The smell of curried chicken filled Robin’s kitchen. Cooking always soothed her. She supposed that’s why she had opened the café. Lord knows she didn’t really need the extra work and it certainly wasn’t about the money. She earned more than enough doing freelance web design and back end database design for some very wealthy individuals. Jose had taught her more about designing secure websites than any other instructor she had ever had. He would routinely try to crack her sites and very recently he told her that she had surpassed his abilities. She wasn’t sure she believed him since every hacker she knew always kept an ace up their sleeves.
Right now cooking was keeping her mind off thinking about what kind of bombshell Matt might be readying. He said he had decided to “do something” about a source of evil. Matt saw things very much in black and white. Combine that with a background in a very action oriented field of work and she honestly wasn’t sure what he would do to someone or something that was evil, but it wouldn’t be pretty.
She loved that he was so straightforward. You always knew where you stood with him and before he lied, something she’d never known him to do, he would just say nothing. It had been a problem early in their relationship once or twice when they had gotten into a discussion on morality or theology. She had bee raised solely by her mother, a successful attorney and latter law professor, who was a very vocal atheist. By the time she had flown the nest she decided that their must be something out there and that her mother protested too much. She didn’t claim to know what God was like and then she came to Westridge.
Long talks with Chris and some of the members lead her to becoming a Christian. She still maintained what she believed to be a sort of free-thinker mentality and didn’t pretend to have all the answers. Matt’s attitude frustrated her a little in the beginning and she knew the feeling was mutual. As their friendship and mutual respect grew over the course of two years it mattered less and less. It was probably in the last six months that she realized that she loved him. She suspected that the feeling was mutual and that perhaps one day they would get married. Now that depended on what it was that he had to say.
The doorbell rang and she answered it. It was Matt and he had a bouquet of wild flowers. “Come on in. I’ll get a vase for the flowers. They’re beautiful.” She moved to the kitchen and he followed close behind. “Go ahead and set the table while I take care of this and get dinner plated up.
Matt grabbed plates out of the cabinet. “So who’s minding the shop, Troy or Morgan?”
She drew water from the tap into a plane glass vase. “Troy. He’s been asking for more hours since Barry has taken sick.”
“The chicken smells good. I haven’t had your curry in months.” He set plates and silver out on the small square dining table.
Robin put the small crock on the table’s center and turned to face Matt. “Okay enough small talk. I am not going to be able to eat until you tell me what has happened.” She held his arms and looked deeply into his eyes. “Whatever it is is making you terribly sad. I don’t like it already.”
“Sit down.” When she didn’t he smiled. “You never were good at listening. Fine stand.” His face grew serious again. “You know that in the army I was a sniper and it was my job to assassinate people. I made my peace with that a long time ago. Well there was one thing that happened that ended that career and changed my life.” He pulled a chair out from the table and sat down. Robin joined him. “I killed a man that wasn’t a man.”
“What do you mean, ‘Wasn’t a man’?”. She cocked her head slightly. “What kind of man isn’t a man?”
“He was a demon. Specifically I believe he was a jinni.” He dished himself out some curry.
“A genie? You mean as in Aladdin?”
“Something like that. Jinni are to that part of the world as demons and angels are to the west. I believe that they are the same sort of being, just given different names by different cultures. Add layer upon layer of cultural accretion and you wind up with things as different as Screwtape and Barbara Eden.” He gestured for her to sit down, hoping that he could ease into this and in part desiring to postpone it for as long as possible.
Robin sat and fixed a small plate. “Okay I suppose that makes some sense.” She wanted him to get to the point, but she trusted him enough to wait.
“So there I am in a building, in the middle of the desert in this little Afghani town waiting to kill who I was told was an advisor to a local warlord. No one ever told me exactly why. Of course the why wasn’t my job, pulling the trigger was.” He sipped at some water. “I set up the shot and waited. Everything was in shades of greens, reds and yellows through my infrared scope. That did nothing to help me identify individuals so I had a spotter scope. My report said that my target was a local who would be wearing a black turban with a red jewel in its center. He’d arrive in the warlord’s limo. Sure enough, the car pulled up and he got out. I tried to sight on him using the infrared scope and he didn’t show up. So, I flipped over to straight optics and he was there plain as day. I took the shot and he went down.”
