kellan ziegmann/dean winchester (crossroaded) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-04-08 18:24:00 |
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Entry tags: | dean winchester |
Who: Kellan, with commentary by Dean.
What: Taking care of a lucrative job for a friend.
Where: In Vegas.
When: Within a few days of this.
Warnings/Rating: Violence and language.
Electrical faults were a godsend. Places with shitty wiring, or old electronics, or leaky pipes, or - best of all - a combination of the three were so simple to take out and make it look like an accident. Sure, there might be something suspicious about the wiring, or the way the fire had spread, but at the same time it could be put down to a negligent landlord and poor workmanship. And since arson - well done arson - was such a difficult thing to identify anyway, Kellan hadn't found himself with much fear of being found out in almost a decade. Policemen usually didn't want to deal with an arson investigation most of the time, especially if there hadn't been any casualties, and with his work, there usually weren't.
So of course this is going to go smoothly.
"I thought we had an agreement."
This time he had a casualty to ensure, true. But he'd done it before, and one person was a lot easier to take care of than a whole group - something he almost never did in any case. One life worth a hundred thousand dollars. In this kind of building. In the middle of the night. The only way the situation could have been more ideal was if it didn't involve an intentional death, but concessions had to be made.
But hey, unintentional deaths are cool, right? Fuck those people. It's their fault they stayed here.
"Shut up," Kellan growled, carefully stripping the already-rusting wiring so it looked like time had been at fault for the coming crime rather than man.
This shit had been so much easier to deal with back before a morally-ambiguous but still definitely good-aligned asshole had been forcibly lodged in his head.
It was simple: Kellan was a criminal. He always had been and always would be. He burnt places to the ground for money or the sheer joy of it, and he sometimes killed people, whether intentionally or accidentally. It should have been evident from the moment they started sharing thoughts that this was an inexorable fact, something that was never going to change, and thus would have to be grudgingly accepted, but Dean never seemed to fully grasp that. He was constantly insulting and degrading and trying to get Kellan to make a mistake, or just give up what he was doing out of pure frustrated rage.
So far, he'd been mildly successful, but at the same time Kellan had a lot more patience and experience than Dean's angry youth was capable of knowing. He could put up with angry shithead because, at one point, he'd been an angry shithead, and knew how they thought. Even if this particular shithead could pretty much read his mind.
Does this guy even deserve this? came the sardonic question, even though they both knew the answer.
"Maybe. I don't know." Kellan pulled back to check over his handiwork and unconsciously flicked flakes of rust off his fingers. "I assume so, if I'm getting paid a hundred grand to take him out." And he was a criminal almost as much as Kellan, or so Maren had said, and he didn't disbelieve her. Part of an organized syndicate, but at that price, he had probably fucked up.
Blood money you're not even going to use.
"Not your problem." With a grunt, he got to his feet. The hotel room was relatively nice, though he could almost guarantee if you took a blacklight to the place someone would throw up, if a little old. It had a tiny kitchenette with - lucky him! - an oven. He'd gotten at the wiring in the heater, would turn on the oven and crank the air conditioning up high, seal the window, and make sure his fingerprints were all gone before leaving. By the time the wires started to spark and snap apart, the room would be flooded with gas. Investigations would come back with a result of negligence on behalf of the room's single, extremely drunk occupant. A hot night meant a lot of cool air. An empty stomach meant a half-thawed dinner forgotten before unconsciousness. A few bottles of something conveniently flammable tipped over next to the bed would only help the implication along, as would the obnoxiously high blood alcohol level of the dead man.
Nevermind that Kellan had been the one to buy him the drinks in the first place. People drank far beyond their limits when someone else was willing to pay.
"Besides, don't you commit credit card fraud on a daily basis? And what the hell do you do with your money?" He stretched one sore arm and went to the window to check and see if the glue - because glue was generally fire-soluble - had set well enough, ignoring the snoring drunk on the bed nearby. "Buy shitty food and fake I.D.s that even I wouldn't have the balls to go after."
