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I know how to scare the crap out of people. Sometimes it’s my job. But I never should have practiced on that toddler.

If I hadn’t, I would have been halfway to the airport by then, I wouldn’t have been stuck in that second rate hotel trying to teach young Jeremy how to correctly pick a lock. Not that he seemed to be extremely interested- being a cleaner, as the Russians call it, or a torpedo, as I’ve known my Argentinian compatriots to prefer, or a specialist in extrajudicial execution as my business cards say just didn’t seem to appeal to him as much as certain other topics.

“You gotta be kiddin’ me!” he spat around a wad of gum, spittle flecking the back of my neck. I was concentrating on working the jimmy through the cylinder, counting tumblers as they rose, and thus could only grunt in what I hoped was a non-conversation extending way.

“No, seriously,” Jeremy dashed my hopes, “Are you kidding me? You’re kidding me, right? You effing kidder.”

The pick broke as I twisted it too viciously, jamming the lock with a shard of broken metal. I rose from my crouched position one vertebrae at a time, coming to my full height slowly, grandly and even dangerously, if I do say so myself. Unfortunately my full height only put my eyes level with Jeremy’s chin.

“Number one,” I drawled out, “I never kid. I am a deadly serious man. Number two, I honestly have no idea who Jay Lowe is, or why I should care. Thus, according to number one and number two, I am not kidding you when I tell you that I do not care who Jay Lowe is dating now.”

“It’s not Jay Lowe, all drawn out like that,” Jeremy unknowingly talked his way one step closer to his death, and damn who his uncle was. “It’s JLo. All together- JLo. You know, Jennifer Lopez? You’re effing kidding me! Double you tee eff!” My expression had told him that, again, I did not know or care about Jennifer Lopez, anymore than Jay Lowe.

“Jeremy, listen to me, very carefully. I am not your friend. I am not your buddy. I am not even your pal. I am your instructor in the fine art of extrajudicial executions. I have been employed doing such for twenty years for your uncle, who has asked me, god only knows why, to instruct you. Not to chat with you, not to laugh at your attempts at humor, not to discuss which of the Mouseketeers you’d rather sleep with. We are in the middle of an attempt to commit a crime, you are supposed to be the lookout in this situation, and you are instead loudly drawing attention to us, distracting me and causing me to jam the door, leaving us with only one option.” Jeremy’s usual smile, that of a Labrador retriever that just heard his name, had slowly faded during my rant, changing his face from vaguely dog-like to vaguely moose-like.

“Geeze, Jake, I was just saying. Y’know?” Jeremy paused, as a very small brain cell shouted in a tiny voice inside the cavernous expanse of his brainpan for attention. “Wait, what’s our option?”

We had already followed Jake’s number one and two steps in breaking and entering into hotel rooms. Number one, knock on the door, place your hand over the spyhole, and pretend to be room service. Jeremy had ruined this step by laughing quite loudly and repeating in a high pitched false woman voice, “Yeah, room service!”

Number two, if number one gets no answer, is to pick the lock. Jeremy had ruined that step by his incredible, and sole, talent for annoying me. Normally I don’t have to resort to step three, but needs being what they are, I readied myself. A deep breath in through the nose, hold three seconds, out through the mouth, slowly, slowly, slowly, empty the lungs, hold, hold, deep breath in through the nose, ignore the bewildered look from the incompetent human load that I’m dragging around, and “Hiyah!”

My foot rebounded off the door, the shock of connection with the unyielding wood reverberating up my shin and smacking into my hip like an eight ball slamming into the corner pocket. Jeremy started laughing. I staggered a few steps down the hall, hand on my hip, walking it off- as my dad used to say when I was a kid, rub some dirt into it, you’ll be fine. Jeremy’s laughter started to ease up into hysterics. “You… you…” he gasped, “you said… you said…. HIYAH!” Getting this sentence squeezed out sent him into a fresh peal of laughter. Jeremy put his arm on the door and buried his face in it, risking getting gum stuck in his arm hair, as he kept laughing, and started pounding the door with his other arm, each fist pound syncopating with the laughter, each getting louder. “Hiyah,” he cried between guffaws, “Hiyah… like… a… ninja… turtle!” This sentiment, having been expressed, magnified the laughter by an order of magnitude. No longer was this the funniest thing in the world to Jeremy. It now might have been the funniest thing in the universe, the grandest joke in a universe of jokes. Jeremy sank to his knees, gasping, crying, and when he found the time and breath for it, screaming with laughter. Lying on the ground, he seemed to catch hold of himself for a moment, all noise ceasing. He cautiously raised an arm to his dripping nose and dragged it across his face.

