Morning Run

Not quite sure where this one came from, although the setting, route, main character and Escalade were all part of my walk into work. The events are fictional, though, and it just goes to show what happens when you let your mind wander. 

Clearly, this one is the start of something bigger. What, exactly, I couldn’t begin to tell you. 

And if anyone is reminded of Detective Kima Greggs from The Wire while reading this … good. 

 

Keisha Caine Westinghouse prepares for her day. She is a creature of ritual and habit, and the fact that today is the most important of her life has no import on the way she begins it. 

 

She takes a long shower, luxuriating in the heat and the rush of the water. It has been built to her exacting specifications, using components rated for industrial power washers, and is powerful enough to knock an unsuspecting user sideways. She does not step out until all traces of sleep have been blasted out of her system. Her caramel skin seems to glow in the steamy light as she carefully dries and moisturises. 

 

Once she is clean and dry, Keisha Caine Westinghouse takes a light breakfast of fruit and yoghurt. She washes it down with a couple of mouthfuls of juice, gulped greedily from the bottle as she stands at the fridge. She has never seen the point in washing up, and will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid it. She eats on the move, and naked.

 

She dresses for her morning run. A short neoprene/cotton unitard is the base layer, providing support without compromising movement. Over the top, a ragged pair of black knee-length board shorts, and an old Chili Peppers tour t-shirt, worn to kitten softness. Long socks, and a boxfresh pair of Nikes in plain black, laced tightly in a b-boy zigzag. 

 

She ties a precise knot in her straight drop of long, black hair, and threads the resulting ponytail into a long-bill corduroy baseball cap. It is free of logo or adornment. Keisha Caine Westinghouse had spent most of a quiet evening unpicking the garish flock New York Giants logo from the front. She was a fan of the hat, not the team. 

 

She tucks a 2Gig Creative Muvo player into the knot of her ponytail, carefully making sure it is precisely vertical, and slips the Sennheiser C60 headphones she prefers into place. It is preloaded with a playlist that she had frowned over for a half-hour before bed last night. Massive Attack to start, building to System of a Down at the peak of the run, Rilo Kiley and Lucinda Williams on the cooldown as she finishes. 

 

Her beloved pair of Nixon Fly shades complete the look, impenetrable, unknowable. One final item sits at the small of her back, and she would not be comfortable without it’s compact weight. She would feel unbalanced. Incomplete.

 

Keisha Caine Westinghouse regards herself in the full-length mirror by the door to her flat. She is slim, toned, but at 5’3” perhaps a little shorter than she’d like. Her features are blunt, broad. She’s not pretty in the dictonary definition of the word, but there’s something about her that cuts through that. She is poised, graceful. 

 

She nods faintly at her reflection, satisfied. She doesn’t even notice any more that whenever she faces the mirror, her hands clench into fists. Her fingernails are painted in chipped Hard Candy purple, and they are bitten to the quick. 

 

She leaves her flat, and jogs out onto Sussex Gardens. It’s early, not even half past six, and a hazy light is softening the edges of the Edgeware Road. It’s quiet, of course. There’s at least an hour before the rush hour kicks in properly, and by then Keisha Caine Westinghouse will be in Soho, sipping an espresso in Bar Italia and contemplating the rest of the day. 

 

The traffic is thin at this time of the morning, and Keisha Caine Westinghouse takes advantage of that to take a short cut down the Edgeware Road. She wouldn’t normally do it, but it gives her the opportunity to pass Jacqes Samuels, and take a moment to peer wistfully at the stock within. The baby Steinway in the window waits, filled with unplayed music. For a moment, her long fingers drum an impatient arpeggio on the pad of her thumb. She allows herself a sigh, then picks up the pace again and hangs a left onto George Street, past the Paddington Hilton on a straight path to Marlylebone High Street. 

 

She is focussed, but watchful. Aware of everything around her. The loose scattering of early commuter traffic is logged and noted, and she misses nothing. Which is why she suddenly breaks her normal route, and pulls a left down Manchester Street into Manchester Square, picking up the pace as she bops past the Wallace Collection. The slow bulk of the black Escalade that’s been following her since she hit the Edgeware Road makes the same turn. It’s a careful fifteen seconds away from her, a margin that would vanish at the poke of a toe on the accelerator. At best, she has ten to formulate a workable threat assessment and solution.

 

It takes her a second and a half. She speeds up again, cutting onto Hinde Street, leaving just enough leeway for the riders in the big car to see where she’s headed. As she runs, she reaches to the bulge at the small of her back. She slides the Glock 9 free from its speed rig, thumbing the safety to off.

