She stared out her window at the wonderful, warm afternoon and the beautiful small city below as the phone rang.
And with each ring she got a little more worried. He had missed his normal call a few times before, but not often enough to be a habit, so this was strange.
Tonight she was looking forward to dinner and then a long soak in their hot tub.
She had to admit, what Sam lacked in abilities to cook, he made up for in construction skills. He had done a pretty nice job on adding in some nice features in the house, not the least of which was the wonderful hot tub on their back deck.
He had built a privacy barrier between the tub and the only neighbors who could see their deck, which allowed them to sit naked in the tub and just stare at the stars. On clear nights, the stars just seemed to really fill the sky. That was yet another advantage of living in a small town away from large cities.
The stars reminded her of simpler times thousands of years earlier. She would never want to go back to those times, but killing back then had sure been a much easier task.
Sam’s phone finally went to voice mail and she listened to his upbeat voice telling her to leave a message.
“Give me a call when you come up from the chapter you are writing,” she said and hung up.
Something didn’t feel right, but she had no idea what that something might be. But over the centuries she had learned to trust that gut feeling.
So from this moment forward, she would be extra careful. Chances are it was just Sam being an airhead.
But she had her share of enemies as well, and there was no telling when one of them would come after her.
She would have no idea how anyone would have found her, but safe was better than sorry and very dead.
And since she had lived thousands of years now, she knew how to be safe.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MARY JO NEVER expected anything to lead back to her and her home, but it made no sense to take any chance when just a little bit of work would solve any problem.
After she had gotten back, she had removed all the black bags from the back of the Jeep and put them where they belonged, then had gone into the guest room, put her blouse, bra, underwear, jeans, shoes and socks in a black trash bag along with all the cloths she had used for the cleaning and set the bag near the back door.
Then she had gone to her own bedroom upstairs in the four-bedroom, two-bath suburban home, taken a shower, making sure she was clean.
Extra sure. Especially her short brown hair.
She had liked this house in the year since she and Bob had gotten married. It kind of fit a part of her that she didn’t often get to enjoy. And she knew how to play the perfect housewife role to a science.
But behind the housewife, she was a member of an ancient order of assassins. She had lived for thousands of years, as everyone in her order tended to do. And she had never grown tired of her job.
Not once. In fact, the job had gotten more and more challenging as technology improved.
She liked that and the money it supplied her to live a lavish lifestyle. She actually had no idea how rich she was, considering all of her many bank accounts around the world under all the different names. She actually didn’t need to work, she just loved her job.
There was always a challenge. And she got to meet and sometimes marry nice people as well before killing them.
After her shower, she had dressed in a similar white blouse that she had had on earlier, same style of jeans, underwear, everything, including a second pair of identical sneakers.
With a pair of white gloves on, she took the black bag and put it into the back of her Jeep along with a couple bags of normal week’s garbage. She had set this routine up a year ago. This was all normal for her, including the white gloves.
She had then driven the ten minutes to the landfill just outside of town, in the opposite direction from the rock quarry.
There she had made sure every bag was tossed over the edge of the dumping area into an area full of other black bags that a bulldozer was moving around and covering in layers of dirt.
She had paid the attendant in cash and he hadn’t even noticed her other than to nod hi as he did every week. His attention was focused on the two pickup trucks behind her full of junk.
Now she was back at her house looking at the bottle of vodka and orange juice and wondering if she dared have just one more drink.
She loved her drinks, but was very careful in the thick of a job to not drink too much.
As she stood there, staring at the fixings for a drink she felt she wanted, but wasn’t sure she needed, her cell phone went off.
It was her husband’s ring.
She answered it. “Hi, honey.”
“Afraid I’m going to be late for dinner,” he said. “Got a body.”
“Oh, no,” she said, making herself take a deep breath.
Her husband was the Chief of Police for the entire city. This call was normal. Over their year of marriage it had happened a good thirty times.
She had been responsible for a few of those bodies, just as she was for dear old Sam, more than likely the one that had just been found. But he never knew that and never would.
Actually, she had been the one who had anonymously reported Sam’s body from a burner phone she used while at the dump and then tucked into a black bag that went into the landfill. She didn’t want to chance that no one would find her bait.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “How about I wait for you and we go out to Murphy’s Diner when you are done.”
“Might get late,” he said.
“I’ll snack until you call.”
“That would be nice,” he said. He told her that he loved her and then hung up.
He was a good man.
She had enjoyed the year plus they had been together. The sex had been good, the laughter real. After centuries of living and killing, she had learned to appreciate those times even more.
She glanced at her watch. It was a quarter after five. The timing was spot on the money.
