“Thanks. I appreciate that.”
Wil and I helped Dad pack his stuff and put it in his car. Talbot posted three around-the-clock guards on the house and contacted someone to rebuild the front of the house. He also detailed three men and a couple of drones to guard my house.
My bedroom was on the first floor, so that was where I put Dad. I took the spare room, the one with the hidden arms vault. It only had a twin bed, but even if I did lose my mind and want to bring a man home, I would never do it with my father in the house.
While I might be squeamish about offending his delicate sensibilities, I discovered I was the only one in the family who felt that way. Dad called Mom to tell her he’d temporarily relocated, and she rushed over immediately.
“Jason, are you all right?” she hugged and gushed over him as soon as she walked in the door.
“Oh, yeah. I’m fine. The house is a little dinged up, but Libby came and took care of all the bad guys.”
She glanced at me. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, Mom. I’m fine.”
She turned back to Dad and forgot all about me. She ended up spending the night, and I discovered the soundproofing inside the house wasn’t all that great. I didn’t know someone in the spare room could hear people making love in my bedroom. I didn’t think I was as loud as Mom. I hoped I wasn’t. It was a really weird night.
Chapter 15
Ron called the following morning. “Hey, Libby. I miss you. Do you have any time?”
“Not really. Things are pretty crazy. My dad’s place needs some renovation, so he’s moved in with me for a while.”
“Oh. That’s a drag. Johnny Jack is playing at The Crown Royal tomorrow night, and I have tickets. I thought you might like to go.”
Why would he think I wanted to see an eighty-year-old blues legend play in one of the most intimate and acoustically perfect clubs in town?
“Yes.”
“Huh?”
“I said yes, I want to go.”
“What about your dad?”
“Screw my dad. I can see him anytime.”
Ron laughed.
When I hung up, I heard a chuckle behind me. “Who am I being dumped for?”
“Johnny Jack.”
“Oh, well, I’d dump me, too.” Both my and Nellie’s love of blues and jazz came from my dad.
I went over to where he was staring at the inside of my near-empty refrigerator and gave him a hug. “Have Mom take you out to breakfast and buy some groceries.”
“You should have had that idea fifteen minutes ago. She already left.”
My doorbell rang. I peeked through the peephole and saw it was Wil. When I opened the door, all I could do was stare. He had bags of food in both hands, along with a takeout cup of coffee. Another takeout cup rim was clenched in his teeth, and it was obvious he’d spilled some maneuvering from his car to my porch.
“Wait right there,” I said. “I need to go get my camera.”
His eyes bulged and he opened his mouth. “Dammit, Libby…” the coffee cup in his mouth hit the floor, splashing over his shoes.
I reached out and took the other cup. “Wow. Thank you.” Turning to go back in the house, I said, “Be sure to wipe your feet.”
“That wasn’t funny, Libby,” he raged as he followed me.
His diatribe cut off when he saw my father.
“Hi, Mr. Nelson. I brought some groceries. I thought you might want some breakfast.”
“Thank you, Mr. Wilberforce,” Dad said. “As far as I can tell, Libby is living on a beer diet. And by the way, my name is Bouchard. Nelson is her mother.”
“Beer and coffee are staples,” I said. “You didn’t look in the cabinet. There’s some dried cereal to go with the beer.”
He gave me a horrified stare.
Wil started putting the groceries away. “Since I bought the food, maybe you could fix breakfast.”
“Maybe pigs will fly,” I said. “There’s a reason I don’t buy food that needs cooking.”
“I’ll fix breakfast if you two get out of the way,” Dad said. He took a box of eggs from Wil and put it on the counter. “You don’t want Libby to cook. Assuming she doesn’t burn the place down, I still wouldn’t chance it being edible.”
“If you had Dominik, would you cook?” I asked. When I lived with Mom, I ate what everyone else at Lilith’s ate—Dominik’s cooking.
“Of course not,” Dad said. “Taking food out of his hands would be a tragedy.”
I went upstairs and checked my computers, hoping some of the searches I’d set up were successful. No luck, but a news alert. Fred Smythe’s funeral was that afternoon. Not that it was newsworthy. The alert program had picked up his name from the funeral announcement. I started to write down the address and stopped. Calderone Funeral Home. I could find my way to Ron’s.
