A witness who viewed the scene at a distance said that he thought Tonya had fainted. The tall and leggy Tonya had obscured his view of the smaller and petite Amelie.
That same witness heard Willie Ralston holler at Amelie, although he couldn’t make out what he said. Ralston was angry because he’d been afraid that Amelie had killed their hostage before the girl could make a video begging her father to pay the ransom.
Ralston lifted Tonya off the street and lowered her into the van. Then he hollered at Amelie again, to tell her to get in back of the van and make sure that Tonya didn’t wake up and start screaming.
Tonya had survived the attack and made the plea to her father that he pay the ransom. As is often the case, the kidnapping fell apart when Ralston went to pickup the ransom. He shot an FBI agent in the foot before being gunned down.
Amelie had seen it all happen from atop a hill where she had been waiting for Ralston. She had followed him to make sure he didn’t try to run off with the ransom and keep it all for himself. Now there was no money, no Willie, and the cops would be going to the garage apartment he rented as soon as they ran his prints and figured out who he was.
Amelie went back to the apartment where she paced for six minutes as she thought over her options. Because she was a minor, Ralston had always snuck her in and out of his place in the back of the van. As far as Amelie knew, no one was aware of their relationship. She’d been living with Ralston while her father assumed that she had run away again. She hadn’t run away, she’d had just never returned home one day.
A plan formed in Amelie’s mind and she put it in motion without hesitation. Tonya was lying on a mattress in a corner of the bedroom. She was trussed up, blindfolded, gagged, and drugged into unconsciousness. Amelie found a hammer in a toolbox under the kitchen sink and used it to bash in the back of Tonya’s head. While doing so she had put on one of Ralston’s jackets and pulled the hood closed tightly around her face. The blood spatter that struck her washed off easily. The remainder of the blood stained Ralston’s jacket and implicated him in the crime. The act of murder meant nothing to Amelie, and she had never hesitated in swinging the hammer once she had made her mind up to kill. If anything, there was pleasure in killing Tonya, whom she’d envied.
Afterward, she stripped naked then removed the handcuffs off of Tonya’s corpse and secured an end around her left wrist. The apartment was one big room with a partitioned area for a tiny kitchen and another for the bathroom. Amelie walked every inch of it to make sure that there was nothing she had overlooked. When she was in the bathroom, she saw the bottle of sleeping pills that Ralston had bought to drug Tonya with.
Amelie downed three of the pills. It was a huge dose considering how little she weighed, but she felt it was worth the risk. Besides, the cops had to be headed her way at any minute. Returning to the bedroom, Amelie laid on the bed and secured the free end of the handcuffs to the brass headboard. When the cops arrived, they would find one dead kidnap victim and a teen runaway who had been handcuffed to a bed, drugged, and raped. Amelie knew her father was nowhere as wealthy as Tonya’s father, but he wasn’t a poor man either. It wasn’t inconceivable that Ralston might have abducted her as part of a second kidnapping scheme.
The rape was as big a lie as the rest of it, but Amelie had sex with Ralston right before he left to get the ransom and she had not showered since.
Amelie felt a chill as she lied on the bed naked and waiting for the cops to show. The drugs had yet to kick in and make her groggy, but she became aware of another sensation. She had to urinate. She decided that being found lying in her own urine would only make her story more believable and giggled as warm fluid was released.
She was having trouble keeping her eyes open when the apartment door burst inward, and FBI agents flooded into the room. They read the scene just as she hoped they would and treated her as another of Ralston’s victims.
The witness who’d seen the abduction had told the investigators that he thought Ralston had another girl and that he’d been ordering her around. His statement gave credence to Amelie’s tale of being treated like a slave by Ralston.
