Those summer and fall days were full of cut grass smells and the tastes of carnivals. Life back then seemed to have no problems and no worries. Now I had finally returned to that point. It is lucky that Carol has been dead all these years. She would call me self pitying. She would be right.
My parents and everyone in Moscow and the surrounding area were killed when Dad’s team tried to start up the simplest power system in the buried ship. Now no children would ever play in these streets again.
I stood on my parents’ front steps and tried to remember the laughter.
NINE
Berkeley, California
July10, 2015.
I stood in front of the television, my mouth open, staring.
“Over a hundred square miles,” the CNN announcer said, “of Northern Idaho has been evacuated. The gray cloud causing the deaths has slowly settled over the Moscow, Idaho, area. No reason for the cloud has been uncovered, but the theory that a small mountain to the north of Moscow has erupted is not true. We will keep you updated as more information comes in.”
“Dad? Mom?” Carol put her arm around me, holding me while crying. I couldn’t cry. I was too much in shock.
I just kept staring at the television, not really believing what I knew must have happened.
The day we found the buried spaceship Carol and I and Dad had sat inside the control room in the alien chairs. Just as Grandpa and the men before him, we decided that the world wasn’t ready for this discovery. We decided that Grandpa and the old Wheelbarrow Association had been right. This ship needed to stay secret for a while. Or at the very least bring outsiders in slowly.
Dad had taken charge and within a week had brought in a trusted friend who was a professor of physics at Cal Tech. Then over the next few years the Wheelbarrow Association, as we called ourselves, gained more and more members as Dad put together a private research team made up of some of the best scientists in the nation to study the ship.
They made slow headway, filing patents on what they did figure out how to work, and being careful to document every step they took.
Carol and I were married the following year and both of us kept going to school and working around the ship in the summers. After a few years we even came to feel comfortable with knowing there was an alien ship buried under Moscow Mountain. It became a part of our lives. I took a job at the University of California, Berkeley, doing research in electrical engineering, mostly along lines we were uncovering in the ship. Carol finished her doctorate in geology and was teaching across the bay.
We spent the summers in Moscow.
Life for all of us was good. Settled. Until the research team decided to start one of the ship’s power systems. For years nothing that crazy had been suggested. That summer I spent time on the ship arguing against trying to power anything up. I argued that the systems the aliens were using were not completely understood yet. I argued that there was a real reason this ship was here that we didn’t understand and that reason might have to do with a malfunction in the power systems. We didn’t know what might happen.
But Dad and his team said it was right to try, all safety precautions would be taken, and everything would be done by the book.
Dad and his friends didn’t say what book.
I helped with the early stages, hoping against hope that I could talk them out of trying anything. But all the research and all the exacting detailed studies went so smoothly that eventually, when school started, Carol and I went back to California.
Every night I talked to Dad and some of the other scientists. And three times that fall I went back up to try to stop the testing. But I had no luck. From what Dad told me on the phone the night before they were all killed, everything still seemed just fine. Powering up the smallest power system seemed to be progressing as planned and he was excited about finally getting into some of the data banks on the ship. I was supposed to call him and be on the phone when the test started in case they needed me for anything.
But, of course, something went wrong. Terribly wrong.
Carol and I were eating breakfast when we heard the news of what they were calling an explosion in Northern Idaho during the night. I had been expecting a call from Dad about the test being postponed for one reason or another. I was sure there would be small problems that would stop the power-up for a few more weeks. But I guess I was wrong.
At first the news sources thought that Moscow Mountain had blown itself apart in a volcanic eruption sometime around three in the morning. But Moscow Mountain was still there and could be photographed from a distance. And there had been no seismic activity that night to show an explosion.
Carol and I knew what had happened. The ship had gone through a meltdown of some sort or another. The test Dad and the rest had wanted to try had not been scheduled to start until later in the morning. Dad was still in bed, at home, with Mom, when the accident occurred.
After staring at the news reports for most of the morning, I finally stood and went to the phone.
Carol moved up beside me and touched my shoulder lightly as I dialed the phone to finally tell the world about the alien spaceship in the Lost Wheelbarrow Mine.
Of course, at that point it was way too late.
TEN
Moscow, Idaho
October 21, 2035
I looked down the gray-coated street. Maybe the ghosts of all the dead children were still playing there. Maybe after today I would be able to see them, hear their laughter. It would be nice to see laughter on this street again.
The gray dust under my feet was the same color as I remembered the hull of the ship. A vast cloud of gray dust, probably material from the hull, had poured out of the northern side of the mountain.
In the end it was lucky that there was very little wind. The cloud of gray dust settled silently in the night over the small city of Moscow, Idaho, and killed everyone in that city instantly. Most in their sleep.
The specialists say that if there had been a wind it could have been much worse, taking out Missoula and other cities east.
