Stand By Your Hitman

by Leslie Langtry

  The fact I’d received a vote made this whole thing real. The Council might let me off the hook somewhat if there were extenuating circumstances. But what those circumstances were was completely beyond me.

  Still, I’d made it to the final eight. Vic was still within my clutches. And Lex and I were having sex. Not bad if you look at it that way.

  “I thought I’d find you out here.” Lex came up behind me and wrapped his arms around me.

  I pulled away. There was too much on my mind.

  “Tomorrow’s the merge. I think the game will wrap up soon.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Ernie said there were major budget problems.”

  Lex lifted my chin. “Are you worried about being voted out?”

  I didn’t speak for a moment. Finally, I asked a question that had been bothering me since the beginning. “Why are you really here? Why agree to be on this show?” There, I’d said it.

  He smiled. “Probably the same reason you’re on it.”

  Damn. I couldn’t tell him that my reason was because I come from a long line of assassins and my job was to kill Isaac. That might hurt the alliance. But I had to come up with something if I was going to get any info in return. “You know how family can be.” Okay. Not a lie. Well, not completely a lie.

  “Really? Why did you go through with it?” Lex asked.

  “I don’t know. I guess I’d been in a rut for a long time. Maybe I thought it would be an adventure.” Again—not a lie.

  Lex sighed and leaned on the railing. “Well, I guess it’s the same for me. My family thought I needed to do something with my life other than being a bartender in a small town. I did this thinking I’d never get picked and they’d leave me alone.”

  “Backfired, eh?”

  “Not really. I found you. I’d say that’s better than twenty-five grand.”

  Once again, it surprised me that we hadn’t had this conversation before. Something about being around Lex always translated to sex first, get-to-know-me later. Why was that? This wasn’t how relationships usually started out. Then again, most relationships didn’t happen on the set of a lame reality show in Costa Rica, either.

  I thought about what he’d said about the twenty-five thousand dollars. It had never crossed my mind that maybe he needed the money. He couldn’t have been making much as a bartender. It was something I was completely unfamiliar with. I grew up wealthy, never worrying about money. Maybe this competition meant more to him than I thought.

  “How did you go from being a stuntman to a bartender?”

  Lex sobered. “Actually, I was a stuntmaster out in LA. So was my wife. That’s where we met.”

  So, Fiona had been a kick-ass stuntwoman? I liked her already.

  “What happened to her?”

  “There was an accident during a stunt. I was in charge—had choreographed it and everything. It was my job to make sure she was safe. But due to a technical malfunction, she died. It was my fault. So, I moved back home.” His voice snagged a bit on the last few words.

  I felt awful for asking. My arms went around him and we just stood there, holding each other.

  “You know, that’s why I’m so attracted to you,” Lex said quietly.

  I pulled back. “Why?” Surely he didn’t know about the stunts I’d pulled for jobs. And let me tell you, there was no stuntmaster planning for my safety.

  He smiled. I liked the way his eyes wrinkled in the corners. “You take risks. You try things others wouldn’t. And you have a lot of compassion.” Lex waved his arm around him. “You did this for the Inuit team because they were suffering. You saved Kit’s life on the zip line and made sure they got across safely before going for the easy win. You remind me of Fiona. And you are more like me than she even was.”

  “Oh.” Wow. I didn’t know what to say to that. It was the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. And I was pretty sure I didn’t deserve it.

  “I’d better get to bed.” I kissed him and turned away. “And Lex?” He looked up attentively. “Thank you.”

  As I lay there in the darkness, listening to Sami’s snoring, I felt like crap. Lex had this glorified view of who I was. His job was about taking care of people, and he thought I was all about that too. Thing was, he’d change his mind about me in a minute if he saw my workshop on Santa Muerta or knew anything about who I really was.

  To him, I was just Missi, a widowed mother who might be the answer to his prayers. If only I were that woman. But I couldn’t pretend I was. I was a hit-man—an assassin—and a damned good one. I invented ways to kill people, and based on their level of evil, I could really make them suffer if I wanted to.

