That may look like a forgotten Aztec god, but it’s just me being too lazy to type out the entire title again.  If I’d known I was going to do another part I’d probably have given it a shorter title anyway.  Oh well.

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Eldred Fie was a darn good hitman, and he knew it. People would often make specific requests for the method of murder, and Eldred took pride in being the one hitman on the books that would do anything he was asked to do. It was only polite, after all.

Today’s job wasn’t really authorised, but he felt it had been necessary. He’d been hired to deal with a fellow named Confidence Barley, a local landlord in possession of most of the houses on Magdalene Rise, an extremely wealthy area of the city. Apparently, Confidence was ridiculous terrified of oranges, and the woman (for it was usually women in Eldred’s experience) who took out the contract had specified that an orange must be used to kill him. It was one of the more unusual restrictions to have been placed on his skill.

The greengrocer hadn’t been his target, but he had been a necessary kill. Eldred had needed to test out his invention, he needed to be sure it worked before he tried it out on the real mark. He had a reputation to uphold, one of accuracy and dependability. If he just strolled up to the mark and tried his invention, only to find it didn’t work, he’d be a laughing stock.

It was a simple enough device. It looked a little like a sawn-off shotgun with slightly bigger barrels, big enough to fit an orange in of course. In actuality those barrels were essentially cannons, scaled down to hand-held size, and that was where some of the problems came from. Turns out that there is an exact amount of gunpowder needed to propel an orange at lethal speed while still maintaining its cohesion. Eldred had put a little too much in, creating a situation where the orange would explode when he pulled the trigger, splattering the scene with orange pulp. Luckily, the greengrocer was happy to help in the experiments, cowering as Eldred altered the gunpowder mixture before each shot.

Eventually he had found the right mixture, and it proved lethal enough although at a much shorter distance than he would have liked. He thanked the greengrocer before he shot him one final time, but the man was very rude. There was really no reason to swear as far as Eldred could see. The lab mouse doesn’t behove the scientist his experiments, does he? He doesn’t shout ‘Fuck you!’ at the eureka moment.

No wonder the greengrocer’s profits had been falling recently. His foul language must have been rotting his produce.