“Libby, it’s food,” my dad’s voice called from downstairs.
My table appeared the way Dad’s always did when I visited. An omelet with bacon and biscuits, marmalade, orange juice, and more coffee.
“You’re hired,” I said as I sat down.
“Just show up when I’m cooking,” Dad said. “You know I’ll always feed you. What are you doing today?”
“Going to a funeral.” I told them about Fred.
“If he’s involved with Alderette,” Wil said, “that could be dangerous.”
“For me, maybe. I’m going as Jasmine. I need to find a new connection, after all.”
Wil volunteered to send a couple of his men with me.
“You can send them, but not with me. I don’t mind the protection, but I want people to think I’m alone.”
After breakfast, I booted Wil out because I didn’t need him hovering. I morphed into Jasmine, found a black dress that was out of style, and put it on over my bulletproof corset.
I parked a couple of blocks away and approached the funeral home from the side where trees shielded Ron and his neighbors from each other. Blending into the background, I watched the mourners show up. I took a picture of anyone I didn’t recognize and sent it to my server.
Fred’s ex-wife and a young man with a white Mohawk showed up together. The guy matched a picture taken by the drone at the drug house. He was also on one of Diane Sheridan’s vids.
Soon after, Jimmy and Alice Alderette stepped out of a limousine.
As was usual for funerals, people milled around outside for a while, no one really wanting to go in. Five minutes before the starting time, they began to file inside. I stepped out of the trees onto the sidewalk and walked toward the chapel. Another limo pulled up, and Gareth Blaine got out.
I stopped in my tracks and turned away. Blaine would recognize Jasmine as me. I thought furiously. Without a mirror, I needed to use a form I was familiar with. I chuckled as I morphed my features into the rich woman I’d used when tailing Maria in Dallas. No one would suspect a woman in her fifties of being a spy.
Ron, dressed in a somber black suit, stood at the entrance to the chapel welcoming the mourners. He gave me a strange look I couldn’t interpret. I signed the guest book as Winifred Parsons with my left hand as I scanned the names. Dareen Smythe was followed by Billy Smythe. That solved one mystery.
I found a seat in the last pew. As the service started, Ron came in and sat off to the side near the front. If he was doing Fred’s funeral, and Alderette was related to Fred, I wondered who else I might find.
I slipped out and searched for a washroom. I saw it across the lobby, but turned away and walked down another hall. Ron had told me about the general layout of his operation. Turning a corner, I blurred my form and proceeded very slowly down the hall. Even with a security camera, it was difficult to identify my presence if I moved slowly. The electronic keypad lock on the door at the end of the hall took seconds to disable.
I passed through an area of offices and then a showroom with half a dozen caskets on display. Miz Rollins’ kids never slept in beds as luxurious as those caskets. People had their p
riorities misplaced.
Behind all that and through another locked door was a long hallway with two doors. The one on the left opened into the room where they embalmed the bodies. All four tables were empty. The other door led to a morgue-like refrigerated room. Drawers stacked four high and eight across lined one wall. A dozen of them had tags. I opened the closest one and discovered one of the men I’d killed at the airport. The next drawer held the other man.
I checked the others and found Professor Sheridan, one of the security guards from the lab, and the blonde graduate student. I didn’t recognize any of the others.
A sound in the hall sent a chill through me. Closing the drawer I had open, I hurried into a corner and blended into the background just as a man in scrubs and a long lab coat came in the room. I knew Ron had people working for him, but I’d failed to consider that when I made my reconnaissance. I stood still as I watched the worker go about his business.
He opened a drawer less than six feet from me and pulled the body out of it. It appeared to be a woman, and from her injuries, I guessed she died from some kind of accident. Half her head was caved in, and she had cuts and bruises to her face. He wheeled her to the door, then out. The last I could see, he took her across the hall.
I breathed a sigh of relief and surveyed the room. That was the only door. I started toward it, but a soft bumping sound preceded the door opening again. I leaped against a wall and froze. The guy came back and pulled another body out of its drawer, then took it across the hall. I decided I’d wait a little longer before I moved again.