  And yet, I was the woman who’d worried that the rival team wasn’t getting enough to eat and plunked down her own money to help them out. It’s funny. Lex thought he had me all figured out. Hell. I didn’t have me all figured out.

  In fact, if it weren’t for this idiotic show, I’d have been blissfully unaware back on Santa Muerta making toys from the eighties explode with enough force to kill a man. Wow. I hadn’t thought of my workshop since I arrived here. In fact, I hadn’t thought much about my work.

  I was here for one reason only—to do a job for the Council. I was a Bombay and I had a Vic. Nothing else should have mattered.

  Right?

  I couldn’t sleep that night. Finally, at about five A.M., I quit pretending and took a cup of coffee out onto the patio.

  “What’s up, Moe?” He was lounging on the deck in a robe when I stumbled upon him.

  “Hey, Missi!” I liked how his face brightened when he saw me. It’s always nice to feel like someone’s happy to see you, and he’d earned big points by helping me out with the Kit fiasco.

  I pulled up a chaise lounge and my coffee mug. It was too early for sunrise. I’d ordered breakfast but it wouldn’t arrive for half an hour.

  “So what’s got you up so early?” I asked.

  Moe shook his head. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  I snorted. “That’s funny. Most of us can’t seem to get enough sleep around here.” I usually chalked that up to boredom.

  “Nah. I never was that lazy,” Moe responded. I hid my smile. “Actually, being here has given me some ideas for when I get back.”

  “Really? Then you’re the first one who’s been able to turn this charade into something positive.” Did that come out wrong?

  “I’ve just been thinking. Sometimes getting away from home shakes you up. I needed that.” He shifted in his seat.

  Huh. I wondered if the same thing had happened to me since I’d been there. Well, I had a kind of boyfriend in Lex. And I’d call Sami and Moe friends. Being away from my monastic existence on Santa Muerta probably had been somewhat good for me. All the same, I still wanted to get my job done and move on.

  We sat there quietly until there was a knock on the door. Sami looked at us with some amusement when we came back into the guesthouse. The laundry was delivered with the food and I slipped off to the bedroom to change before joining everyone.

  Moe’s words made me think. I was getting some benefit from being here. But what did that matter in the grand scheme of things? If I had to take out Isaac, not much.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Misty water-colored memories…

  —Hamlisch, Bergman and Bergman,

  “The Way We Were”

  “As you may have guessed,” Alan was saying to us poolside at the Tigre, “both Inuit and Ottawa will now merge into a tribe of eight.”

  I picked at the rubber sole of my shoe. Why did he always have to state the obvious? Like we didn’t know there were only eight of us left?

  He reached into a bag and pulled out a bright yellow bandana. “You are now all part of Team Tico.”

  I sighed restlessly. Well, at least he got that right. A howler monkey went off, as if to give his approval.

  “And you will set up a new camp together on the site of Ottawa’s old camp. Bert and Ernie will be your only camera crew.”

&n
bsp; Sami snorted beside me. I guess the merge made the budget cuts easier to deal with. I wondered what had happened to Jimmy? Maybe he got sent back to Canada.

  “Today, you will spend the day getting to know your new tribe. You will not have any challenges until tomorrow. I will see you then.”

  I waited for Julie and Alan to leave before snagging Ernie. “What’s going on?”

  Ernie looked around before answering. “They’re flying back home to beg more money from the network. I’ve got to drive them to the airport. You won’t see anyone until tomorrow.” He motioned to Bert and the two of them took off.

  I filled Team Tico in on the latest developments. Lex and I volunteered to throw together a rudimentary shelter as subterfuge, and the others decided it would be a good day to spend at the guesthouse.

  “What was your husband like?” Lex asked softly as we worked.

  “What? Oh. Rudy.” I thought for a moment. “He was great. You would’ve liked him.” I hoped my insecurity wasn’t showing. In all honesty, I hadn’t seen Rudy in fifteen years. My memory was rusty when I tried to think of him, and that bothered me.

