bosch slices him at a bulge on his torso, that’s a fucked rib. The sig is still pointed in Balthazar’s face.

“Shut the fuck up you inhuman Gopnik fuck, my god, do you ever shut the fuck up?” Bosch, he’s panting. “And you” He waves the gun up and down “You walked into it,” Bosch keeps his aim trained, sticks the scalpel in Vlad, poking out of his belly, and pushes himself up to standing. “I’ve got you dead to rights, and you assaulted ME, in MY place of business. Do you know how that looks to some people Mr. Balthazar? How that looks to people who look down upon people like you and me”

Balthazar stubs his cheroot out on the bottom of his boot and lights another. “Nope.”

The air between them is muggy with the smell of Vlad’s blood, bits of it probably floating around the entire makeshift office as particulate matter, wait and the walls could turn into a pointillist nightmare. And Bosch, so easy to work up when he’s like this. “It looks like you’re fucked, you and Althea” the name perks Balthazar, “Delphine.” Bosch uses the name as punctuation. “These, these fucking Russians.”

Balthazar takes a drag, blows out a plume of white, through the haze he says, “say those names again.”

Bosch laughs, an exhausted laugh, a this Russian just won’t break laugh, but still, it travels like happiness. “Even by the obtuse rules that govern every single aspect of this wretched fucking hotel, this fucking graveyard, I have you breaking into my room, interrupting my business, and killing my personal staff.” With his free hand Bosch tries to do the suit straightening act but it doesn’t play because his shirt is half untucked, tie loose, he’s been sweating, blood all over him. Not his, but still. “I think I’ll shoot you dead now mr. Balthazar. Alpha dog. ‘The assassin every killer wishes they were’… King of Killers.” The earned titular comes out a spat epithet.

But it’s Bosch, and Bosch is a stage show, so there isn’t an immediate gunshot.

Balthazar pulls his wool coat back behind the holster on his left hip. The Contessa. Rare is a man that sees the end of her six inch barrel and sees anything else afterwards but god or the devil. “Well.”

The pause hangs dead. Bosch has never seen him wearing the Contessa. Most people, even staff and regulars at the hotel haven’t. The Contessa is not just a tool. The Contessa is Balthazar’s favorite brush. Bosch is already sweating so it’s hard to tell when more comes bubbling up, but his hand, his hand gives it away, the P229 shakes. Blink to miss. Not even a half millimeter of wiggle, but it’s a shake in the hand.

Balthazar glances down at his bride, the Contessa at peace in her spot lying against his hip. Sniffs the air, blinks, spits on the ground between them.

“Take your shot then boss.”