Slowly, Jack came to. Although there was no way he could know for sure, Jack was pretty certain he was in this room to be murdered. Or to receive whatever else you get in return for showing up on credit to a high-stakes blackjack game with a $10 million jackpot and losing.
Knowing luck wasn’t on his side, Jack regained his senses and began searching the room for a possible way out. He was seated at a table with only one empty chair directly across from him. Further investigation of the room revealed no escape routes. There was nothing else besides four walls, each an eerie shade of greenish-blue. The only thing in the room that came close to a window was the large mirror next to Jack’s table, which he knew was transparent. The room’s only light was a glass-covered fluorescent strip. It looked like some fancy, creepy interrogation room. And Jack had no way out of it.
The door opened as he contemplated breaking through the mirror, and two men walked in. Jack sat stiffly in his seat and surveyed the two: one was very large and muscular, with a bit of a contorted face - some form of bodyguard for the evidently more important man who moved from the door behind Jack to the empty chair. As the man, skinnier than the bodyguard but still in good shape, sat down, it wasn’t difficult for Jack to deduce that he was made of money. The man looked too young to have as much money as his appearance indicated, dressed in a suit blacker than charcoal with a shimmering Patek Phillipe on his wrist.
“I realize that from your position, this may seem concerning, but I can assure you there is nothing to worry about. Nobody will harm you. Apologies for the villainy of the setup; you can only look through so many design plans for a hundred-story building before you start to skim,” the young man said with a refined tone of confidence. Based on the pitch of his voice, it was clear to Jack that he was younger.
“What am I here for?” Jack responded.
“I just wanted to talk to you. My name’s Rich. Even though you might not believe it, you can walk out of here unharmed without worrying about paying me the money you lost downstairs. As significant as the amount may have seemed to you, to me, it is chicken feed. That said, if you ever return to one of my casinos again, sure as you were born, you will end up in someone’s trunk.”
“What’s the gag? I’ve gotten into problems with bookies before-”
“I know. You are a gambling man; I like that. Someone like you has no place in a high-stakes game like that, though. Those were some of the best card players in the world. You know that, and I know that. Just as we both knew going into that game, you didn’t stand a chance. If you had the money to sit in, you might’ve just been stupid, but somehow, you got in with nothing, blindly risking everything for just a chance at the prize money. You know what that tells me?
“What?”
“You have your priorities straight. You didn’t think about how you would get the money; all you thought was that if you could get into that room, there might be some way you could get it. I brought you up here because I know you want to be a rich man, and I want to make you one.”
“Rich?”
“Very.”
“Like poker game rich?”
“As much money as you could ever need or want rich.”
“What do I have to do?” Jack said, already very unsure about the entire situation.
The smirk across Rich’s face disappeared in the few moments of silence it took him to work up to what Jack guessed was his reason for being there.
“You have to kill a man.”
The room remained silent long enough for Jack to realize Rich wasn’t kidding, “Are you serious?”
“Very.”
“Well, sorry to waste your time then, but the answer is no.”
“How come?”
“Well, first of all, how could I be sure I’d get the money? How could I even be sure that you have-”
Before Jack could finish his sentence, Rich pushed a button below the table, initiating a mechanism. The sound it made stopped Jack dead in his tracks. He turned behind him to find the source of the noise. As he did, his jaw dropped. The wall behind him began separating in the middle and retracting from sight. Where these walls went might have been the first question he had asked Rich, but what was coming into focus behind the moving wall was what stripped him of his ability to speak.
Jack stumbled out of his chair, slowly approaching the other side of the room with pure disbelief. Hidden previously behind the wall was a room full of money. Though Jack couldn’t see the top of the enormous stack, he could tell that the mountain of cash, which was as wide as the room they stood in, went back about half as far as the room they were in did. Every piece of paper he could see was a hundred-dollar bill—nothing but blue faces. Allegedly, Rich had offered him a room stacked to the ceiling with $100 bills, amounting to a number so high he probably couldn’t even count.