  Living on the island, I thought about him a lot. But since I’d been here, around new people and Lex, Rudy’s memory seemed to fade. Why was that?

  “Are the boys like him?” Lex pressed.

  “Monty is,” I answered without thinking. “He’s quiet…thoughtful. Jack is outgoing and a handful. Rudy was more like Monty.” But was that true? I could barely remember.

  “I always wanted kids,” Lex said. “So did Fiona. It just never happened.”

  An aching feeling I recognized as sorrow welled up in my throat. Lex obviously had no problem remembering his wife. How sad that they’d wanted children and never had them. My boys had been my life for nearly two decades. I couldn’t imagine life without them. As they prepared for college in the fall, I was preparing for the whole empty-nest thingy. And I was not looking forward to it.

  I touched his hand. “As I told you before—I bet you would’ve made a great dad.”

  Lex shook his head. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up. I guess I was just feeling a little melancholy.”

  “Well, I’d be happy to loan you the boys anytime you want.” I laughed thinking about Lex chasing after Monty and Jack.

  “I’d like that. Kind of like a fun uncle or something,” Lex said.

  Yeah, a fun uncle who didn’t teach them how to kill people. That would certainly be a novelty to them.

  Once we were finished with the saddest excuse for a lean-to ever, I sent Lex back to the guesthouse and slipped away to find my boys. They’d better have something, I thought. I couldn’t go on much longer with all this confusion. Back at Santa Muerta, everything was safe. The only decision I usually had to make was how much C-4 to order online.

  “Mom!” Jackson’s voice caught me off guard. Apparently, I’d walked right past our tree.

  “Where’s Monty?” I asked, always suspicious when they didn’t turn up together. In my seventeen years of experience with these two, I’d learned the hard way that if one was gone, the other was likely covering for a punishable offense.

  “He’s in town, doing some research on the show.” Jack grinned a big, toothy grin. Damn, he was a good-looking boy!

  “Forget that. I need stuff on Vic.” I really didn’t care too much about the show.

  Jackson frowned. “Well, I don’t exactly have anything on him.”

  “What? What have you been doing?” I threw a mom tantrum. It surprised even me.

  “Geez, Mom!” Jackson looked left and right. “It’s okay. No big!”

  I sighed and took a deep breath. He was too old for shaken baby syndrome, but I was considering it. “Jackson. My son. My youngest by two minutes. The only reason I’m here is to do a job. If I don’t have a job to do, I’d just as soon not be here. Got it?” Wow. I sounded pissed. I wouldn’t want to be him arguing with me.

  “Did something happen with Lex?” My little boy folded his arms over his chest. When did he get so smart?

  “No!” I said a little too forcefully. “No!” I said it again as if repeating it would make it true. Hey, now there’s a thought! I wonder if I could do something with that in the lab? Suddenly, I felt very homesick.

  “Mom, you’ve got that screwy look on your face. Snap out of it!”

  I ran a hand through my hair. “It’s nothing,” I lied to my child. Truth was, it was something. Lex’s words bothered me. There was no way I could live up to the memory of his dead wife. And I was pretty sure he wouldn’t want me once he knew what I did for a living. I mean, he spent his career making sure people didn’t die on his watch, while I made sure they did on mine.

  “Look. I’m just anxious to finish the job,” I lied again. And from the look on his face, I was getting good at it. “So I need to know whether to take him out or not.”

  As Jackson nodded his head to agree with me (or admit to himself that I finally had gone nuts), slivers of his red hair seemed to burst into flame as they hit patches of sunlight.

  “I’ll find out. If I don’t know soon, we’ll just call the whole thing off and Monty and I will get you off the show.”

  I hugged him before he fled. As Jackson disappeared, it hit me. How were they going to get me off the show? I shuddered in spite of the heat.

  I didn’t go back to the guesthouse. I told myself it was because I didn’t want to get any closer to my Vic, but in all honesty, it was Lex and not Isaac I was worried about.