She glanced at the bottle of vodka one more time, then set it aside, put the pitcher of fresh orange juice back in the fridge and the clean glass back in the cabinet.
Maybe after her dinner.
She then took her purse and went out to her Jeep in the garage. The third row of seats were always down in her car so she could carry gardening and groceries easily.
She lifted the seat and there was the bag with a rifle in it. Also her disguise bag was there as well.
She slipped on her gloves for a moment and did a quick inventory to make sure everything was with the rifle and the disguise bag and she hadn’t forgotten anything, then lowered the seats back into place.
Fifteen minutes later she had parked her Jeep in the mall parking lot out of any camera sight. She then, when no one was around, transferred her rifle to the small Ford four-door sedan back seat and locked the car. The car was brown, with plates mostly covered in mud.
The Ford sedan had been stolen by a man she had never met and left for her, just as another man had left the pickup for her. She had paid the man ten grand for the car in a drop bag. He hadn’t asked questions.
Then, carrying her disguise bag, she went into the mall and into the public restroom as herself. She came out almost ten minutes later, after a half-dozen other women had come and gone, as a long-haired brunette with a much larger nose and a tan jacket and red tennis shoes.
She was ready to get this job done.
PART TWO
The Job
CHAPTER EIGHT
JEAN COULDN’T BELIEVE when she got home that Sam had vanished.
His cell phone was beside his computer, his car was in the garage, and the front door was unlocked.
His wallet and car keys were where he always left them in a dish in the entryway.
Jean quickly checked where they normally left notes for each other beside the fridge and there was nothing.
And no sign at all of
any kind of scuffle.
She made herself do a complete check of the house. His clothes were still there, nothing had changed.
She went out into the backyard and walked the wooden fence-line, seeing if there was any sign anyone had come or gone that way.
Nothing.
She went back in and stood in the kitchen, looking around calmly.
Sam had simply walked out of the door.
Clearly for some reason.
But where was he? And why?
She needed to be prepared because if one of her enemies had found her, she needed to be ready.
But first she needed to find out what exactly had happened to Sam.
She went to their bedroom and pushed aside some of her clothes and clicked a tiny hidden switch on the back of the closet.
The switch tested her fingerprint to make sure it was her so that no one could accidently find what was behind the panel.
A very small section of the wall slid back and a computer screen and monitor slid forward.
She triggered the proximity alert around the house in case anyone approached. She wanted to be ready if they did.
Then she brought up the security system she had installed. Every inch of this house was recorded at all times. That would have driven Sam crazy if he would have known that, but she had lived a very long time by taking no chances.
Normally she would never check on Sam, but she had to know what had happened to him.
She fast-forwarded it to a time just slightly over three hours before. Sam had been working on his book when he suddenly turned.
He stood and went to the door and talked to a woman Jean knew from three doors down the street named Mary Jo Hanson.
The wife of Jean’s target.
Mary Jo was an attractive and tiny woman with short brown hair.
Jean clicked on the sound and heard Mary Jo tell Sam that she had a light that was shorting out in her hall and would he help her fix it.
He had agreed and from an external camera Jean watched Sam go down the sidewalk to Mary Jo’s house and go in.
About thirty minutes later Mary Jo left her house in her Jeep, alone.
She came back almost an hour later, still alone.
She left once more for what must have been a short errand of some sort, then had left just ten minutes ago.
Jean was stunned. What was happening?
Was Sam still alive in there?
And what part had Sam played in whatever Mary Jo and her husband were up to?
She didn’t dare go in there to look for him. All she could do at the moment was wait. Whatever was happening wasn’t her doing.
She shut down her security panel, but not before extracting a pistol from a box inside the open wall. She made sure the clip was full and took a second clip.
Until she figured out exactly what was happening, she was going to stay armed.
And she was going to watch Mary Jo’s house.
CHAPTER NINE
MARY JO WALKED from the mall to her stolen brown Ford sedan not drawing any attention to herself, climbed into the brown sedan and ten minutes later had it parked on the top of a pine-tree covered hill just to the right of town.
She had turned the car around so she could go straight down the hill she had just come up and be lost in the streets below in thirty seconds, long before anyone below even knew what hit them.
She left the car running and left the disguise bag in the car. She then took her rifle and made sure it was loaded.
It was actually a deer rifle, a classic bolt-action Roberts with a scope. The rifle was a collector’s item that she remembered back sixty years ago really liking for a job similar to this one. The thief who had given her this rifle had assured her it was accurate and had been tested.
She tested it on him and he had been right, actually. The thief was still one of her husband’s unsolved cases.
She moved to the small stone wall that kept tourists on this hill from tumbling over the edge of a fairly steep cliff down into an old stone quarry below. This small turn-around often held teens out parking for some first love experiences in a parent’s car.