There was a brief period where she thought it might all unravel when Ralston’s junkie brother, Frank, came forward and claimed that Amelie and his brother had been lovers and that the kidnapping was her idea. Being thorough, investigators looked into the allegation. And yes, while Amelie and Tonya had attended the same high school and shared a class together briefly, there was no other evidence that they had ever interacted in a friendly or unfriendly manner. It was also difficult for the FBI agents involved in the case to view the delicate and lovely teen, Amelie, as someone capable of committing such actions. Frank was threatened with a charge of giving false testimony and backed off. He would overdose on heroin fourteen months later and be found dead in an alley.
Logan Fortunato had been following the story in the news. Unlike the FBI, he believed Frank Ralston. He’d seen something familiar in Amelie when she gave an interview about her ordeal to a local reporter. The girl lied as well as he had when he was her age and confronted by his elders.
Fortunato hired a female private investigator to follow the girl. It wasn’t long before he received a report that stated Amelie was sleeping with a married man, doing drugs, and shoplifting.
Those activities were a far cry from kidnapping and murder, but it was enough for Fortunato. He decided to recruit Amelie and used a surrogate to approach her and make her an offer.
Amelie was to play a small role in the burglary of an expensive home by distracting the man hired to guard it. She did her part well, accepted money, and asked if they had other work for her. Over time, Fortunato had asked more and more of Amelie, including murder. She would do anything as long as she felt the compensation was enough. By the time she was nineteen, Amelie had become Fortunato’s favorite assassin. The girl killed without mercy and because of her small size, youth, and beauty, her victims suspected nothing until she struck. Anyone seeing her driving around in the car with the vanity plates and teddy bears would never suspect what she was. She was a sociopath who could fake emotions she didn’t feel and cry on cue.
Gage Kline certainly hadn’t seen her coming. After going separate ways with Bohdan Kushnir and Cory Sparks, Kline had contacted a friend he knew who might be able to tell him why the rare bill they’d stolen was too hot to fence.
That “friend” was connected with Fortunato and knew that he was looking for the heist crew. When his contact described the woman he had spotted Kline with, Fortunato was certain that she was the blonde seen in the video taken by a drone. Cipher had sent him a copy of that video along with other pertinent information and reports about the robbery. If Gage Kline refused to give up his partners, maybe the woman would talk.
Fortunato had also accepted a contract on Tanner. With the robbery crew grabbed and the rare bill recovered, Fortunato could then turn all of his attention toward killing Tanner.
Kline and the woman were tortured and told all they knew about their partners. It wasn’t enough to be able to track them down. Fortunato then had a brilliant idea. Amelie Weber and the blonde woman involved with the heist crew were similar in appearance. He’d had that very thought while watching the drone video. He was also aware of Weber’s peripheral involvement in the heist. Amelie’s father acted as a courier for rare items that Cipher used to launder funds. Fortunato had been aware of that when Amelie had first come to his attention. He’d been gathering information for years on Cipher’s operatives. He had a long-range plan to take over their operation someday. That would only happen if he could identify who they were, which so far had been impossible to do.
But he did know about Karl Weber’s connection to Cipher, as did Amelie. One of her standing assignments was to spy on her father for Fortunato. That was why he knew that Weber had been the courier on the day of the heist.
His fertile mind saw a way to use Weber, Amelie, and the surviving members of the heist crew to lure Tanner into
the perfect trap. It meant sacrificing the reliable Boss and his team, but in the interest of killing Tanner, they were an acceptable loss.
Amelie was told what her part was to be, and she was excited by it. She’d heard of Tanner and it pissed her off that he was considered to be the greatest assassin of all time. She was an assassin too and had killed nearly eighty people since bashing in Tonya Flores’s skull. To her, Tanner was another Tonya. Someone who other people held in higher esteem than herself. It would be a pleasure to kill the bastard, and she could get back at her father at the same time.
Things had gotten scary there for a while when Boss attacked. Amelie didn’t think that the hit crew was aware that she and they were working for the same man.
Still, by attacking, they gave her a chance to see Tanner in action, and who knew he had a boy wonder? Tanner had been impressive, as had the boy called Henry, but Amelie considered herself better than both of them.
