SINISTER

     "Just one last thing, Pete. See that baseball on the floor beside my desk? Toss it over to me."

     As he spoke, Johnny Moss -- known to the authorities as Jonathan Frederick Moss and to the general public as Moss the Boss -- leaned back and put his feet up on his desk. He wore a maroon three-piece suit with white stripes too wide to be called pinstripes, a white shirt with French cuffs, and a wide, garish patterned tie that matched the handkerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket. Snow-white spats covered the uppers of his light brown shoes, and his grey Homburg hat lay on the corner of the desk, atop a shallow pile of papers.

     Peter Donaldson was also wearing a three-piece suit, but in a dark blue with muted grey pinstripes. His shirt was almost identical to the one Moss was wearing, but his tie and handkerchief matched the pinstripes in his suit and his black, highly-polished Oxford shoes were unadorned.

     Pete looked down and spotted the ball near his left foot. Shifting his fedora to his right hand, he leaned down and retrieved the ball from the floor with his left. Then he sat back up again, placed his hat in his lap, transferred the ball to his right hand, and flipped the ball backhand across the desk.

     Moss caught the ball in his left hand. "You're hired," he said.

     "What was that about, Mr. Moss?" Pete asked.

     "That was your last test, and you passed it with flying colors. And now that you're part of the outfit, you can call me "boss".

     "OK, uh, boss. What kind of test was that, anyway?"

     "I was makin' sure you're right-handed." Seeing Pete's questioning expression, Moss continued. "You know I don't allow guns up here, and there ain't no one better'n me with a knife -- in a fair fight, anyways. So all I gotta worry about is someone taking me from behind.

     "The heart's on the left side, between the fifth and sixth ribs. I figure that's why most people are right-handed -- 'cause that's the hand you gotta hold the knife in if you're gonna kill the guy you're facing. If a right-hander wants to kill someone from behind, his knife hand's gonna be on the wrong side.

     "That ain't the case for a left-hander. He's built to stab you through the heart from behind. My bookkeeper's a college boy, and he says those old Roman guys called left-handed people "sinister", which is a fancy way of sayin' you can't trust 'em. I figure they was right, so I only hire right-handers."

     Pete nodded. "Makes sense, I guess."

     Moss lifted his feet off the desk and stood up. "C'mon," he said, "I'll show you around the joint."

     Pete quickly got to his feet, went to the door, opened it, and stood to the right of the doorway. "After you, boss," he said.

     As Moss walked through the door Pete slid his left hand behind his jacket and grasped the hilt of his knife.

     If you were a hit man, he mused, there were real advantages to being ambidextrous.

END

Jim Robb
(Fiction)