He helped himself to the size-eleven shoes left outside the kitchen door of the farm house. He had just enough time to vault over the fence earning himself a deep scratch in his forearms before the dog managed to make a meal of his limbs.

“I am getting soft!” he muttered to himself for even though it was one of those breeds that didn’t bark but snarled before pouncing, he hadn’t been able to gauge the dangers as before.  He used his soldier training to run around in different direction to disperse his scent from the pack of barking dogs before he hit the trails of the mountains and lost himself to the wilderness once again.   He knew these mountains which was almost like his home the past five decades. Yet, he had hoped that the last place he had made a Spartan home for the last six months would be kind of final knowing that the old man must be pushing nineties and must have slowed down.

Well, he thought wrong. He had to run once again.

Even in his thirties, the millionaire lived by the adage, ‘Whatever Mark wants Mark gets’.

They had met as Calvi and Monsieur Johnson then in the mid-seventies. It was only latter that he came to know that he was The Mark Sanderson. The latter wanted a job done and was willing to pay for that. Being the most sought after mercenary of those days, Calvi had managed to smuggle the Browning across the border and had effectively done his job. He must credit Johnson for the meticulous layout of the remote villa situated in one of the obscure islands off Spanish coast and also let him know the time to strike. He had made his job easier.

He met Monsieur Johnson the following evening. He had shown the news article that screamed, ‘Major Archie Summers killed by an unknown assailant’. He tucked in the fat packet of the green currency that he received from the happy Monsieur Johnson as a remaining part of his payment.  It all began as he was about to leave when Johnson had asked with a strange smile in his lips as if reliving a pleasanter future, “hope that there would be no comebacks and none noticed you?”

“Oh, I forgot to mention this. There was a sudden storm that made a woman come into the study just as I was leaving. Very attractive woman in her early thirties. Not to worry… I killed her too.”

The sudden lunge from across the table caught him by surprise. His training had helped him to get away and forced him to live always on a run, undetected, unable to put up any roots of any kind.

How was he to know that he would become the hunted and would still be paying for that man’s obsession. All because the lady had rejected his proposal saying that she believed in the vow, “Until death do us part”?

( 496 words)

Notes:

One of my all-time favourite books is No Comebacks,  a collection of short stories by Frederick Forsyth.  I have written the above as a kind of sequel to the first story in the book No Comebacks. I hope that the story unravels itself as you read this. To those who haven’t read the original, I highly recommend that book.

This story is for the Picture This contest run by Artoonsinn- Five-0022

Image credit: Artoonisnn- page.