“Are we finished?” I asked him, digging my knuckles into the knot of muscle just above my leg. Jeremy’s teary eyes caught mine from where he lay in a fetal position, curled in front of the door I had kicked. “Hiyah!” he whispered, and was lost in a great storm surge of laughter, bursting through what flood dams he had erected.

“What the heck is going on out here, anyway?” The door I had been trying to pick and kick had been pulled open by a mousy little man, dressed in a bathrobe, held closed in one hand. All the hair that had been on top of his head when he was a child had apparently migrated to his chest.

The computer in my skull took instant assessment of the situation. Objective one; open the door had been achieved, mainly through my action of kicking the door- though it didn’t turn out exactly the way I would have wished, I had actually effectuated a solution. The only downside was that, mousy though he was, I was currently in no position to overpower him and gain entrance to the room. It was time to employ subterfuge. “I- we- are roomservice,” I confidently asserted, raising my voice above Jeremy’s wheezing laughter.

“Hiyah!” Jeremy added from the floor. The mousy man peered at him, through eyes that probably used glasses when the rest of the body wasn’t in a bathrobe. The peering traveled down Jeremy’s body, clad in amateurish jeans and tshirt, and over to my own wardrobe, a nice black suit, white shirt and red tie, though cut a little tight on me, as I am still refusing to buy new suits while I have a gym membership that someday I will use until my old ones fit properly.

“I don’t think so?” the mousy man asked, but should have said, if he had had any guts. A spasm in my leg caused it to buckle underneath me, and I tripped over Jeremy, stumbling into the mousy man, sprawling my way into the room. “Hold on, what is going on here?” said the man, as I slammed into the wall.

“Hiyah!” giggled Jeremy from the floor of the hall.

“What?” said the mousy man. If my arms hadn’t had been numb from slamming into the wall, my normal operating procedure would have been, at this point, to employ a chokehold on the mousy man as his attention was directed at my, for lack of a better and more derogatory term, partner, relax it just short of the mousy man’s death, but after he slipped into unconsciousness, then store him in the hotel room’s bathroom. However, my arms being numb, not to mention my unreliable leg, I had to improvise.

“We’re, as I said,” I said, “room service.” Here I quickly continued, as the mousy man was about to give voice to another objection phrased as a question, “Not that you have ordered room service, but we are currently engaged in a room service exercise, a training mission, if you will, we being myself and my… associate.”

“Hiyah!” wheezed the shuddering lump in the hall. The mousy man opened his mouth again. Turning my back on him, I quickly limped towards the window in the wall opposite the door.

“My associate is new, thus he cannot be issued the standard hotel uniform. I am a manager, thus I cannot be in the standard hotel uniform. I do not think that my associate will be with this hotel very long, as you can see from his behavior, he is not very mature. However,” and I flicked the curtains away from the window, and peered out over the hotel pool. “However… however…” I repeated to gain time, as my eyes scanned over the hot tub, the tiny pool, the deck chairs arranged in pairs, the gazebos with the covered deck chairs, the locked gate, and finally rested on the far table, with the bag- The Bag!- resting on its surface.

“However?” repeated the mousy man.

As a rule, I do not have to talk my way into situations, at least not for very long. I had long lost my train of thought. The bag was resting on the table. In the locked pool area. Which means that my contact had been there when I was there, and that toddler-

See, I had been bored. It’s a hazard of the job for me. You may think that being a hitman is a life of glamor and excitement, but generally it means hurry up and wait. You go to your contact point, get the information, wait on your target, wait longer, wait longer, fall asleep, wake up with a start as the target is already passing you, chase them down with some amusing hijinks, then take care of them, then wait around for another contract. And wait.

I knew that I wasn’t supposed to pick up the bag with the information until midnight, and that it would be stowed at the pool. But there are a lot of hours in the day to fill before midnight, and I had already exhausted - and then some- Jeremy’s limited repertoire of conversational topics that also interested me on the flight down. Besides which, he was asleep on the bed in the hotel room we had rented for the night, driving me from the room with his resonant snoring. In the interest of casing the pick up scene, I had gone to the pool.

In retrospect, it may have been a poor decision to go to the pool dressed in my suit and tie. Not exactly blending into the scene. With the couples stretched out, tanning on the paired lounge chairs, the small children laughing and splashing in the pool, a man in a business suit is not as inconspicuous as he is normally. However, the power of the business suit is such that, while not inconspicuous, one is not conspicuous, either. You can simply be a business man taking some fresh air between meetings in the hotel’s conference rooms, or a traveling salesman ogling the women in bathing suits, or a hitman ogling the women in bathing suits. At least, that’s how I justified it to myself as I entered the open gate and surveyed the scene.