Unable to contain himself, Jack fell to his knees, bowing down in front of the money, gathering his composure with deep breaths. He was staring at more money than he’d ever seen in his entire life, and it was all cash. Jack would never have to work again. With that, he wouldn’t ever have to worry again. But was it worth killing a man?
“This won’t be some gladiator match, no fighting involved. The man will be unconscious with a bag over his head. I’ll have some people bring him in and put him in a chair. All you have to do is pull the trigger,” Rich said, seated comfortably in his chair at the other side of the room.
Rich watched Jack bend before his enormous mountain of freedom. Jack was silent for a few moments, contemplating his options. His eyes fixated on the money before him as he exclaimed, “I’ll do it.”
As Jack got off his knees to touch the money, Rich motioned to the mirror. The door suddenly banged open, startling Jack out of his fugue state. His hands were on the cash, but his eyes were locked on the men entering the room. The one who opened the door carried in his other hand a blood-stained wooden chair, while the other had the object of Jack’s attention, that being the unconscious man with a bag on his head. Frozen where he was, Jack watched as they dragged the man by his shoulders and tied him loosely into the wooden chair past Rich on the other side of the room. As the two men leave the room, Richard’s bodyguard takes a gun from behind his back, cocks it, and sets it on the table.
“Before you get imaginative, I will tell you there’s only two bullets in that clip. Shoot me, and you will surely die a slow and painful death personally overseen by Sergei here,” Rich said, followed by some grunt coming from the bodyguard. Rich watched Jack, who still had his hands on the money but couldn’t take his eyes off the man in the chair.
“Come over here,” Rich said. It took a few moments, but Jack soon lifted his hands off the money and walked over to Richard and the gun, stopping before picking it up.
“If you have never used a gun, the safety is already off. You don’t even need to cock it. All you need to do is step in front of this man, point the gun straight at his heart, and shoot,” Rich explained to Jack, whose conviction stagnated. The premise of murder was one thing. Going through with it was entirely different.
“Jack, as I see it, you have four options. Shoot me and die painfully. Shoot both of us and die painfully. Shoot this man and walk out rich beyond your wildest dreams, or walk out poor and miserable with no blood on your hands.”
Jack looked from the gun to Rich with concern on his face. Taking a deep breath, he picked up the weapon. Rich sat back in his chair as Jack stepped closer to the unconscious man. He lifted the gun slowly, moving it until the unconscious man’s heart aligned with the crosshairs of his scope. He held it there for five seconds, which soon turned into 10 and then 15. Around 20, Rich realized Jack wouldn’t be able to shoot him on his own. Jack, now struggling, put the gun down and started breathing heavily again.
“Something wrong?” Rich said.
“Who is he?”
“Should it matter? To you, this doesn’t have to be a person with a name and an address. To you, this doesn’t have to be anything more than the man with a bag on his head. Soldiers in wartime break down when they come home, but not for the reason everyone thinks they do. When they leave for war, they are moral men, running modest homes made out of bricks that they built as strong as the support of the families behind them. But what about when they return from such an amoral place to a household they struggled to keep up with their morals alone? What if the house’s foundation wasn’t brick? What if it was gold? Do they see the faces of the men they were forced to kill? What if a $10,000 screen replaced those images with better ones? What if, instead of looking through their window into another to see the same beaten-down look found in the eyes of millions of hard-working Americans, they saw the shore of a warm beach? Moral men who kill don’t come away broken because they kill. They come away broken because they’re broke. How much pain will this man’s death bring you? $100,000 worth? 1 million? 10 million? You can put a number on anything. What that number is is unimportant. What is important is that you’ll have it, no matter how high.”
