The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

my life.
    Remembering Goosty’s generous offer, I ask the dark Angel whether one can super-size one’s meals in this joint. You can, she says, and winks the Latvian Gun over. She wears a blue satin dress and a lustful smile hiding a set of heavy braces, some excellent Baltic handiwork that really should call for an even deeper discount. But I have my fifty-percent off already. I put my virgin credit card, Torture’s special gift to me (laden with contributions from hardworking supermarket cashiers to his church fund) on the bar table and watch the waitress, a freshly retired stripper with wrinkled cleavage, squeeze out of it the equivalent of a two month’s stay at Hardwork Hotel, in exchange for a bottle filled with twenty minutes of double fantasy. This might just be the most expensive bottle in the history of mankind.
    I follow the four high heels down an alley of curtains. Behind one of them, Balatov must be trying hard to save his white cream for his last sip of black champagne. The deeper we go into the cave, the darker it gets, but the music doesn’t fade one bit. It’s Beyoncé time now. She and Jay-Z. “Crazy in Love.”
    At the end of the alley, Angel opens a curtain and leads us into the thinly veiled private space, furnished with a big box of Kleenex and a very laid-back La-Z-Boy. The blonde girl, who calls herself Ina, opens the bottle and fills our glasses: three flutes’ worth my mother’s salary for standing ten hours a day, six days a week, for three whole months in her hardverski store in Split, copying keys and searching out those hard-to-get .765 caliber cartridges she keeps in the back.
    I should probably tell her about this born-again thing.
    I throw myself into the chair. Angel starts moving about, but Ina kneels by my side and starts rubbing my left knee. Must be an order from the Good one. The stripper seems lost without her pole, like a pole-vaulter without his tool. But who’s going to criticize dancing when it comes with stripping? Not me, at least, though Crotch Dweller remains unimpressed. No standing ovation. I should be worried. I’m buying him the most expensive date of his life, and his first sandwich in years, and he better be up to it. My heart goes out to those hardworking supermarket cashiers, the donating members of the Church of Torture. I can’t let their contributions be in vain.
    Dweller doesn’t buy my arguments.
    I don’t quite get it. In the past, the flag of my manhood has been successfully raised by countless soldiers of sex, but now it’s turning into a fag. Must be all that Bible reading. I call out my fantasy-squad, the elite cells of my brain, and with the help of another bubbly glass I manage to fully morph the two girls into a pirate copy of Gun and Munita.
    Finally, as the dark one lets out her twins and the blonde one takes off her dress, unveiling a slim and very Gun-like body dressed in some delicious underwear, I sense something that could pass for boner-building. I rise to my feet and clumsily start to slow dance with the two ladies of my life. The image of the born-again hitman dancing to Beyoncé brings a smile to their faces, and Gun lends her hand to the buildup down under. The development aid from Latvia works like magic, and now my worries are all focused on her braces. They scare me. Could cause injury. Whether it’s because I want to check out their sharpness, the good feeling from the girl’s hand, her close likeness to my ice-queen, or simply the bubbly wine, I get carried away for a very brief second and I try to bloody kiss her.
    Like a fucking priest in a fucking brothel in some fucking century.
    She immediately turns her head away from my lips and removes her hand from my pathetic crotch. It’s like a slap in the face. Out of old habit, I automatically reach for my semi-automatic problem-solver, but there is none, of course, and I have no other option but to walk away.
    As I rush up the alley, the curtains swing a bit open as I pass by them. I look behind me and see men lying in La-Z-Boys being nursed by half-naked women. They kneel down beside them like widows mourning their dead husbands. I walk away from it all and head for the bar. I wave the waitress over and ask her whether it’s possible to get a doggy bag.
    “A what?”
    “A doggy bag!”
    Damn. I’m fucking angry.
    “For what?”
    “I couldn’t finish the meal I just paid for!”
    “The what? The…meal?”
    “I PAID FOR TWO HEADS! I WANT TWO HEADS IN A DOGGY