Dying for Revenge (7 page)

Everyone else in the business had a sobriquet: El Matador, or Mutt, or Crazy Shank, or Bull’s-eye.

She was
the Assassin with Ass
.

Whatever.

Said her backside was so nice she put two asses in the word.
Ass ass in.

What the fuck ever.

She wanted to get back on the diet: cayenne pepper, lemon juice, and honey for twenty days. Maybe she’d shed a few pounds, lose that weight before she spent the twenty-four thousand dollars and went to New York. Maybe. Maybe not.

Finally. All Saints Road. Her umbrella up high. More sweat dripped down the back of her neck.

She stumbled, her heel caught in the roughness of the road. After the stumble she cursed. Lowered her umbrella. Looked down at her heel. Hoped she hadn’t ruined her Blahniks, this pair black patent leather. Open toe. D’Orsay sides. Hook-and-loop ankle straps. Heels over four inches. Not made for this road.

She paused at the intersection, vans and buses and cars zooming by.

Then all traffic ceased. Not a car or bus in sight. The world became quiet.

She closed her umbrella, crossed All Saints Road, and faced Sweet T’s Ice Cream Parlour and Snackette, a colorful wooden structure, rustic like most of the buildings in the islands, greens and oranges and shades of purple, licking her lips and craving. The morning was so warm it took her mind off death and put her mind on ice cream. Made her wish Sweet T’s was open. She wanted a scoop of ice cream. Hell, after the job this morning, she was ten thousand dollars richer. She could afford two scoops in a waffle cone.

 

Her scooter was parked behind a green lattice fence at T’s, that fence around three feet high, tall enough to shelter her scooter all night. She had left it by a sturdy tree, a kid’s stage and other children-type playing equipment adding to the camouflage. Now she would ride near St. James’s Club, an area no more than ten minutes away, and get the clothing she had stashed there, change to jeans and sandals, and drive back to her hotel. That missed shot continued to plague her mind.

She told herself she had missed because she was hungry, hadn’t eaten for almost eighteen hours. She’d make it back to her hotel in time for breakfast. Maybe head to the other side of the island.

Before she could get her scooter started, there was a
pop
sound. The sound of a silenced gunshot. Purple wood in front of Sweet T’s exploded. Then the wooden fence that supported the green lattice erupted, then the ground near her feet did the same, kicking up gravel and dirt.

She jerked, dropped her umbrella, and looked back in the direction she had come from.

One of the men she had killed, or thought she had killed, was staggering down the dirt road, blood draining from his face, covering his white T-shirt. A gun was in his bloodied hand, six-inch barrel dressed in a silencer, that gun raised and aimed at her as he staggered toward All Saints Road. He had staggered after her for a quarter mile. Bullets flew her way, missing by inches, all hitting the front of T’s.

Adrenaline rushed. Heartbeat accelerated.

She was in that zone where the distance between living and dying was measured in seconds.

Shoot and move. The voice inside her head reminded her to shoot and move. In a fight, front and sight. Keep the target in sight. Never turn around, never run. Keep the goddamn target in sight.

That information moved around inside her head as she did as she had been trained to do, as she had learned ten years ago when she had longed to be part of Chicago’s police department. She moved to the right as she went for her holster, removed her gun with quickness, knowing any hesitation would put the scent of her death in the air.

The bloodied man came in a straight line like an amateur, growling, shooting, and refusing to die. She moved in an arc and closed the gap on her attacker, shooting and still moving to her right, smooth steps, never crossing her feet, bullets whizzing by her as she remained focused, everything else blocked out, tunnel vision, her gun shooting a police double,
pop,
hitting her target twice, bull’s-eyes in the center of his forehead, popping three more before he fell.

Her prey crumpled to the battered road, dust and gravel rising up around his lifeless body.

First London. Now this. She looked up All Saints, traffic starting to come her way.