By the next morning the dust had quit spewing from the side of the mountain and it rained. A simple fall rain that turned the gray dust into something harder than concrete, gluing death to everything it touched.
Exploration teams eventually entered the mountain and the old mine and found what was left, a melted mass of grayness in a huge empty hole in the ground. They explored that hole for a while, until it became clear there was nothing to gain. Then they left and sealed off the area. Left the dead frozen in their sleep. Set up guards to keep the world out.
There was nothing else the world could do.
No one lives within a hundred-mile radius of Moscow, Idaho, now.
And no one will for centuries.
I took one last look at the street, hoping to see children playing there. Then I turned into the house. Carefully placing my feet in my footprints from my very first visit I climbed the stairs to my parents’ room.
For only a moment I thought about going down to my old room, to the safety it offered. But then turned and went into their room.
“Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad,” I said, but my voice echoed around inside my protective suit. “I’d like to pretend it’s Christmas morning. Can I join you?”
Without waiting for an answer I strode across the unmarked dust on the floor around their bed.
I unzipped my suit, took off my helmet, and took a deep breath. The air smelled dry and stale and I felt my eyelids getting heavy.
Quickly I jumped onto the bed and then laid down beside Mom. I didn’t look at them because I didn’t want to know if I had disturbed the scene.
I took another deep breath and let it slowly out. For a moment I thought I could smell Grandpa’s pipe smoke and hear his cackling, crazy laughter.
For some reason that made me smile.
I took one last deep breath.
Outside, beyond the window, I heard the sounds of children laughing and playing in the street.
Mary Jo, one of the most beautiful and deadly assassins in all history, loves drinking vodka and orange juice after a job well done.
She planned her next kill perfectly. Every detail thought through.
But Mary Jo never planned on meeting Jean, the beautiful woman two houses down the street.
Jean also loves drinking vodka and orange juice after a job well done.
A twisted story of love, killing, and drinking, not necessarily in that order.
DEATH TAKES A PARTNER
A Mary Jo Assassin Novel
PART ONE
The Stage is Set
CHAPTER ONE
MARY JO STOOD in her kitchen, staring at the bottle of Smirnoff Vodka in her hand. Actually, it only said Smirnoff on the outside. She had poured out the Smirnoff and replaced it with Absolut Crystal, one of the more expensive vodkas in the world. But she had to keep the fact that she could easily afford Absolut Crystal hidden.
She had a pitcher of orange juice beside her on the counter, ice was a touch away in the fridge, and a highball glass sat waiting.
That wonderful taste of fresh orange juice over ice with the slight flavor of a very good vodka could make a girl smile and she liked to smile.
She made herself look away from the bottle of vodka like a lover turning from a night of sex with a great date.
She was fairly certain she could have just one more. But she needed to be sure. Not like the day-after pill sure, but full condom and birth-control pills sure.
She thought she had done everything right. But she needed to check it all again.
The gray granite counter surface was spotless, the white cabinets wiped down completely, the dark tile floor scrubbed.
Not a spot of blood could have survived in this modern suburban kitchen. She had even opened every cabinet door and made sure nothing had dripped down onto a hinge or in a crack. She had sanitized every tiny inch with bleach.
Sometimes more than once just to be sure.
She had come to love the smell of bleach over the years. It always signaled a job well done in her mind, which then led her to top-shelf vodka mixed with fresh orange juice.
She had put nothing down any sink, but instead used a plastic bucket for the cleaning water. Then outside in the fenced back yard she had washed the bucket out completely in the gravel at the back end of the path to the yard.
Then she had put the bucket in the ground in a new flowerbed full of roses that she had planted last week. She had punched some holes in the bottom of the bucket, put a new ground-cover plant in the bucket, and filled the bucket up with dirt.
The bucket was covered completely.
It was gone.
Then she had turned on the sprinklers that watered the lawn, including the area of the path where she had poured the cleaning water.
She was very good at this sort of thing.
Very, very good.
At five-one and a pixie-like body, no one would ever suspect her abilities to kill. For centuries, her looks had always given her an advantage. And she had used the advantage often.
Now, as a modern housewife living on a suburban street in a small town in upstate New York, the idea that she might be able to kill would be ludicrous to anyone who had met her.
A deadly misjudgment on some people’s part.
She stared at the bottle of vodka and the pitcher of orange juice. It had been a perfect day so far.
She could have just one more, she was sure.
But instead she stood there, thinking back over the events so far, the drink not yet poured.
Mary Jo had to make double and triple sure.
Safety first in both sex and murder.
CHAPTER TWO
Three Hours Earlier
JEAN FINISHED THE last project for the afternoon and sat back in her oversized (for her) office chair. At five-three and with a tiny stature, no office chair had ever fit her. She had used pillows at times to support her back and a footrest for her feet, but those pillows, at the moment, were on the hardwood oak floor in her office, near her couch.
