The moon was white, high above the dockland warehouse where Franco conducted his business. He furrowed his neat brow and glared at the numbers in front of him. Try as he might, he couldn’t make them work for him.
“Damn!” he said and threw the paper down. Outside, the armed guard stirred. After a moment, he popped his head round the door.
“Problem, boss?” he said. Franco shook his head. He would make those numbers dance if it took him all night. Damn. He could feel another migraine coming on. He popped a painkiller and swallowed it dry, then reached for the telephone. He dialled, listened to the phone ring on the other side, and listened to it ring off.
“Where has that meathead gotten to?” he said to himself quietly. It was these brothers, these idiots. He should have killed the smart one when he had the chance. Smart, but no forward thinking. Without him the other one would have been lost. He really should have done it before the guy had a chance to make an escape. They could be anywhere.
The door burst open. In a fraction of a second, Franco noticed that his guard was lying on the floor, clutching his throat. Blood poured onto the floor.
“What-” was his last word before the bullet entered through his sinuses and collapsed the front of his skull inwards, turning the handsome face into a monument of death.
“Right, let’s fucking get out of here,” said Sergio, tucking the smoking pistol into his jacket pocket.

Anna could hear gunshots from inside the building. She groaned and covered her ears. “Just come back safe,” she said to herself, a sort of prayer. Her forehead pressed against the seat in front of her, her eyes screwed up tight, she didn’t notice the figure approaching the car in the darkness until they were right next to her.
A tap at the window startled her, and she pulled the trigger on the small pistol Tomas had given her to protect herself. A neat hole appeared on the window, and the figure dropped away with a yelp.
Anna forced herself between the seats and strained for the glove box, where she knew a pocket flashlight sat with the rest of the emergency kit. She pushed and pushed, and finally her fingers closed around the light.
She shone it down on the body on the ground. The woman was dressed in a blue parking attendant’s uniform. The bullet had struck her just above the heart. She was still alive. Reaching up towards Anna. Her lips formed a word: “Help…”
Anna covered her eyes. She couldn’t look again. She pulled back from the window, and as she did the glass exploded inwards. The hand that the attendant had been reaching up had clutched a concealed one-shot pistol.
“Fuck this,” said Anna. She got out of the car, looked down at the red-headed attendant bleeding on the ground, and raised her gun again. “Shit,” she said, and fired, not looking. Then she tossed the gun into the back seat of the car, climbed into the driver’s seat, and turned the key in the engine.
The wheels screamed as she skidded away.

Tomas glanced at his brother. “They’ll be coming. They’ll have heard,” said Sergio, pushing his sunglasses up his nose. He was still wearing them, although it was dark out. His normally perfect hair was wild, twitching as he moved his head like a bird in fits and starts.
“So we fight our way out?” said Tomas. His own trigger finger was itching; Sergio had been the one to lead the assault on the warehouse, dispatching guards with an evil-looking knife that he held in his left hand.
“We kill our way out,” said Sergio. He was still the perfect picture of calm outwardly, though his manner was beginning to betray him. He looked at Tomas and bared his teeth in a grimace. “I’ve got a surprise for these fuckers in the car.”
Tomas leaned out into the corridor and checked up and down the way. No sign, he signalled to Sergio. Then the two of them ducked out into the hall, their guns covering each angle. Sergio aiming forward, Tomas back.
“That girl really does something to you,” said Sergio. It was a statement of fact. “It’s like you turn into a different person.”
“Heh, yeah,” Tomas agreed. They passed a dark nook, and something stirred. Tomas fired. A balding security man fell forward, dead, onto the concrete. “Like rats, these mothers,” muttered Tomas.
“You know she’ll leave eventually,” Sergio went on. Tomas looked over his shoulder at the back of his brother’s head. “When she finds out about you. The real you, I mean. The one you hide away when she’s around. You know that isn’t healthy, repressing yourself.”
“Careful, Sergio. I might have to kill you, talking like that,” said Tomas, and giggled.
He turned back around, and a bullet hit him in the chest, smashing through his ribs and lodging in his right lung. Another quickly followed it, this one in his eyeball (the left, this time). Whatever had been in his mind, it was quiet before he hit the floor.
Sergio let loose a screamed “No!” and spun, squeezing the trigger on his old Chinese knockoff pistol until it clicked. The woman fell sideways into a doorway and disappeared.

Anna drove home and parked the car on the street. She put her head in her hands and stayed there at the wheel for what felt like hours but must have been minutes.
God, this is stupid, she thought. What if they need to get away? But she hated what she had seen, what she had done tonight. The glimpse of Sergio and Tomas’ daily life had shocked her, driven her away. She had been able to keep it at arm’s length. When he had told her he was a criminal, she had joked about it! “Can you make the guy who stinks up the bathroom on my floor disappear?”
She reached for the door handle, stopped, and turned to snatch the gun and the camera from the backseat. The camera would need to go back to work. And there was another thing. Did she go back as if nothing had happened? How could she? But she had to work.
She went inside and collapsed into restless sleep in her tiny apartment.
That night she had no dreams. Nor did she dream again once, for a month after that. Her daily life was like a waking dream, an empty space that she drifted through. She phoned Degeneration Video and they told her they wouldn’t hold it against her as long as she didn’t disappear like that again. She said if it happened again then they should just find someone else straight away, because she wouldn’t ever come back.

It was a cold, overcast day when Sergio came back to the city. He was aged more than the months would allow, bearded, his hair shaggy. Still he wore those sunglasses. They were like his shield against the world, to him. The truth of the eyes beneath didn’t matter, as long as he had them. Look into my eyes and look into a mirror, he thought, and laughed.
He was sitting on the bus, a black backpack on the seat beside him. Inside was a change of clothes, a toothbrush, and a gun. When he laughed the people around him could smell alcohol on his breath.
He got off at the next stop, because people were starting to look at him funny. Next step after looking funny was throwing weight around, making trouble. He didn’t want any trouble. Not til he was the one making it.
He unfolded a worn-out piece of paper from his pocket. The writing on it was an address. He had copied the address from one piece of paper to another as it got worn out. This was the third. He didn’t know if it was the right address, but it was time to find out.

Anna opened the door and gasped, taking a step back. It was as if a corpse was standing in front of her. Never hearing from them again, she had assumed the worst, or perhaps the best, for the brothers. But here was… one of them, plain as day.
“Hey, Anna,” said the man. He lurched forward, into the small, dark apartment. There wasn’t much room.
“Tomas?” said Anna. The man nodded. Something was wrong. She could smell alcohol. God, he reeked of it.
“I had to run after what happened at Franco’s, baby,” he said, reaching for her face. She recoiled viscerally. “Hey, what’s your problem?”
“Get out,” she said. “Get out!” and now there was a gun in his hand.
“Don’t you wanna have some fun with your old boyfriend?” said Tomas. His leering expression showed teeth. Not Tomas’ teeth.
“You’re not him!”
“I may as well be,” said Tomas, and pulled the trigger.
The lead slug thudded into the wall, and Anna, who had been backing away until she was right next to her pillow, dove down and pulled the pistol from underneath it.
“You’re right,” she said, and killed him.