"I have reason to believe that you are in significant danger," Alexei Lyapunov said, his sharpened consonants playing at a Russian accent. Alexei was a large man with tightly packed musculature to hang off of a sturdy skeletal frame. As such, he comically dwarfed the leather and walnut chair that the mayor's office provided for it's guests. The ridiculousness of it had nagged at him from the moment that he'd laid eyes on the chair, but he was able to put it in the back of his mind for the sake of the greater good. In this case, the 'good' was setting up his next kill.
An awful silence set about the room, and very slowly, Alexei's message seemed to set in. A tall, lanky Hispanic man, mayor Guillermo Delasol was not easily cast as intimidating outside of political circles. Lyapunov was his polar opposite, and looked break a man between his fingers. He'd known this day was coming eventually, as many people as he'd pissed off trying to clean up his city- he hadn't expected it so soon, though. Knowing that any attempt to reach the silent alarm with his hands above the desk would be blatantly obvious, Guillermo cleared his throat and sat his pen down. "I uh... What exactly are you saying, Mister Lyapunov?"
Alexei smiled and leaned forward, causing the wood to creak under the strain of his weight. "Mayor Delasol, I've killed a lot of people for the common good. Israel has no shortage of rich, powerful enemies, you see. I don't work for the my government anymore, but I still try to look out for the common good. You are in deep trouble, mister mayor, so I have come to warn you."
All at once, the fear that had been as real as Alexei himself departed from Guillermo. "Excuse me!" he shouted, standing up an slamming one hand down on his desk with a thunderous clap. "You mean you came to threaten me!" he screamed. Alexei didn't react, but remained still, smiling at the mayor with fixed eyes and a toothy grin. "Didn't you?! DIDN'T YOU?!" the mayor screamed, slapping a stack of papers off of his desk in Alexei's direction.
Unphased by the mayor's theatrics, Alexei replied in the same cool voice, now made to sound eerie in the shadow of the mayor's rage. "Oh, no, not a threat, mister Delasol." The mayor made several loud screeching sounds and took to flailing his arms about, almost taking on the appearance of a brain damaged eagle. Ignoring what he had to say was fairly easy, given that English was his third language, but Alexei felt it was safe to presume the mayor wanted him to leave. "Are you listening to me?! Huh?!" Guillermo screamed as he marched up to Alexei's chair, inflamed with this unwanted guest's indifference. Alexei shifted in the chair and smiled at the mayor.
"I don't believe you know who your enemies truly are. To be more specific," Alexei said, standing up and instantly dwarfing the mayor. "I don't think you know who he is."
"You mean to tell me you're not my enemy?" Guillermo asked, stepping back to lean against his desk and fold his arms. He surveyed Alexei more thoroughly now, reconsidering his aggression in the face of this man's enormous stature. Alexei nodded slowly, careful not to break eye contact. Guillermo considered him for a time, and then glanced at his watch. Then, he looked back to Alexei, who stood in military parade rest stance, carefully observing the mayor back. The mayor sighed, wiped the sweat from his brow, and then fished a cigar from his pocket. "Lock the door on your way out" he said, his voice low and tired as he lifted the cigar to his mouth.
"I should ask you to reconsider," Alexei said, his voice as cool and suggestive as when the conversation started. The mayor stopped his lighter just shy of the cigar and glared back up at Alexei. Alexei nodded. "As you wish," he acknowledged, then turned, and left. Too bad, Alexei thought, the cute ones are always dumb.
Kirby took a long, deep breath. Then, he jumped off of the roof of city hall. Everything rushed up towards him, finer and finer detail rapidly resolving on the pavement below. The smooth surface gave way to dips and bumps, which then gave way to fractures, which held smaller cracks. Then, all at once, Kirby stopped, the rope drawing taught against his harness with a loud pop. As his downward momentum swung him in towards the building, Kirby leveled a double-barrel shotgun at the glass and fired twice. The rounds were mostly harmless to men- birdshot at any range past ten feet mostly left only bumps and bruises. The large glass pane shed a coat of fine splinters an large cracks shot across its frame under the impact of the rounds. Kirby kicked his legs out, crossed his arms over his face- he had to protect his pretty face- and crashed through the glass. Kirby landed on the thick carpet in a sunlit fog of glass dust, standing neatly with his arms spread, as if to say 'ta-da'!
As the mayor wheeled away from this new and terrible attacker, Kirby drew a revolver from a leather holster on his hip and fired a single, unaimed shot into the mayor's left leg, just beneath his buttocks. The mayor let out a yelp, and just before he could collapse, Kirby stepped in and caught him by the waist. "Easy, big guy, you've got something that belongs to me," Kirby whispered, knowing he spoke too soft to be heard over the deafness he'd just inflicted. With his gun hand, Kirby reached around and plucked the cigar out of the mayor's mouth while managing to keep a finger on the trigger. Then, Kirby jammed the cigar into his mouth and took a drag off of it. "That's better," Kirby sighed, dumping out a stream of smoke against the mayor's face.
Suddenly, a loud crashing sound filled the room, cutting through Kirby's tinnitus and causing him to put his gun to the mayor's head. There was another crash, this time accompanied by the splintering of wood, as the wooden double doors at the front of the office threatened to buckle in. Kirby pulled the mayor tight against his own body, and continued staring at the door, fascinated by the rapid response. The doors buckled under the third hit, and a huge, brick wall of a middle-aged man smashed into the room. He had no weapons that Kirby could see.
"Уродливая сабака!" the man snarled.
Kirby tilted his head, let out a puff of smoke, opened his mouth to talk, and frowned instead. He didn't understand it, but in his experience, foreign words spat at him like those were generally unfair assessments of his character. Also, foreign languages effectively gutted his ability to come up with witty retorts, which left him feeling robbed. There was something else, though- he'd seen this man around before, very recently, on the other end of the country. That never meant anything good. There was a loud whooshing sound as the unbolted air conditioning unit that Kirby had secured his rope to plummeted past the window. Not much time now. "You know, I'll just work on the presumption that you want to kill me," Kirby said. Kirby's revolver went off, blasting a quarter-sized patch out of the other side of Guillermo's head. Guillermo's body jerked free of Kirby's grasp, and then collapsed on the floor in a heap. Kirby shifted his aim to the Caucasian man, and was jerked out through the window.
Kirby had disappeared out the window in a violent flash of motion, and Alexei ran to the edge in pursuit of his exotic prey. His stomach bottomed out at the thought that Kirby was splattered on the pavement below. When he looked, though, the only thing he saw was a smashed AC unit, and the car underneath that it had obliterated. When he panned his view further down the street, he could see an opened, abandoned parachute being pressed into a chain link fence by the wind. Even though his quarry had escaped him, Alexei's frustration couldn't outweigh his appreciation for Kirby's over-the-top style. Unfortunately, this meant he'd have to check back in with the Eye. The bright side was that the best hunts were never easy, and Kirby was poised to be his best yet.
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