She had one of the best offices in all of Benton with a view of the surrounding rolling pine-covered hills and the river that cut along the side of the small city.
She turned and just let the peaceful view relax her. It would only be a little longer before her mission here was complete. It might be another six months before she could really move on, but that didn’t matter. She had the patience that came with living for thousands of years.
The patience of a hunter.
And she was one of the best hunters and killers there was.
She glanced around. She might actually miss this office. She didn’t need the job or the money, but her husband Sam didn’t know that. And besides, she found this modern job challenging and the people here in the office were friendly. They all fell totally for her role, and her story about working to let her husband stay home and write novels.
Her husband Sam was a nice guy. Gentle and friendly and always willing to help. Not that good a writer, but decent enough to maybe have a chance of selling someday. Too bad he wasn’t going to live long enough for that to happen.
He was just her cover to get to her real target and when she finished off her real target, she wouldn’t be able to leave any loose ends, no matter how much she liked him.
Too bad she didn’t love him. If she had, she might have worked to find a different way. Sadly, she hadn’t fallen in love with anyone for a very long time.
And that thought just depressed her.
She stood to get her pillows and put them behind her back again as she started on a new project.
The work at least kept her mind busy until she could get to her real job and kill her target.
That would be soon.
Very soon.
CHAPTER THREE
Three Hours Earlier
MARY JO SMILED as her neighbor Sam stood on the ladder in her hall and finished fixing the light that had been shorting on and off. Mary Jo had caused the short and then asked Sam, the friendly writer from three houses down the street, to help her fix it before it burnt down her house.
An easy excuse in the middle of the afternoon that no good neighbor could refuse.
Sam was one of the nicest men Mary Jo had ever met. Maybe in his late thirties, balding with only thin brown hair and a grin that reminded her of a nice puppy wanting to be petted. She had only seen his wife from a distance. She was an attractive small woman and they looked to be a happy couple. Mary Jo knew that Sam’s wife worked downtown somewhere so that he could stay home and write a novel.
How cliché as far as Mary Jo was concerned.
But perfect for what Mary Jo needed at the moment.
“Got it,” Sam said, pride at his own small accomplishment in his voice.
She clicked on the light and the bulb burnt steady.
“Wonderful,” she said, smiling as Sam climbed down and folded up the ladder.
“That calls for a quick drink,” Mary Jo said. “I owe you. You like screwdrivers?”
Sam beamed, the smile reaching his brown eyes. “Love them. And so does my wife. I think at times she might be able to live on them.”
“Well, this one is on me,” Mary Jo said, watching as Sam put the ladder away and noting carefully what he touched and exactly where. She would clean off his prints later, including inside the light fixture.
Then she led the way into the modern, bright kitchen with its stainless steel appliances, white cabinets and granite countertops. The floor was covered in a dark tile that contrasted perfectly with the cabinets. All the houses in this neighborhood had modern kitchens like this one.
“Make mine a small one,” Sam said. “Still got to finish that chapter.”
“No problem,” Mary Jo said.
She took down the bottle that said Smirnoff on the outside and two glasses.
“Ice in the fridge,” she said.
As Sam turned to get the ice, she drove a long ice pick through his back and
directly into his heart. He was on the floor almost instantly, bleeding only slightly.
He had a puzzled look in his brown eyes.
“Sorry,” Mary Jo said to Sam as the light in his eyes faded. “Just needed a body and yours was handy. If you wrote mystery novels, I’m sure you would understand.”
Sam took one last breath and died.
Mary Jo got the ice from the fridge, put Sam’s glass in the sink to wash in a minute, filled her glass, then added vodka and orange juice. She had her first drink of the day watching Sam slowly bleed onto her kitchen tile floor.
Drink tasted damn good.
She loved screwdrivers.
CHAPTER FOUR
JEAN PUSHED BACK and stood, glancing at her watch.
Almost three in the afternoon.
She had a routine at this time of the day because her target had a routine as well.
Her target was the Chief of Police for Benton, Robert Hanson. It seemed he had really, really made someone with a lot of money very, very angry. So this someone had hired her to take care of the chief.
One million up front, two million on completion of the job.
She had made it clear to the man who hired her that it would take her almost a year to kill the target. She liked working slowly and carefully.
The guy didn’t care, just wanted it done.
So she had met dear old Sam, they had moved to Benton and she had taken a job so he could write, and three months later they had gotten married. In her long life, she couldn’t remember how many times she had been married.
And then widowed.
Or even under how many names.
The wedding with Sam had just been another of the small and completely forgettable ones, with only his family and friends, since she had told him her family was dead. That was a truth. Her original family had been dead for a couple thousand years, all killed right after they sold her as a young woman to the order of assassins.
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