One small child in particular disagreed with my reasoning. As I entered, this child, who I mentally named “little Jeremy”, shrieked out to no one in general, in the fashion that toddlers who have just learned about sentences do, “Lookit the man in the clothes! Lookit the man in the clothes! Lookit the man in the clothes!”

As the last thing I wanted was to attract undo attention, or be lookit-ed, I glared at the child in my most chilling fashion. Little Jeremy laughed, and splashed water at me.

This would not do. I’m a killer, I should be able to inspire terror with a glance. I leaned close to the child, risking the splashing. Standing on the edge of the pool, I was about two feet from where Little Jeremy floundered. “Santa just called me,” I whispered to him. “He told me to tell you that you were bad, and Rudolph hates you.”

So it might have been a little extreme. I didn’t want the kid to crap himself. That much. Certainly not so much that they would close the pool. Not so much that they would close the pool, and be cleaning it still at midnight, when I was supposed to be picking up The Bag. Not so much that I would have to break into a room that had a pool view the next day to see if the bag was still there, or had been put there at all. God only knows what would happen if I was going to be too late for this hit - Jeremy’s uncle had already shown just how displeased he was with me the last time I was late for a hit, which hadn’t been that long ago, if it came to that. Not that much, certainly. Maybe a little bit of crap, but not that much.

“However?” repeated the mousy man, who was starting to become a little bit more agitated than the situation really warranted.

“However-” I extemporized, “However, we apologize for the inconvenience, and will be comping you your stay for last night.” The mousy man smiled at that, and I started to feel like my luck was turning. I started to limp towards the door, babbling, “And feel free to order anything from room service that you might want, and tell them that it is on the house. Tell them that… Mr. Spanager… said that.” I had achieved the door, and grabbed Jeremy, who had managed to pull himself to his hands and knees, by the elbow. “Thank for your stay at this hotel. Have a nice day, sir!” Pulling Jeremy, I limped at a high speed down the hall, to the elevators. I felt the mousy man’s eyes on my back down the entire hallway, until we turned the corner about a minute later.

In the elevator, Jeremy turned to me and asked, “Spanager the manager?”

“Don’t talk to me about that. Ever again.” The doors dinged, and slid open, and I started walking towards the exit to the pool area, Jeremy trotting after me like a confused, but relatively obedient puppy.

Coming out of the doors to the hotel, the humid air and sunlight hit me full in the face, like being slapped with a microwaved cow liver. Since the hotel happened to be in Miami, it had the liver smell, to it, too. Blinking my eyes rapidly, to try to wipe away some of the effect of the air, I surveyed the gate to the pool area. It still was closed, with a handwritten sign promising that it would be open soon, and the management apologized for the inconvenience. Peering between the bars, I realized that I could catch a glimpse of the edge of The Bag from where I was. Oh well, the hotel room had been good practice.

Turning to Jeremy, who still looked like a dopey moose, but broke into a Labrador grin when I turned to him, I said, “Give me a boost.”

“Boost?” he riposted.

“Over the fence.” He still looked blank. “To the pool.” Nothing. “To get The Bag.”

“What bag?”

I peered at him. “Do you know why we are here?” He nodded. “Well, the bag has our information in it. Along with a small deposit. Both are very important. Without the first, we don’t have anything to do. Without the second, we don’t do the first.”

“Oh, that bag.” Pausing a second to glance at the gate, Jeremy took two running steps, planted a hand on top of it, and vaulted over. Gripping the bars, I hissed at him in frustration, “You are supposed to be learning from me, here! Get back here!”

“You mean this bag?” Jeremy called out, his voice echoing off the hotel’s walls. “Don’t look special,” he continued, unzipping the top. Suddenly a cloud of green mushroomed out of the bag, enveloping him in dye. Men in helmets and pointing guns leaped out of the two covered gazebos on either side of the bag, yelling contradicting commands, “Freeze!” and “On the ground, now!”

In confusion, Jeremy probably obeyed one or the other. If I had my guess, I would say he froze- quick thinking and obeying commands to move didn’t seem to be in his repertoire. I say probably, because I had discovered that you can indeed run while limping badly, and was halfway to the rented car in the hotel’s garage. It’s fortunate, in the long run, that I never made it to that car, and that the rock had been there to break the toe on my good leg and slow me down and give me time to think, but that’s a story for another day.