During the mid-semester break of 1993, Kristy took me to Chicago. Firstly because she wanted company since she always "hated spending Thanksgiving alone", and secondly because she injured herself when I sneaked a back-thrust to her hip in a sparring practice.

At this time Kristy and I were already a team - we worked together in synchronization, understood each other's strengths, and were willing to forgive each other's little idiosyncracies. As a Muslim I was and still am very particular about handling pork, and would make her wash her mouth and hands with soil before we retire to bed.

I would put up with her heavy drinking - she had a particular preference for a brand of tequila (the clear ones). She would take three, four, five - who's counting - shots of these after every job, it calmed her down, she said. At one time she made me take a shot and all I could remember was waking up naked in the bath tub with puke smell all over me. I never took to drinking, and Kristy respected and appreciated this very much; from thereon I would always be the designated driver.

The job in Chicago involved a businessman (it almost invariably always does, in this line of work). Apparently this businessman had been stepping on too many toes in his bid to carve himself a slice of the pie, but no hands in Chicago were willing to stop him in his tracks, and, like always, an outside contractor was called in to do the work. Let's call him Fat Man.

Fat man rules

Living in an unimaginably luxurious loft but practically impregnable fortress in one of the upscale apartment in the city, it was near impossible to reach the target without getting ourselves killed.

We couldn't shoot into his windows (there wasn't a tall enough building surrounding his building complex) and we could not ambush his armoured car. After three days of looking at the building with no idea what to do, we got a break when someone informed Kristy that Fat Man had a peculiar habit: he liked to buy apples by himself.

He would go to a supermarket produce section, and choose an apple one by one, not by visually inspecting the apple, pressing its flesh and smelling it, but by biting on the apple and tasting it. If the apple was crispy enough, he'd put it in the bag. If the apple was not good enough, he'd throw it away.

Occasionally, he would make one of his guards eat the apple that he had tasted. The poor bastard would eat the apple and pretended like he was enjoying the apple that had been sullied by Fat Man. The supermarket management kept quiet; you would if you saw four large guys carrying guns.

Because of this apple habit alone, I felt putting the Fat Man down was a service to the community.

Right after fall semester ended we came back to Chicago. It was a convenient excuse for me to go back to Chicago - there was an Islamic convention in the city then and I always relished the opportunity to meet up with familiar acquaintances. The hotel where the convention was held was a 20-minute drive from the food mart where the target frequently shopped for his apples.

In this job, as this was my first time, my role was a "roadblock", and I positioned myself in front of the food mart in the parking lot between rows of cars, lying on my stomach in the classic firing position. I was to ensure that the target wouldn't escape just in case Kristy failed to put him down.

Kristy wore a wig (she always does in jobs), blue contacts and long fake eyelashes, with nonprescription glasses to boot. She'd push her own cart with - why didn't anyone ever notice this - a brown bag on her cart. A brown bag is usually given to a patron after she comes out of the cashier's aisle!

Here she was pushing a brown bag and no one ever noticed the abnormality. She would put her nine-milli with a silencer in this brown bag, and had a thunder flash* go off with a timer on the other side of the target.

In the ensuing chaos, she calmly took out her gun and carried out her assignment.

She shot four men that night, killing the target, and injuring the other three men. I saw her gunning down the target with unflinching ease. It was very surreal, like watching a slow motion gunfight scene in a movie, because apart from the single thunder flash, there wasn't any gun fire, the bodyguards were shot before they could react.

Observing

I, however, took the remaining bodyguard that ran out of the food mart, with a single shot to his left ear. His blood splattered all over "Day Bread Half Price" stickers on the mart wall. Kristy gave me quite an earful for that, because I was only supposed to incapacitate the guard, and not kill him. Assassins live under specific rules and regulations; we are not supposed to kill anyone who are not supposed to be killed.

From outside I could see the sole cashier wetting her pants. She was standing lifelessly when Kristy walked past her by and said 'Hi, have a good night'.

Your first kill, whether incidental or not, is always a relief. From that moment, there was no turning back. By the end of my stay in the States, I took down 13 men, nine of which were intended targets.

It turned out that Fat Man was a coke supplier. He was not happy with the impending threat of meths and was pushing his coke as the main sugar of choice. With him out of the picture, meth slowly became popular in the greater Chicago area, thanks to a boom in new labs in Chicago itself.

Hey. Don't shoot me. I'm doing you a service. Drugs are bad, honey.


* Thunder flash is a generic name for a non-lethal but loud bomb. Commonly used by police and army for shocking the enemy and also during training.

THE ARMY CAPITAINE considers himself friendly. He's really a family man. Email him at armycapitaine@yahoo.com.