A man left dead on the edges of All Saints Road. No way could she drag the body off to the side. Too much dead weight. An impossible task. Matthew would never let her hear the end of this shit. She hurried to the scooter, sped away, sweating, Antigua’s sunrise warming her suntanned skin.

 

Inside her room. Trembling. She called her husband. No answer.

She left him a calm message. The job was done but it wasn’t as clean as she had anticipated. Big sale. Five bags for the price of one. He knew what that meant. She didn’t tell him about the shoot-out on All Saints Road. She made the job sound, for the most part, perfect. She said the weather was nice but the island was
hot.
Too
hot
to go to the airport right now. She needed a few days to cool off. Small island, only one airport, basically one way in and one way out of Antigua’s one hundred and eight square miles of floating paradise. Couldn’t drive to the other side of the island and find another airport, not like in Jamaica. Do a hit in Kingston, drive a hundred miles of bumpy roads north, fly out of Montego Bay. In a sexy voice she told her husband she loved him, missed him, and purred that she would see him soon.

Then she hung up the phone, cursed, and screamed.

Five

pain and pleasure

Formerly Springville, a city with seven springs, water with over two dozen minerals that made the sand look like gunpowder. Six square miles with a population under twenty thousand. Sixty percent white, thirty-eight percent African American, the rest mostly Native American and Pacific Islanders. The perfect place for Catherine and the kid to blend in with the rest of North America. Median income for a family about thirty thousand British pounds, which was about sixty thousand U.S. dollars, the amount I made sure Catherine and the kid had for the year. That didn’t include making sure the mortgage was paid. The car she drove, a two-year-old Mini Cooper, was paid for, the title in her new name. That was the car she had wanted, something cost-effective, sensible, and European, refused to let me buy it for her new, refused to let me get her a convertible. The same for the city she had chosen to live in. She didn’t want to live in Los Angeles or New York, wasn’t interested in being put up in a condo or home over in Buckhead or in Virginia Highland, wanted a smaller, quieter community. I never asked her why she chose Powder Springs, but maybe it was a place that reminded her of the commune she grew up in outside of Paris. Out of London’s red-light district, no longer having to live the life that the friends she had left behind still lived, she and the kid lived in a small town where gold had been found in the 1800s and the Cherokee people were forced off their land and marched to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears. Not too far from the Civil War’s Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. American Revolution. War of 1812. Civil War. All of that carnage happened in this part of the greatest country in the world.

No matter where a man put his foot in North America, there was blood in its soil.

Same went for most of the rest of the world. Whoever had the biggest bomb ruled their land.

When I was the kid’s age I had longed to have a house with a yard. Now he had one, two stories and a basement, the house sitting on three quarters of an acre, plenty of room to play British or American football in the backyard. Same for baseball. Him having the life I wish I had had, that made me smile.

But him having that life with Catherine, at times that terrified me.

The memories were too strong. Forgiving was not forgetting.

The weather was cold. Forty degrees. Partly cloudy. Rain due late tonight or tomorrow.

I was in a rental car I had picked up at Hartsfield, a car Konstantin had arranged to be waiting for me. One that came with all the latest options: navigation system, Sirius, and a few loaded weapons.

I took the kid for a drive. Catherine was driving her car to Publix to go food shopping.

It was time for some male bonding. Just me and the kid riding the highways.

His frame was strong, shoulders broad, could see where he was going to fill out as he got older. He had a severe ruggedness about him. He had on jeans and tennis shoes, a pair of Nikes with AIR JORDAN on the side. Up top he had on a golden Old Navy hoodie underneath an oversized blue jean jacket, a worn jacket he would grow into. For the most part we were both dressed the same way.

He had his soccer ball with him, but he knew we weren’t going to play European football.

I asked, “How’s school?”

“Good.”

“How are your grades?”

“Good.”

He wasn’t the best conversationalist in the world.

Neither was I.

