Consulting Sniper (Moran's Story)

Chapter 25: The Final Problem (Part II)

I loaded my rifle and waited to see who emerged from the top of the waterfall: Jim Moriarty or Sherlock Holmes.

I cringed when I saw who it actually was. Sherlock Holmes.

FUCK.

I leaned against the rock, letting my forehead rest against it. I looked over the side of the falls to see if there was a body, an article of clothing, blood, anything.

Sure enough, at the base of the falls was a bloody suit jacket. Shit, that was Jim's Westwood jacket. I could tell even from about a quarter of a kilometer away.

I knew what I had to do now. I pulled the ring off my left fourth finger, looked at it once more through the blur of the tears in my eyes, and pitched it over the side of the falls and into the water.

I took another few minutes to sit there in a sort of daze. But then, I realized that every moment I sat there was another moment Sherlock Holmes could have been using to get away.

Pull your shit together, Moran. NOW.

I loaded my rifle and turned toward the falls. That was when I saw her. Sherlock Holmes. Running away from a cave by the top of the falls.

I aimed and fired. I must have fired off somewhere around twenty rounds just then trying to hit Sherlock, but she dodged it too well. She was cunning...

I dropped my rifle and began to shoot with the pistol, aiming at her heart. I grazed her arm and from the other side of the falls, I could see the blood pour down her left arm as she ran. I smiled to myself. But I wasn't done.

I reloaded the rifle and took one more shot with it; the last bullet I had in the rifle. I hit a tall tree just at the right angle to send it crashing down the side of the mountain.

Sherlock ran down the mountain, barely avoiding being crushed until she darted into some brush. I did not see her again.

Both my pistol and my rifle were out of bullets. I took them both and threw them into the falls in anger to join my fiancée and my ring.

I was again unarmed, but I was concealed well enough by the rocks that no one coming up the path by the side of the falls could see me. I waited for Watson.

Sure enough, he came. He saw the remnants of Sherlock's footprints and her hiking staff that she had left by a rock, and he was indeed convinced she was dead.

I nearly laughed out loud. When Watson and the police that he had called were finally gone, I made my descent back down the mountain on the common path.

Back in the hotel room, I packed up the guns that I still had and boarded the train back to London. I had got rid of all my luggage, so all I had was my bag of guns, the clothes on my back, and a ten-euro bill in my pocket.

I carried out all of Jim's burial wishes. He was buried at Reichenbach. When I die, I'd like to be buried at Reichenbach, too. But I think it's a lot more likely that I'll be cremated, and Mycroft will take possession of everything that was mine. My body, my mind, but not my intent and soul. Those would be with Jim.

Upon returning to London, it was not hard to realize that Jim was right about everything. The syndicate was nonexistent. All of my old friends, enemies, and other coworkers were either in jail for over twenty-five years or dead.

It would have been completely impossible for me to think that I could have recreated the syndicate back to what it was. As a result, I did not push my luck. In fact, in the months I was back in London, I did not do much of anything.

I was not overly motivated to find other friends from the syndicate who were still in the London Underground except for the ones who made themselves known to me. I had a feeling there weren't really many more than those people anyway.

My life was ultimately back to the way it was before I had been introduced to Jim, minus of course my enrollment in Oxford. I was still unemployed, with nothing legitimate on my resume that could get me hired at a legal business. The only thing listed on my resume was my trip to the place below the equator and the fact that I could shoot a gun.

I did not, of course, mention the fact that I had failed in my goal to kill Sherlock and Mycroft on two separate occasions. It had only occurred to me when I returned to London that I had in fact failed almost every single important mission that I had ever been given and that all of the successful ones were of such little importance that they could be completely ignored on my record.

Indeed, three months after Reichenbach, I was back at Conduit Street. I sat in my house all day, smoking by my window. There was a bottle of beer on my table that I took the occasional sip of, but I was never drunk in case I got a call back from one of the jobs I interviewed for.

But one night, I was invited to a Casino Club by an old member of the syndicate who quit before it was dissolved. My old friend Becca was one of the few people from the syndicate that I still talked to, and I had not known that she was a member of this Club until she invited me that day to attend with her as a guest. That was when I was introduced to yet another world that I would soon become very familiar with.

*Anyway, thank you for reading! Only four chapters left, so I hope you enjoy the ending :)