Hey, I don't spend that much. Food, motel rooms, guns, other necessary equipment ...
"Salt, crosses, and silver?"
Knives and cell phone minutes.
Kellan snorted. Dean's life of monster-hunting and demon-dealing still struck him as stupid and unbelievable. What with recent revelations, it seemed that Dean was almost sharing his opinion.
"Might want to start investing in life insurance," he said with a half-snicker, but the responding shut the hell up was vicious enough to make him raise his eyebrows. "Still touchy about that whole dying affair? Guess I don't blame you, but ... "
Don't even bring it up. Hearing from two people that he was going to die and then come back, one of whom was his own brother, only to face a new and hellish world ahead of him had not sat well with Dean. He was angry, and upset, and probably a little terrified, and he was coping with it by not coping with it.
"If you ignore it, it'll go away?"
Just shut up. Go back to being a paid thug.
It was an insult that normally would have riled Kellan, but he didn't rise to the bait. Dean's coping mechanism was familiar, and if he was too busy being sullen to keep up his string of stupidly self-righteous moral intentions, then all the better. It meant Kellan could get on with his work in relative peace and quiet.
Window sealed, air conditioner on, oven on and open just enough to let gas out while looking unintentional. He tipped over one more bottle of whiskey with his foot and let it spill across the carpet, soak in under the bed, and crawl up the carelessly-flung sheets a little. The smoke detector he left intact, but the sprinkler it was hooked to he had made sure would have ... problems. That might cast a little suspicion on the whole affair, but it was a chance he was willing to take. He wasn't going to fuck this up.
He dies and it all goes downhill from there, Maren had said to him. He dies and spends time in Hell and comes back. What kind of fucked-up world had that in it? Aside from the current one, anyway. Kellan pondered on it as he slipped back out of the room, locking the door after him and flicking the stolen key under the thin crack at the bottom of the door. Wherever it ended up was fine. He had gloves; his fingerprints wouldn't be anywhere on the room, except maybe on the soon to be burnt and charred wires on the heater. And at that point, they'd have been seared away forever.
Back out through the empty room next door, dropping out the window to the decorative rocks and concrete a few feet below. At most he'd give it twenty minutes, which was well enough time to be away and have a good vantage point. He could still feel a burdening sense of disapproval on his mind, even if it wasn't accompanied by some snide remark.
"Hey, if it makes you feel better, just pretend he was a vampire or something." Kellan fished his cigarettes and lighter out of a pocket and lit up, taking a long, satisfied drag after a job likely well done.
Vampires are mostly extinct, was the short, sharp reply.
"Oh. How about a zombie? He looked a little dead to me."
Can't kill a zombie that way.
"I don't believe you. You set something on fire, eventually, it has to die." He kept moving, staying in the shadows and out of sight of any security cameras that might see him moving away from the scene of the crime. Of course, if they'd seen him going to, well, that was even worse. But he was fairly sure that hadn't happened. "Or get burned to ash, and even if it's still alive, the hell can it do then?"
The only way I've done it is by staking the damn thing back into the ground.
"Sounds like fun."
Ten minutes and half a mile away and Kellan watched from an abandoned fire escape as the hotel window blew out in a mess of flame and acrid, curling smoke. He sighed, feeling any stress, or tension, or displeasure just ... burn away, joining the darkening smoke in the sky. It was so nice to watch. Already the fire department would be on their way. Already the dead man would be dying, waking up in an inferno and screaming for less than a minute before the only thing that was left of him was a nigh-unrecognizable corpse.
You're proud of that, aren't you, said Dean, but his voice was distant and distracted, the words an offhand comment made automatically while his mind was somewhere else.
"Not really," Kellan said, letting out a trail of pale smoke with a breath. "Satisfied's a better word."
A hundred grand for a few hours' work. Maren would hear about it in the paper or on the news, and she'd know it was him, and she could relax knowing that the work she'd needed done was done. He did try to be a man of his word, after all.