Paragraphs without Context: "Slape"

Reg Slape spoke with an English accent, but not one of those hoity-toity ones.  It was an accent that spoke of years of chain-smoking and violence.  Whiskey, rage, and blood.  He wore simple black suits and white shirts.  Sometimes he put on a red tie, other times he just decorated his shirt-front with blood-spatter as it rained from his pummeling fists and carving stilleto.

He wasn’t a psychopath; he just didn’t give a fuck.

He owned the night.  When he went out on the town, people got hurt.  He feared nothing.  He owed nothing.  He took what he wanted, and if a fellow didn’t like it, a fellow was going to swallow his own teeth.

Reg Slape was everything that Ogden Stover wasn’t, and vice-versa.  Which one was the invention?  Slape couldn’t be bothered to give a shit; Stover pondered this question deep into the night, as he washed the results of the evening’s activites from his skin, tended to ripped knuckles, bleached gore-tainted shirts.

“It doesn’t matter,” Stover would say to himself in the mirror sometimes, as he suited up.  “You’re fucking right about that,” Slape would say back moments later, the transformation complete.  “Stop being a pussy.”

They met only during these brief moments, as one became the other.  Slape never asserted himself while the sun was out, and Stover never interfered while Slape was doing business.

Sometimes, Stover wondered what would happen if Slape ever became dissatisfied with this arrangement.  Sometimes Slape wondered too, but thinking about it only made his head hurt and wound up costing somebody a visit to the ER.

What would happen?

One day, both of them were going to find out.

This day, in fact.  The day Stover’s wife made a very bad decision, and the day Slape decided to do something about it.