The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

door…
    Amen.
    I take a long good look at my former buddies, lying face down in the cleft, like two gentlemen overdressed for a mass grave. I then nod a few times before telling them goodbye with a short little Croatian word:
    “ Bok. ”
    I turn away and start limping towards the car. My groin cries, my heart shakes, but my soul says hallelujah.

CHAPTER 35
THE SERBIAN ENTRY
    05.12.2007
    Driving an Audi you think you should be happy. Success has rewarded you with soft leather seats and a pilot’s dashboard. Luckily it’s an automatic, since I’m losing all feeling in my left leg, as well as the lower half of my torso. My pants are soaked in blood, urine, or some other inner liquid that is about to fill my left shoe. I wonder if the bullet is still inside me somewhere. Feels like it’s resting on the bottom of my bladder, working as a plug in a bathtub.
    When I had walked some sixty painful feet away from the two idiots, I turned around and looked them in the eye. They were peeking out of their lava-grave with dumbstruck eyes, looking very much like two sheep stuck in a hole. Why didn’t you kill us? I even sensed a touch of disappointment in their eyes. I turned my back on them and continue towards the car. I threw their guns in the trunk, put mine in my pocket, and managed to pack my pain into the driver’s seat.
    I’m driving back the same way we came. I can already see the aluminum factory down by the coast. Some cars drive past it, on the Reykjavik-Keflavik highway. The song contest must be over.
    Senka was Serbian, a way-too-beautiful Serbian, a fact I hid from my parents. Her real name was Dragana, the Serbian equivalent of Sickreader, so we decided on Senka, that indicated a Bosnian, even Muslim, background. We went out together for over a year. But then came war and she had to move away with her family.
    After our capture of Knin, we were focusing on the region around it, and I was ordered to search some German-looking villas. One of them had a bombed-out roof and broken windows, with scorched walls. It was a huge house on three floors, and I took my rifle from room to room. They were all empty, but when I came down to the basement, I heard some noise. I rushed into a side room, screaming at the Serbian soldier hiding under an ugly old bed. After I’d spread some bullets around the room, he came crawling out. Except he was a she. It was Senka. Dragana Avramovič. She was still too beautiful. Even more so, wearing that awful uniform. Her hair had been cut even shorter, making her look even more boyish. But the mole was there, and those tempting lips, eyes full of poetry…I wanted to stroke her hard cheek with my finger. We were both dumbstruck. I noticed an ugly scar across her neck.
    “Senka?”
    “Tomo?”
    Before we knew it, we were kissing each other. Two soldiers in enemy uniforms. But then she suddenly stopped kissing and stepped back, holding a gun in her hand, a Serbian made Zastava, pointing it at me with serious eyes. She didn’t trust me? I tried to keep my cool, my AK-47 hanging at my back, strapped around my shoulder.
    “You want to shoot me?” I asked her in a very calm way.
    “I always wanted to.”
    “Why?”
    “Because you’re such an asshole.”
    “I loved you.”
    “Liar.”
    “No. I really did.”
    “I missed you,” she said with shaking lips.
    “I missed you too.”
    “You never wrote me back.”
    “I did. You didn’t get it? I wrote you to Belgrade. To your aunt’s place.”
    “Liar.”
    “Senka…” I said with a smile. “You’re still crazy. I remember…You always said you wanted to kill me.”
    “Yes. And now I can.”
    I suddenly felt like we were back together, arguing in her stepfather’s funky basement in the heart of Split, and without thinking I reached out and touched her army gun with my index finger. I put the finger inside the barrel, as far as it could go, while telling her in the most relaxed voice that kissing was better than killing. I kept on playing with her gun, doing the international sign for “make love, not war” (making my finger enter and exit the barrel a couple of times) until her juicy lips gave birth to the smile I’d been missing for five long years.
    And soon we were kissing again. Me and my crazy girl. Me and my Serbian girl.
    In a short while we were on the bed, our thirsty hands trying to find their way through five lost years and heavy outfits. Bombs went off outside. The whole house shook like from a bulldozer