She was so old now, she could barely remember her first sexual experiences. They had not been pleasant, she remembered that much.
That’s why she enjoyed the modern pleasant experiences now. Just like she enjoyed her drinks. When good, they were both worth savoring.
The rock quarry two hundred feet below was abandoned and mostly a playground for neighborhood kids after school and in the summer.
The body of good old Sam lay below her, right where she had dumped it. Someone had covered it.
Killing never did anything for her, one way or the other, and poor old Sam was just bait for her husband who was the real target.
She checked the area in the small clearing around her to make sure no one was nearby that she would also need to kill.
Thankfully it was clear.
Her husband stood with two detectives in a tight group near the body, talking.
Good, she would take care of all three at the same time. First her husband, who was her target, the one she was getting paid to kill. She had slept with her target for fourteen months. She thought of it like a cat playing with a mouse.
She studied the scene quickly one more time. By taking out the other two detectives, it would slow down any investigation.
“Goodbye, dear,” she said softly. “This is what you get for pissing off the wrong people who have far too much money.”
The rifle was loud, but had almost no kick.
The echo of her first shot bounced around through the trees and over the surrounding farmlands and down against the rock walls.
Her husband went to the ground instantly.
She knew the entry wound would be small in his chest, but most of his back would be blown away from the high-velocity rifle as the hollow point bullet expanded on impact and blew him apart.
She quickly took out her husband’s best friend with a second shot before anyone even thought to move for cover.
She killed the third detective as he turned to run.
She picked up the three shell casings, made sure she had left nothing else where she had fired, brushed around the dirt to kill any shoe prints, then put the gun back in the case open on the back seat of the car and headed down the road.
She turned away from the police and then worked her way slowly back toward the mall.
She parked the Ford sedan next to her Jeep again. Then she transferred the disguise bag and everything into her car and put the rifle back under the back seats.
She climbed into her Jeep and turned on a high-tech scanner she had in her purse that told her if any camera was watching at all.
Nothing, as she had known for this area of the large mall parking lot.
She quickly pulled off her disguise and tossed them into the bag, zipping it up and putting it on the floor behind her driver’s seat.
Then she took off the thin, transparent gloves she had been wearing that were embedded with fake fingerprints and stuck those in the pocket of her jeans.
She hit almost no traffic on the short drive home.
That was nice. Her job was done now.
All she had to do was make sure nothing came back toward her and get paid before moving on and vanishing into the next job.
CHAPTER TEN
JEAN WATCHED AS Mary Jo pulled into her garage and the door slid shut. She had been gone for just over forty minutes.
What was she up to? Where was Sam?
Jean really, really wanted to just go bang on the door and ask what had happened to Sam, but that would blow her cover completely.
But honestly, she wasn’t sure that her cover wasn’t already blown. She needed to be prepared for that possibility.
She quickly went out to her garage and clicked open yet another secret panel behind some boxes she stored there. Sam had been handy with tools, but he had no idea how good she was as well, and she never let on that s
he was a master carpenter who could build just about anything she needed.
In the panel was what she called her “go bag” meaning guns, clothes, an extra pair of shoes, fake passports and drivers’ licenses, and some rolls of cash.
She also had two different full face and hair disguises in the bag.
If she needed to go, there was a way she could go under the hot tub, through an opening in the deck siding and through their fence and into the neighbor’s back yard.
She kept an SUV gassed and stored in a self-storage place five blocks away.
She closed up the panel and put her go bag near her back door where she could get it on a run, then went back into the living room and sat, watching Mary Jo’s house.
She had often sat in the same chair, watching for her target, Chief Hanson, to get home. She knew their routines as well as her own. He should be home by now, but clearly he hadn’t come in yet.
A few moments later the garage door on Mary Jo’s garage opened again and she backed out. The windows on Mary Jo’s Jeep were tinted, so no way Jean could tell what she had.
And still no way that Jean could try to go into that house to investigate what happened to Sam.
She watched Mary Jo drive away, then stood and went into her kitchen to make a quick sandwich and grab a bottle of a sports drink.
This was going to be a long night.
A very long night.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BACK AT HOME after her run to the rock quarry, Mary Jo put back on the fake fingerprint gloves and pulled out two more black garbage bags full of weekly trash from the kitchen, including a bunch of stuff she had tossed out of the fridge after wiping prints and putting the fake prints on the stuff.
She got the rifle from the car and broke it down and put parts in three bags, wearing her fake fingerprint gloves as she did.
Then she took parts of her costume and spread them through the garbage as well. And she made sure that there was nothing in the bags that would lead to her in this home in any fashion.
Death Takes a Partner: A Mary Jo Assassin Novel Page 2