My Foray into Noir Fiction. Part Five.

Previously.

Two weeks later and there he was again, standing in front of my desk with a gun to his head. How he'd gotten the gun, I had no idea. You could never really tell what Timmy was going to come up with next. You could only hope that by then you were far far away.

"I'm at my wits end, only you can help me now."

"I don't remember you having any wits in the first place, Tim."

"Shut up. I'm serious this time."

"As serious as the time you said you were going to join the Avengers?"

"If you can't help me, I'm pulling it. There's no other way out for me."

His index finger was wrapped tightly around the trigger, the barrel pointing to the side of his head. I noticed how drenched in sweat he was, especially around the armpits. The sweat stains seemed to form a strange, symmetrical face-like pattern on his light yellow shirt and it suddenly occurred to me that I had never seen Timmy sweat before.

"Well I know you're not going to. You don't have the GU-"

BAM.

And Timmy was dead, just like that.

If this was a novel, the chapter would have ended right there and then near the top of the page, leaving a blank space at the bottom for the reader to contemplate over this shocking turn of events. But for some reason, I didn't feel a thing. The sight of Timmy's head jerking to the side from the impact of the bullet, the spray of blood, his body falling onto the floor, without the slow-mo effects, it all just seemed 'usual', like watching a ball roll off a table.

I waited for a few minutes, then stood up from my chair and walked over to the body. Even in death, Timmy was still a neat-nik. His body was spread out on the floor in the exact position of any chalk outline you might've seen at a crime scene. A TV crime scene, to be exact.

A small puddle of blood was taking it's time growing beneath his head. The gun was stilled gripped, though much more relaxed now, in his left hand. The bullet wound was a neat little hole through his head and blood was already starting to clot, making it looked more like an over-sized blister. You could've put the scene in a kid's movie and no one would have given a damn.

I looked at the clock on the wall of my office. It was just past midnight. I sighed for no real reason at all. Maybe I felt that the room had gone too quiet. I gave some thought to what had just happened. My best friend, or rather, my only friend, had just killed himself. I had a dead body in front of my feet. Someone was going to have to clean up the blood stains. And the bullet, going clean through his head, had broken my window.

This was probably going to be my worst birthday ever.