I should have known better when he told me he was incognito and that, for his protection as well as my own, it was better that I didn’t know his real name. I found that kind of curious, but at the same time, intriguing.

My mother always said I was attracted to bad boys, and she was right. I always preferred the allure of an air of mystery to the open book, tell-all type of guy.

One day, after we’d been dating for about six months, I got up the nerve to ask him if he would tell me about whatever indiscretion he’d been involved in that necessitated his use of a pseudonym. He shot me a look that kind of scared me. In fact, for an instant, he looked like some sort of lunatic. But it passed quickly.

“So you want to know my real name and why I go incognito?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “We’ve been together for six months. I would think by now you’d feel close enough to open up to me.”

He had a broad smile on his face, but the look in his eyes belied his smile. “You know,” he said, “If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you.”

“Not if I kill you first,” I said, pulling a gun out of the back of the waistband of my pants and shooting him in the upper left thigh.

He fell to one knee and looked up at me with a bewildered expression. “Yes, Nicco, I shot you because you were a hitman for the Vegas mob and ratted out your bosses in exchange for immunity from your crimes and going into Witness Protection,” I explained.

“But one of those you ratted on was my Uncle Vito. He said if I could ever find and take care the rat, I’d get a cool million for my troubles. I may be in a slump when it comes to my dating choices, but I’m very good at getting information. All I had to do was find a really nice, open-book type of guy who worked for the WITSEC program, get him drunk, and intimate the possibility of sex. And, well, you know what they say about loose lips, don’t you Nicco?”

Nicco groaned. “If you knew who I was and what I did, why did you ask me just before?”

“To tell you the truth, Nicco, I was undecided. I was curious if, after six months together, you loved me enough to tell me the truth. But apparently, you didn’t. You even threatened to shoot me. But now it’s my turn to shoot you and to collect my bounty promised to me by my favorite uncle. Goodbye, Nicco.” I aimed and shot Nicco right between the eyes.

Written for Greg’s Five Word Weekly Challenge, where the words are found, incognito, indiscretion, lunatic, and slump. Image credit: Wonder AI.