After swallowing a bite of chicken, she asked “I’m guessing it wasn’t equipment malfunction?”
He held up a hand. “I’ll get to that. I hit him center mass and switched to a head shot. I won’t go into too much detail, but what I shot him with would have gone through a steel plate no problem. My spotter told me that the target was down and that we needed to bug out. We made it out of there no problem. This hit was being recorded by my spotter and I was called into the office afterwards to debrief. I was told that for reasons they couldn’t go into that I was done with the army. They would discharge me honorably and that I was never to discuss this mission post-discharge.”
“I’d think that all of your missions would be covered by some sort of non-disclosure agreement.” She was into this story.
“Well see that’s the thing, they are. All of our missions were top secret clearance or higher. So they processed me out and after I had been out for a while I got a DVD in the mail. There were no markings. I played it. It was the mission recording. When I shot the man, he disappeared.”
“Disappeared? What do you mean?”
“Just what it sounds like. After the head shot an empty set of clothing was all that remained of him. After doing some digging on the individual in question I came to the conclusion that the same person had been serving as an advisor in that region for two hundred years. Now of course I don’t have anything like proof, fingerprints, DNA, or anything like that. What I do have is a movie of him disappearing after having been shot by two armor piercing fifty caliber rounds and pictures of him going back at least a century. That was enough for me.”
“Okay, so assuming that you’re right, what does this have to do with you being in trouble?”
“Well after I sat around for a while I decided that God put me in this position for a good reason. I don’t believe that anything happens by accident. I’ve had two experiences that I believe involved demons. I got back into researching the occult and began to pray that God would reveal to me a way to use my knowledge and skills.” His speech began to pick up speed. He wanted to finish before Robin was tempted to stop him. “A few years passed and I found a career along those lines, writing books and now my comics. I thought that was the answer that I prayed for. I wasn’t what I expected, but I was happy. Then I had a chance meeting with a man. I saw something in him that led me to believe that he was more than a man. I did some research into his background and everything pointed to involvement with supernatural evil. I decided that God called me to take him out and I did.”
Robin put her fork down. “So you’re telling me that God told you to kill someone. You realize how that sounds, right?
He nodded. “Of course I do. And I sure don’t think that I’m crazy. Unfortunately it does turn out that I was probably wrong. I killed a man, not a demon.”
“Who was it?”
“His name is Walter Owen and he was a man, just like me. I think he might have been possessed, but that alone was no reason to kill him. If I had known that I would have left him alive so that God would have a chance to redeem him. I just have to accept that his death was part of God’s plan and that now it’s His will that I turn myself in. I talked to Chris about it today and he’ll go with me.”
“Now you’re telling me that you’re going to walk into police headquarters and tell them that you killed Walter Owen because you thought he was a demon? If they believe that you did it and that you aren’t just a crackpot they’re going to put you away for a very long time.” She stood and held her hands stiffly against her sides. “God damn you. God damn you for killing someone. I’ll grant you from what I know of this man that he certainly deserved it as much as anyone does, but you have totally screwed any future that we might have had.”
“If that’s true then it’s God’s…”
“Don’t you dare tell me that it’s God’s will. You don’t know God’s will from a God damned hole in the ground. You did something crazy. You may not be crazy, but this is no different than what those sickos do that blow themselves up to take out the infidels. You’ve blown yourself up to destroy a man. Leave. Leave me know before I do something that I really regret, like breaking your fucking nose.” Her fists clenched and unclenched as tears welled out of her eyes.
Matt got up quietly. Her words hurt him, but only because they were true, every one. He left, closing her apartment door behind him. She may think that he didn’t know God’s will and that was also true. Right now as his heart felt like it would stop at any time he could only hope that His will included them coming back together.
