Sudden Rain #3

It was a gorgeous sunny day, with clear azure skies, and mild temperatures in the mid seventy-degree range. It was almost perfect, unless you like rain, along with dark gloomy skies, occasional fog, humidity, and a generally depressing mood.

Jake loved the rain. He killed in the rain. Now with twenty-three days of bright sunshine in a row since the last rain, Jake was getting sort of “twitchy”. He didn’t like the feeling, as he hated the sunshine nor did he understand why anyone in his or her right mind would like bright, warm, dry, weather! The only thing that could make it any worse would be if that obnoxious song “It’s a Small World After All” was playing loudly. Jake was angry, he was furious, he seriously needed to kill someone…no really; he needed to kill someone soon.

Jake often killed for money, being a type of assassin who preferred blades to guns or bombs. He also killed for his own deviant pleasure, picking random victims always in a different city, never twice in the same city. There were a lot of cities.

The TV was tuned to the Weather Channel, the only channel Jake ever watched. Somewhere in the world, even in the good old USA it was raining. In fact, in Venice Italy it was flooding. Oh, if only he could be there, the body count would be very high, very high indeed.

Just then the local weather came on. There was a hint of a thunderstorm that afternoon between 4:00 – 6:00 PM on the west side of town. Which of course was the side opposite the fleabag motel he was staying at. But rain is rain, and death can arrive on the west side as well as any other compass direction. It was now 3:37 PM, so Jake looked out the window that faced west…not a cloud in sight. But not one to forsake an opportunity, Jake, already dressed in his usual black undertaker attire, grabbed his black trench coat and his newly sharpened K-Bar knife and drove out of the motel lot and headed west.

Twenty-five minutes later he was in the “west side” of town, a mixture of light industrial, cheap motels, and equally cheap apartments. Greasy spoon worker-bee diners dotted the streets. Foot and car traffic was sparse for the time of day, the area being more on a three-shift time element than the 8-5 workday of the office types. Jake found a parking spot near a closed, run down building with only a few other cars on the street. The crappy nondescript car he was driving fit right in. He looked at his watch, it was 4:15 PM and growing dark, as Jake grew calm. Then the rain began, heavy at first, then a deluge. Jake left the car and walked over to the alley entrance. He waited in the rain, rain that already in the space of minutes had the street gutters overflowing the curb. He could barely see, and no way in hell could anyone see him.

Splash, splash the sound of running feet sloshing through the torrent, his victim-mark-hit and all those other nouns, ran right to Jake, thinking the alley a brief refuge from the storm. Wrong, it was the end of the line pal, as Jake planted the K-Bar in the victim’s chest right to the hilt. The body actually made a plunk sound as it hit the ground. Die where you lay pal. He felt better as he drove away, the skies unfortunately were clearing, and then a rainbow came out; how ironic, no gold at the end of the rainbow, just a dead body. He left town, headed to the Pacific Northwest. It always rained in the northwest. It sounded like a plan, since he loved the rain.