Fortunato was right. Played correctly, Tanner would never see her coming. He would show up at the diner to play the big hero and when they were alone, she would slit his throat wide open. She wouldn’t use a knife. To place him at ease she was wearing a pair of tight shorts and a form hugging top. If she had a concealed weapon on her it would be easy to spot. She’d have a weapon, nonetheless. It would be the silver barrette that she’d taken off the blonde who had been involved in the heist. She’d sharpened one side of it until it was honed to a fine edge. At some point Tanner would look away or turn his back on her. When that happened, Amelie would use the barrette to kill him.
She had already used it once, on her father. Amelie smiled again. The look on her old man’s face had been priceless.
With him dead, the farmland he’d inherited would pass on to her, along with most of his money. And once she killed Tanner, then those in the know would have to respect her. And better yet, they would fear her. Things were certainly looking up. And soon Tanner would be facedown.
Amelie sent off a text to the number she’d been given. She wanted to let Fortunato know that Tanner was on his way and would soon be dead.
A text came back moments later. It consisted of only two words.
Don’t fail!
Amelie smirked. Of course she wouldn’t fail. Tanner thought of her as a not too bright and harmless piece of fluff. When she sank her makeshift knife into his throat, those intense eyes of his would be wide with wonder.
Amelie sat at a small table inside the diner and ordered a piece of cherry pie. When it came, she imagined the redness of the cherries was Tanner’s blood.
20
Devil In Disguise
Luck was with Tanner and he was able to get a flight to Dallas that had him arriving at the diner a little more than three hours after speaking to Amelie. He’d driven by once to take in the surroundings and saw nothing and no one that looked suspicious or as if they were keeping watch.
The car he was in was nondescript and had been ordered in advance from a black-market service that supplied vehicles, weapons, and other items their customers might need. They didn’t operate in every state, and only in certain cities. Tanner wished they would expand. Despite the steep prices they charged, the service was A+ and there were a number of times he could have used them over the years. If he returned the car and the weapons he’d ordered in good condition, he would receive a discount the next time he used the business.
He paid a yearly fee for a similar set-up based in Europe. It was one he rarely took advantage of, but when he needed it, he really needed it. Such was the nature of insurance, legal or illegal.
Amelie had certainly been watching for him. She ran from the diner before he could step out of the rental he was driving. A look of relief was evident in her eyes and she heaved a sigh as she took the seat beside him.
“Thank you for coming. I didn’t know who else to call or what to do.”
Tanner looked her over and saw that her eyes were red, and one hand was fiddling with the silver barrette in her hair. He had the car in motion and drove around to park at the side of the diner, and away from the windows where people sat in booths to look out at the highway.
“I want to go to the motel where you were staying, Amelie. It’s possible your father could still be there, or someone there knows what happened to him.”
“Oh, Papa. Do you think he’s still alive?”
“I don’t know. But I will find out and I’ll get you somewhere safe. Do you still have that new ID your father bought?”
“No. It was left in the room.”
“Let’s hope the cops haven’t found it.”
“Yes,” Amelie said.
Amelie was waiting for the perfect moment to act. By pulling around to the side of the building, Tanner had cut down on the number of possible witnesses. She would still be bloody after she killed him. That couldn’t be helped and was something she hadn’t considered before. It didn’t matter. Killing Tanner was the important thing, once that was done, she’d worry about getting clean of his blood.
Tanner placed the car in drive and drove forward slowly. There was a narrow one-way street at the rear of the diner. The car’s GPS had designated it as a first step along the shortest path to reach the motel they were headed to. As he turned away from her to see if anyone was coming down the street, Amelie made her move and freed the sharpened barrette from her hair.
It should have worked. She should have been able to take him unawares and inflict a fatal wound before he knew what was happening. Three factors saved Tanner as they had many times in the past.
Factor one: The man was inhumanly fast. His hand speed didn’t only help him be quick with a gun but in all forms of self-defense.