 

She stops at the junction of Hinde and Thayer, brings up the gun in a cop’s two-handed grip, and waits.

 

The Escalade grumbles round the corner, rolling it’s shoulders like Mike Tyson. The driver spots his target, and twigs he’s been made. The engine roars, and smoke floods from the heavy radials. His reaction time was good, and the V8 in the Escalade had been tuned for high torque. He aims the big car’s flat nose at Keisha Caine Westinghouse, and drives straight at her.

 

She fires. Four shots, snapped off in a wide, sharp-edged C-shape. Left right down left. The shots sound like flat slaps in the thick air.

 

The windscreen of the Escalade stars neatly in two places, at the driver and passenger positions. The other two rounds shred both front tires, the tortured rubber giving way as the 9mm slugs slam home. At forty miles an hour, and utterly out of control, the Escalade shimmies, screaming as the back end jitters round. It can’t hold the momentum, and flips, hopping two feet into the air before banging back onto the tarmac, pancaking the driver’s side. 

 

The car judders to a halt six feet from Keisha Caine Westinghouse, facing her. She fires again, two shots, offsetting the initial double-tap by six inches or so. The Escalade groans, dying slowly. 

 

She waits for a minute or so, while the dust settles. Car alarms whoop and whistle in the sudden quiet. She clocks the number-plate. J4MAL. A gangbanger’s ride, then. English boys making out like they were straight out of Compton rather than Croydon. Keisha Caine Westinghouse huffs out an exasperated snort. 

 

Lightly, she springs up onto the passenger side of the dead Escalade, and pops the door. Smoke billows out. She waves it away with the barrel of the Glock. The guy in the passenger seat is dead. The first slug had hit just under the nose, the little groove known as the filtrum. It had caved his face in, tearing through the extensive gold dental work he’d undergone, turning all that metal into shrapnel. Filling his mouth and nasal cavity with fast-moving shards of gold had done nothing for his looks. There wasn’t much left of him below his top lip. The other round had gone through his throat, which was really just adding insult to injury. 

 

The driver was slightly better off, in that he was still alive. Keisha Caine Westinghouse’s first shot had missed him completely, burying its snout in the headrest. The second shot had done a better job, and shattered his sternum. He was taking harsh, whooping gulps of air, and every exhalation had blood in it. 

 

A tinny, migraine-inducing Midi version of Jay-Z’s Dirt Off Your Shoulder rings out. The driver looks around frantically. It’s coming from a pocket of his Rocawear trackies. Before he can figure out the logistics of stemming the flood of gore from his throat while taking the call, Keisha Caine Westinghouse moves in. She slips a hand into the pocket, and pulls out a Razr, that is now buzzing like a hornet. She regards the call ID for a moment, then flips the phone open.

 

She listens to the jabber that instantly pours out of the earpiece with a quizzical frown. 

 

“You D?” she asks the driver. He bulges his eyes at her, and that’s all he can manage.

 

“It’s for you,” she says, and moves up close, sliding past the corpse of the passenger, tucking the phone into place by D’s left ear. 

 

D listens. He tries to say something, but can’t get the air. Instead, a single pearl of blood spits out, and lands with mathematical precision on the left lens of Keisha Caine Westinghouse’s shades. The bright red spot on the black looks like a tiny window, opening suddenly on the fury of Keisha Caine Westinghouse’s soul.

 

She plucks the Razr back. “Don’t worry about it, D,” she says. “I’ve got this.”

 

“I’m sorry,” she continues into the phone. “He’s indisposed. Can I take a message?”

 

She listens to the rant on the other end of the line, amused as it spikes in violence and intensity. 

 

“Hey,” she says, shoehorning her way into a gap as whoever was yelling had to take a breath. “Hey. You started it.”   

 

She snaps the phone closed. D has gone quiet. The frantic wheezing has stopped, and the fear in his eyes has loosened into a kind of acceptance. She watches quietly, her eyes locked on his, as whatever is left in him gives up and drops away. 

 

A single tear rolls down his cheek as he dies. Keisha Caine Westinghouse takes it from him with a finger, and tastes it with the tip of her tongue. The sweet and salt of him brings the faintest quirk of a smile to her lips.

 

It’s not quite seven in the morning, on a quiet Wednesday morning in May. The men in the car will not be the only people Keisha Caine Westinghouse would kill before the sun went down. Not by a long shot.