  After buying a large sun hat and a huge pair of sunglasses in the gift shop, I ordered a pitcher of vodka tonics and sat down in the most remote corner of the pool area. Now, I know drinking doesn’t solve anything. And I have the alcoholic tolerance of plankton. But being alone with my thoughts seemed to be the best option right then.

  Patience may be a virtue, but it never did right by me. I’ve had some pretty tricky hits over the years.

  The first time I used one of my inventions for a hit was, oh, about twenty-five years ago. It was 1982, something like that. I’m not that good at math. That’s weird for an inventor—don’t you think? Anyway, I had to take out a woman who’d engineered a major terrorist plot that killed a marketplace filled with innocent people in the seventies and was then living as a divorce attorney in Tempe. She was a real dragon-lady bitch. And she favored suits with huge shoulder pads. I could’ve just plugged her, leaving the cops to think it was the ex-husband of one of her clients. But I wanted to try something new…have a little fun with it.

  At first I thought about exploding shoulder pads, but that would have been hard to rig, and what if it just blew her shoulders off? I mean—she’d look pretty silly and would probably survive. So I rigged her garage. I messed with her car’s ignition so that once turned on, it wouldn’t turn off. Then I built sensors for the garage door and the door to the house that would lock when it sensed CO2. I guess they found claw marks around the doors where she’d tried to scratch her way out.

  The detectives put it down to equipment failure. There was no CSI then so no one knew what to look for. From that moment on, I was hooked.

  Shortly after that, I went through a James Bond phase where I experimented with everything from the deadly bowler hat Odd Job flings (for a vicious white slave trader) to the suffocating gold paint from Gold-finger (on a visiting nurse who murdered her senior charges once they’d put her in their wills). After about four hits, though, I got bored and wanted to get back to developing my own stuff. Besides, no one got it. I was at least hoping to terrify people with the 007 Killer—but no one figured it out.

  That was followed by the time I had to take out this Vic who worked in construction and dealt crack to middle-school kids in his neighborhood (they had only a 50 percent survival rate due to his lethal blend). I rigged a nail gun to backfire via remote. The gun shot the nail out backwards, killing the bastard instantly. I switched the gun out before the body was found. It looked like he’d committed suicide. I guess I ram
bled a little in the suicide note I left for him, because the police spent months interviewing employees at Hostess Foods in an attempt to discover a reason for the Vic’s obsession with Ding Dongs. I love Ding Dongs.

  Where was I? Oh yeah. Probably my favorite job was where I invented a pair of stroke-inducing panty hose. You know how they have massaging nylons for people with poor circulation? It’s kind of the same theory, really, except that as you move, my hose constrict in a way that creates blood clots in the legs. From there, it’s only a matter of time before death by aneurism occurs. Of course, I had to trail the Vic for a while to make sure they worked. Boy, was he surprised. Oh, did I forget to mention the nylons were for a man? Yup. A corrupt judge with cross-dressing tendencies who liked to wear them under his robes. He’d had a weakness for mob money and was known to slap the brutal defendants in his courtroom with nothing more than community service. Two of the guys he set free later went on to murder a prominent female district attorney who posed a threat to the Cosa Nostra.

  I’d looked into various means of death, but that was the only thing I could come up with. I even tricked them out with an old L’eggs egg. Remember those? They don’t make them anymore, do they? I think they came out the same time as Mork and Mindy—maybe they were cross-promoting?

  Oooh. This vodka was smooth. It seemed pretty strong but as I said before, I didn’t have a lot of experience drinking.

  Anyway, as I was saying, I was pretty much obsessed with inventions by then. Let’s see…. I had the sunglasses that spray poison in your eyes; the garbage disposal and faucet rigged to electrify the sink—when the Vic washed dishes he was electrocuted; the weight belt that crushes your spine—I got the inspiration for that having my blood pressure read; the remote-controlled brick falling from a building to crush your skull (timing is really important on that one); the floor wax that looks dry but is actually slipperier than Crisco on an eel; oh yeah, and the super “Viagra.”