Factor two: He was a Tanner, the seventh Tanner and had been trained to be on guard at all moments and against all persons. Tanner could walk in a room and his mind would automatically count the number of people present and look about for any threats. He had no reason to mistrust Amelie but that didn’t mean he had classified her as harmless. She was a human. Human beings were always capable of violence.
Factor three, and the one most applicable: Tanner had been betrayed before by a woman. She had been someone he trusted with his life and loved deeply, and she had been willing to kill him when she deemed it necessary. Since that day, trust has come very hard for him.
As he was turning his head to glance away from Amelie, Tanner had used the button on the door to adjust his side mirror so that he could also have a view of what was in the other direction. This was something that Spenser, his one-eyed mentor, did often while driving. Tanner adapted the habit whenever he was driving with someone other than those few he trusted implicitly. Amelie was not numbered in that class.
The first thing he saw was her twisted features as she freed the barrette. The innocent face had hardened, and her pouty lips were curled into a sneer. The barrette was in the shape of a heart. The bottom of the heart had been sharpened to a fine edge.
Tanner hit the brakes and at the same time gripped Amelie’s delicate wrist; the one that was connected to the hand holding the edged weapon. Panic flared in Amelie’s green eyes as she struggled uselessly. Tanner slammed her hand against the dashboard and the barrette fell onto the floor. The fingers on her free hand were curled into claws and she was reaching out to scratch at his eyes while emitting a sound of anger. Tanner released her wrist, batted away her hand, then hit her hard on her chin. Amelie collapsed like a toy whose batteries had fallen out.
A look around told Tanner that no one had seen the brief struggle inside the car. He drove off and headed to a nature preserve that was less than half an hour away. He hit Amelie hard enough to keep her out that long, and likely much longer.
Fortunato had sent seven men after him, a biker gang, and finally, a young woman who might weigh a little over a hundred pounds. Judging by her previous interactions with him, Tanner had to assume that she’d been Fortunato’s ace in the hole all along. As strategies went, it was a damn fine one. He’d had no reason to
suspect Amelie or fear her. He guessed that belief had been shared by whoever she had killed before attempting to murder him. Maybe someday a woman should be named a Tanner. They certainly had an edge in the advantage of doing the unexpected when it came to being an assassin.
Hutchinson said that Fortunato believed he had no equals. That conviction might have merit if this level of guile was an example of how he normally operated. The plan had been brilliant, and if his reflexes had been slower, Amelie’s improvised blade might have found its way into his throat. Fortunato was not someone to take lightly.
By the time Amelie stirred the sun was setting. She was still in the car. Tanner hadn’t bothered tying her up, but her sneakers had been removed and she was sitting on a blanket that had been spread out over the seat. Tanner was parked on a gravel surface. He’d been headed to the nature preserve when he spotted a vacant warehouse with a huge gravel parking lot. The building was in the midst of a renovation and the work crews had left for the day. If Amelie bolted from the car and tried to run in her stocking feet on the uneven stones, she wouldn’t get far.
Her eyes came into focus slowly as she moved her tongue around in her mouth. When she turned her head, she saw that Tanner was holding a gun in his right hand. The weapon had a silencer attached. In his left hand was a baton. It was retracted in on itself, but the heavy metal ball at its top was in plain view.
Amelie moaned. “Shit, my jaw hurts, and I can taste blood.”
“Is your father a part of this?”
Amelie looked at the gun, then smiled at Tanner. “You don’t want to kill me, and I don’t want to die. Why don’t we make a deal?”
“What sort of deal?”
“The kind of deal a man and a woman can make,” Amelie said. As she spoke, she had unfastened the top button on her blouse. Tanner snapped the baton open with one flick of his wrist, and with a second flick he smashed the metal at its tip against Amelie’s fingers. She yelped, then cradled her left hand with her right.
To Serve And Protect (A Tanner Novel Book 39) Page 16