Rich jawed from the comfort of his chair, not once lifting as much as a finger to persuade Jack, yet he lost none of the effect. His speech stirred something inside. Jack remained where he had, but a look in his eye changed. He brought his arm up once again and pointed the gun directly at the man’s heart. As Jack looked straight at the faceless man he was about to shoot; his eyes might as well have been in the back of his head. He didn’t decide to pull the trigger. The green paper behind him did.
Jack’s bullet struck the man’s heart with such force that it railed his instantly lifeless body out of the chair onto its side. Motionless on the ground, dark red blood ran from his body onto the cement floor. The shot echoed throughout the room until an eerie silence settled over it. Jack’s hand began shaking involuntarily. He let his arm slowly fall to his side along with the gun. Unable to take his eyes off the man he just killed, he noticed something.
Stepping closer to the body, Jack recognized a brown leather wallet that must have fallen out of the corpse’s shirt pocket as Jack shot it out of the chair. He stopped at the sight of it. Rich was right, and Jack knew it right away: if he wanted to move on, he needed to keep this corpse nameless. Yet, something compelled him to look. He couldn’t walk away. Unaware of the blood he was kneeling in or impartial to it, Jack picked up the damp wallet. Still watching intently, Rich did nothing to stop him. Reluctantly, Jack opened the wallet a crack. The glimpse he got robbed him of his breath and his grip. The wallet slipped and splashed in the growing pool of blood covering Jack’s boots.
Motionless for a few seconds, Jack slowly picked the wallet up again, this time opening it fully to the picture he was afraid he’d seen. It was a memento. The man had a son who was very young at the time the picture was taken. But, like most people, Jack would recognize a photo of himself no matter how young he was. He suddenly realized the pool of blood he made...was his own.
Jack started breaking down. Tears poured out of his eyes. Jack fumbled with the wallet until he found the pocket he was looking for and removed what he prayed he wouldn’t see. It was his father’s driver’s license.
Jack began sobbing uncontrollably, waiting to wake up from the nightmare he’d willingly walked into. But he didn’t...because it was no nightmare. Jack crumbled to the floor. His tears mixed with his father’s blood as it spilled across the room. His last hope was that Rich planted the ID to deceive him into thinking he’d just killed his Dad. Jack pushed over the lifeless body and fumbled around, searching for the zipper on the bag, getting blood all over it in the process. As he unzipped it, he let out an indistinguishable wail of agony. Bent over, screaming in between his animalistic sobs, Jack cradled his father, smearing his blood on his expressionless face.
Rich, who hadn’t moved a muscle from his “front row seat,” took in the experience villainously like entertainment. Give him some popcorn, and you’d think he was at a movie theater. At the moment, Jack’s suffering was too great to act on the rage he felt towards Rich welling up in his subconscious. The blood pouring out of Jack’s father, staining his hands, made its way to Rich’s boots. He momentarily let it muddy his cap-toed Oxfords before lifting his right foot and crossing it over his leg. The blood of the father, who he knowingly had persuaded his son to kill, dripped onto the ground. Rich ran a finger across his heel and gazed at it for a second before running the finger across his tongue. A perverted smile spread across his face.
As Rich and Sergei left the room, the money loomed from the other side of it. Its height, which had stirred a sense of childlike giddiness within Jack, now towered over him, bathing him in its shadow. Only a few inches below the room’s ceiling, Benjamin looked over his latest victim, wondering whether Jack was the type of man who could move on from what he did. Rich removed his bloody shoes in the next room and gave them to Sergei, who placed the pair in a glass case sitting on a mantel across from Rich’s desk. Watching from behind the glass, Rich lit a massive cigar as the wailing continued. Suddenly, the echo of a second fired bullet rang out. And the wailing stopped. And the blood grew, as did Rich’s smile. The black mold nobody ever saw caked into his shiny white teeth came out of hiding. A crooked smile hid beneath the lips of the blue bills at the top of the stack Jack’s blood had just reached. Underneath this smile lies the same black mold revealed by Rich’s curling lips.