We stopped by Titan Games & Comics on Spring Road, near Cumberland Boulevard. The kid wanted to go there.
Sin City. All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder. Golgo 13.
I bought him a dozen manga graphic novels and comics. That reminded me of when I was about his age, sitting on an urban stoop in Montreal, reading comics I had bought from a bookstore on Sainte Catherine West.

We went by a gas station, filled up, then took Barrett Parkway toward Kennesaw, made a stop at Costco, and loaded up on canned sodas. After that we got on I-575 and went out past Woodstock, Georgia. I took the kid to an abandoned farm I knew about, a place a long way from civilized life, an area that had no traffic and no spectators. He took cans of soda and headed for a wooden fence, lined the cans up along the edges, set them about five feet apart. I opened the trunk of my car and took out my four handguns. Two .22s and a .380. Then I took out ammunition. I went over the proper way to hold a gun with the kid, then went over the proper way to load a gun, then we did some target practice.

The closest home was probably a mile away, the report of the guns insignificant. This was NRA country, pictures of Charlton Heston in every home, a gun rack in the back of every truck.

He did okay; hit about 30 percent of his shots from thirty feet, much better than the last time.

I needed to make sure he knew how to handle a gun, knew that it wasn’t a toy.

I wanted to ask him if he had ever shot anyone, but I was afraid to ask him, not sure if I wanted to know the answer. Now I wanted to make sure he would be able to protect himself and Catherine.

I asked Steven, “Does Catherine ever touch you?”

“Mum touches me all the time.”

He didn’t understand what I meant.

I said, “In the areas . . . your genitalia . . . does she touch you on your private parts?”

He still didn’t understand what I meant.

I said, “She ever talk about your father?”

“No.”

The kid picked up the .380, the smallest of the weapons.

I said, “Support the bottom of the gun with your left hand. That way you can control the kick. Squeeze the trigger. Don’t pull it. What they do in movies is bullshit. Always squeeze.”

The kid fired six times, a three-second lag between each shot, hit two cans.

My cellular rang. Konstantin’s number. I answered.

By then the kid had reloaded, was shooting again.

Konstantin asked, “You getting shot at?”

“Out on a range.”

My Russian friend told me he had assignments in the States. One was on a real estate mogul who had swindled people out of millions. The second job was in the heart of Dixie.

I said, “That’s down in Hawks’s territory.”

“Hawks. That’s one mean son of a bitch.”

“Yeah. Mean as a pit bull on gunpowder.”

The kid had lined up more cans. Shot at them like he was shooting at his problems.

Konstantin asked, “You talked to Hawks?”

“Not since that time we worked together.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Fort Hood. Right before I did a job in Chapel Hill.”

“For me?”

“The Chapel Hill job was for . . . someone else. Close to two years ago.”

Another job was in Miami, a contract that paid well. The third one was in Birmingham, was a contract on the type of person I hated the most. A pedophile who had escaped justice.

Konstantin said, “Have to run and pick up some things for the wife.”

“You have the best wife in the world.”

“A wife who hands me a computer-generated honey-do list when I walk out the door.”

“Your wife has gone high-tech.”

“Printed the list off from some Web page. Has low-, medium-, and high-priority boxes, but she only checks the high-priority box. Toilet paper, high priority. Paper clips, high priority.”

We laughed.

He said, “Sounds like you’re back on grid.”

“Guess so.”

“Welcome back.”

I hung up. Back on grid. It was as if I had never left.

The kid was standing to the side, waiting on me.

Then I had him set up more cans and load the gun, again six shots, this time hitting four cans.

I said, “You ever ask about him?”

“Ask about whom?”

“Your father.”

“No.”

“You ever meet him?”

He shook his head.

I fired six times; deliberate one-second lag between shots, hit five times. Not good enough, not from this distance. I had to be better at close range. I flexed my fingers a few times, popped another B.C. Powder, washed it down with soda, reloaded, took a breath, imagined I saw Detroit, and fired again.

The second time there was no lag, sounded like one continuous shot.

Like in a war.