ignacio moya | district seven | fin

The Salazars are his family, and he has done terrible things to protect them.

He is well known throughout Seven as a man who can get things done. Even the Mayor's office has has employed him. They told him to keep it discrete, to not do anything to compromise their position. He merely laughed, removing a pair of dusty sunglasses and rubbing the lenses with the inside of his shirt collar. They knew discretion was not going to be an issue, not with him, else they would not have broken rank and come down from their ivory towers to ask for his help.

He has taken many lives before their time, and for that he feels little remorse. Life is a game of changing, taking and giving. Sometimes roses must be picked before they fully bloom, so that others may thrive. That is life.

The cicadas hum as he counts the money, one stack of notes after the next. He never misses a beat. And when he's satisfied that everything is accounted for, he stares at the dealer, who for a few horrifying moments believes that there is something deeply wrong. When he gives them a satisfactory nod, the relief on their face is like a flush of cold water across their brow, and they are almost itching to run outside, out to sell more of the drugs he gave them.

He lets them leave the bar, barren and void of any customers at this time of morning, as he continues to make preparations for the rest of the day. There is no air-con, spare a ceiling fan that spins far too slowly to vanquish the wicked summer heat. He sweats through his dark shirt as he packs a canvas duffel-bag with all the things he needs: rope, flashlight, water. Axe.

Walking down the street to the tune of lumber being sawed and processed, he begins to whistle a happy tune from old days, when summers were long and the flowers bloomed with more colour. Or perhaps that is just how he chooses to remember it.

Halcyon days drinking sweet peach tea with ice on the expansive patio of the Salazar manor. Sixteen years old. Motherless. Fatherless. An outsider, but welcomed into the family as if he was their son. A debt he feels will never be repaid. But he does his best, slinking through dark alleyways, collecting drug money and butchering those who plot against the family.

His parents, they abandoned him because they wanted to have a good time.

That's not so bad, he muses to himself on sticky evenings such as this. He would probably have done the same.

The children run home from playing in the streets, a patrol of Peacekeepers shoo-ing them along their way like they are nothing more than a nest of mice. They pass him, giggling as they hurdle over fences and sprint bare-footed through the mud tracks back to their parents. He hears the static of the patrol's radio as they pass him, and he smiles warmly through his thick, black beard, giving a mock salute with two-fingers tapping on his forehead.

He thinks back to the young couple from last week, they had children around the same age. Orphans now. He regrets when people conspire so recklessly when they have so much to lose and leave behind, but that cannot be helped, he supposes.

You are wondering - is he a good man, or a bad man? You tell me. He left them out there in the woods, with the wolves so near. Knowing they did not know their way back to town. He could hear them scream. He could have turned back. He did not.

The midday sun burns, but his skin is hardened, freckled by time spent waiting outside offices with a pair of binoculars and half a beef sandwich. Sometimes he watches for weeks, learning their routines, where they keep the keys, when they leave the place empty.

But today he is not commissioned for recon work, no. Today he must convince someone to drop their rash ideas of blackmail. Stealing what does not belong to you and using it as a bargaining chip for power is laughable. You do not try and strange a snake - it will usually bite back.

He plans his day methodically as he carries the duffel-bag through the streets of Seven, down to a corner off the butcher's street. First he will deal with this little problem, then he will go for food and drinks, after washing the blood from his knuckles. Work always gives him such a fierce appetite.

He waits at the corner for a few minutes, waiting for the next patrol of white pawns to glide past. He knows where these clockwork soldiers will be, and when, and why. He has it all mapped out in his head. He moves on, walking past the town square. He thinks back to the riots here a few years ago. He used them to hide what he did. It was clever. It was disgusting.

The man he seeks has a flush of ginger hair, and a strawberry blonde beard so scraggly that he resembles a scarecrow. Last week one of his dealers told him that he was jumped by a man who looked like a stiff breeze could knock him over, but the man had desperation in his eyes and a knife in his palm.

He wonders just what the endgame was. Did he really think it would end well for him? Did he see the Salazars paying for what was rightfully theirs in the first place? He will deal with it, because that's his job. Deal with it, so they don't have to. Deal with it, because if this slides then all his dealers around town will start losing their stock. Integrity keeps everything moving.

He passes the lumber mill where he took Emily. They kissed for hours until the sun had long set, falling into each-other, forgetting everything else that was going on in their lives. He had bribed the foreman so that he could take her inside. He had told her that the view from atop the mill was breathtaking, especially at night when you could see the street-lamps stretching out towards the hills and beyond. He said it was something that she just had to see. He pushed her.

He remembers lighting a cigarette and walking the other way whilst crowds ran to her body. A faint orange glow drifting in the heavy evening air.

He reaches the place of residence where Rocco saw the man run, a lonely brick hut at the end of a dirty street. It's unimpressive. Usually he has to deal with people of a higher class, in lavish mansions and ballrooms - Some carefully placed lies, a few whispers, and he makes them kill each other. No need to get his own hands dirty when they're so willing to do it themselves.

More often than not, when the Salazars ask him to deal with someone, he has to be discrete, careful with his approach. He has to consider the consequences of their death, what to do with the body, whether to make it look like an accident, how to infiltrate but also escape without detection or suspicion. Today he simply has to take the axe from his bag, walk across the street, and kick down the wooden door from it's hinges.

No one will miss this man.

He takes back the bricks of cocaine, piling them into the duffel-bag and slinging it over his broad shoulders with little effort. He leaves the body for the flies, a bleeding mess sprawled out across his sofa. There won't be questions asked when the neighbours start to smell his corpse and the Peacekeepers come knocking. Men like him don't matter.

Walking back to his bar, he thinks no more of the dead body he has left behind than a lumberjack would think of a tree he felled. Instead, his thoughts drift to tonight, where he will bring good news to the Salazars, and share spiced rum around a fire-pit.

Ignacio Moya will never be a rich man, but he is honest enough, and even, deep down, happy.