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    When Your Number's Up, a short story
    When Your Number's Up, a short story
    When Your Number's Up, a short story
    Ebook17 pages15 minutes

    When Your Number's Up, a short story

    By Angus Brownfield

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    About this ebook

    A jealous mobster approaches a hitman—regarded as the best in his line of work—to eliminate a rival for his lady love’s affections. The project violates several of the hitman’s self-imposed rules, but when he declines, the mobster showers him with an irresistible increase in his usual fee. The project has a time constraint and this constraint limits his ability to plan adequately, causing him to botch the job. As a consequence, someone affected by the hit comes after him, intent on assassinating the assassin. After two close calls, his nemesis catches up with the hitman in Costa Rica, where the odds are no better than fifty-fifty he will survive.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAngus Brownfield
    Release dateAug 23, 2017
    ISBN9781370995707
    When Your Number's Up, a short story
    Author

    Angus Brownfield

    Write what you know. I know me and I'm talking to you, reader, in the first person, not the anonymous third person, because when I write I write about me and the world that thrives around me. I wrote decent poetry in college, I couldn’t get the hang of short stories. I finished my first novel so many years ago writers were still sending their works to publishers instead of agents. My first novel was rejected by everyone I sent it to. The most useful rejection, by a Miss Kelly at Little, Brown, said something like this: “You write beautifully, but you don’t know how to tell a story.” Since then I've concentrated on learning to tell a good story. The writing isn’t quite so beautiful but it will do. Life intervened. Like the typical Berkeley graduate, I went through five careers and three marriages. Since the last I've been writing like there’s no tomorrow. I have turned out twelve novels, a smattering of short stories and a little poetry. My latest novel is the third in a series about a man who is not my alter ego, he’s pure fiction, but everyone he interacts with, including the women, are me. My title for this trilogy is The Libertine. Writers who have influenced me include Thomas Mann, Elmore Leonard, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, Kurt Vonnegut and Willa Cather. I don’t write like any of them, but I wish I did. I'm currently gearing up to pay attention to marketing. Archery isn’t complete if there’s no target. I've neglected readers because I've been compulsive about putting words down on paper. Today the balance shifts.

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      Book preview

      When Your Number's Up, a short story - Angus Brownfield

      When Your Number’s Up

      a short story

      by Angus Brownfield

      SMASHWORDS EDITION

      ***

      Published By

      Angus Brownfield on Smashwords

      Copyright © 2017 by Angus Brownfield

      All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this Ebook.

      When Your Number’s Up

      1

      Someone is trying to kill me and I don’t know whether he’s bad at what he does or if he’s torturing me before he delivers the coup de grâce. You would think, given my years of practical experience, I could outsmart a hit man six ways to Sunday. I am, I like to think, the best in that field. But, like some NBA offensive giants who are defensive midgets, I’ve never even thought until now about eluding an assassin bent on whacking me.

      It began last year in that time between Thanksgiving and Christmas when life’s tempo quickens as orderliness slips away. It was then I contracted to take out

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