I Never Told You What I Do For A Living

"Brendon? Brendon, god damn it, we don't have time for you to go through things," Ryan snapped, and I immediately looked up from the drawer I was rummaging through to look at him. He looked slightly annoyed; the expression amplified by how much more threatening he looked with blood spattered on his shirt and on his face and covering his hands. It was almost like someone had taken a can of crimson paint and thrown it at him, the way most of the liquid was around his middle; where he'd held the bleeding man down despite his screaming and thrashing and pleads for mercy.

It wasn't unusual at this point, the whole thing. At least, not to me. For Ryan, I was sure it was even more of a common routine; our whole little delightfully demented cycle.

"But you said we needed more money," I stated simply, pulling a few ten dollar bills out of a nightstand drawer. "Money, see?"

Ryan sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing. When he took his hand away, it left a trail of bright red across the otherwise pale white of his face.

"Fingerprints, Brendon," he said, making it seem obvious. And it sort've was. "Wipe those handles off. Now. I'm done dealing with him, I just want to clean off. And hurry up, I don't want to stay here a lot longer and get caught."

I shrugged and carefully shut the drawer, nodding as I did so.

It's not that I was necessarily scared of Ryan (although I had reason to be); it was just that I'd learned that if he asked you nicely to do something, it was normally a good idea to just do it. Ryan never really liked being ignored; at least, he hadn't in the time I'd known him.

Ryan was my closest and only friend. Before I'd met him, I'd learned from the news and articles in newspapers that he wasn't just some person; some fresh-out-of-high-school child who had no future and had decided to kill a few kids who'd mocked and relentlessly tortured him in school and spend the rest of his life being cared for in a prison cell (although I knew for a fact that he'd gone after some of those people, as well). Ryan Ross was a common name across Nevada-- across the whole country, really. He was smart, and I think that's what scared people the most. He chose his victims meticulously, followed the police reports and news articles about himself so he'd know exactly where to go next.

I'd admired him ever since I'd first read about him on the front page of my dad's newspaper when I was eighteen, and so I felt it fitting to continue his work once he'd finally been caught and put in prison. The cops had been baffled as to why the murders had continued even after Ryan was put away; and it had taken them quite a while to piece everything together and eventually catch me, as well.

I don't know how Ryan and I had ended up in the same cell (or even the same jail, for that matter). But we did, and it wasn't long before we'd got to talking and eventually found our way out. Ever since then, it's been this; a partnership. And in all honesty, I've lost count of how many times we'd repeated this little fucked-up dance of ours; how many tiny pieces of victims we'd hidden away in the rotting walls of the houses they'd lived in or left in a pile for the cops to find like a cat would leave a half-eaten rabbit on a doorstep.

I finished cleaning off the handles of the drawers and picked up the few bills I'd found before hurrying into the front room of the house, where Ryan stood smiling in the sea of crimson.

"Isn't it ironic," he asked with a slight smirk on his face, "that this was the living room?"

I rolled my eyes and he laughed a little more.

"I'm sorry. It wasn't as funny as it'd sounded in my head," he admitted, shrugging and fishing his car key out of his pocket and flipping it over a few times in his hand.

"So, are you ready to leave?" he asked, finally looking up at me. I nodded.

"Yeah," I said, laughing a little as I looked at the scene we'd left. "Let's go."