After five minutes, I decided he wasn’t coming back, so I slipped out the door and down the hall. The halls didn’t have any recesses or alcoves I could hide in. Blending in was fine, but not if someone bumped into me. It also would be kind of noticeable if someone looked down a long hallway and saw a human-shaped lump on the wall.
I made it to the showroom, and decided it would be safer to go out the front door rather than try and make it back the way I’d come. I was halfway around the room when I heard two men talking and coming toward me. I ducked into an empty office and dived under the desk. The next thing I knew, the office door closed.
“That was the bloody stupidest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” The voice was Gareth Blaine’s. “Why did you go after Bouchard?”
“He went to Alonzo. How the hell was I supposed to know the old man lives in a fortress?” Jimmy Alderette’s voice. “And you’re a fine one to talk about stupid. If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t have lost the Dallas operation. Why did you try to hit the Nelson broad?”
“I thought I could take her out and get Simon Wellington off my back,” Blaine said.
One of them walked around the desk, pulled out the chair, and dropped into it. His foot came within an inch of my hand.
“Then there’s this mess,” Alderette said. “Billy’s asking questions about what happened to his father, and my wife isn’t real happy about it either.”
Blaine walked around a bit. The office wasn’t large enough to walk much. It definitely wasn’t big enough for that conversation with me hiding under the desk. I was scrunched up so much I couldn’t reach a weapon. If they found me, I’d have to draw as I sprang out at them, assuming my legs hadn’t fallen asleep.
“Tell Billy that Liz Nelson killed his father,” Blaine said. “Give him her address, and also the address of that bloody orphanage she funds. And for God’s sake, give him some direction. Don’t just turn him loose and hope he does what you want him to. Tell him to follow her and take her out at the orphanage, not at her house. I’m willing to bet an attack on her house would be as much of a failure as that fiasco last night.”
“That might work,” Alderette said.
“I wouldn’t bet on it, but if it doesn’t, we’ll be quit of Billy bloody Smythe.
“We’ll still have Wilberforce to deal with.”
“Wilberforce will be easy to take care of once the Nelson bitch is gone. She does all his thinking for him.”
“Have you found the Sheridan woman yet?” Alderette asked.
“No, and Campbell swears he doesn’t know where she is.”
“I still think he’s protecting her.”
“I don’t think so,” Blaine said. “He knows she’s a weak link, especially after her brother died. Campbell’s strong. I’m not worried about him. You point Billy in the right direction and hope he takes care of our major problem.”
It took me some time to uncurl from under the desk after they left. Checking my chrono, I realized the service was over. I had no idea who might be wandering around, or what would be the best way to get out of there.
No one was in the showroom, so I raced across the room and unlocked the door. I had it half open when I heard someone coming down the hall from where all the bodies were. Letting loose of the door handle, I whirled around and faced the room. Ron walked in and pulled up short, looking at me in surprise.
“May I help you?”
I was still wearing the old lady illusion. “I was at the service,” I said, “and I wondered about the prices of the caskets. I’m not getting any younger, you know. Poor Fred was even younger than I am.”
I endured Ron’s sales pitch, including him trying to sell me casket, plot, and funeral in advance. I didn’t know you could pay for a funeral on a ten-year loan. The interest rate was exorbitant, though.
I finally escaped, taking the route by the neighbors with all the trees. Retrieving my motorcycle, I headed home, checking constantly to see if anyone was following me.
Chapter 16
I came home to find Dad set up on my back porch, ready to grill a couple of steaks. When I left that morning, I didn’t have steaks or corn in the fridge, let alone a grill. Of course, at his house the back porch was enclosed with an exhaust setup for the grill.
“You have my permission to kill Gareth Blaine,” Dad said when he heard my news.
“Just as soon as Wil transfers my contract to his budget, I will. I want to make sure I get paid for performing that kind of public service.”
He plopped a medium-rare steak on my plate along with corn on the cob and potato salad.
“Where did all this come from?”
“Don’t speak with your mouth full. I had it delivered. A couple of Noah’s boys brought the grill from my place.”
“You can have groceries delivered? Does the liquor store do that?”
He laughed. “Yes, and yes. I hate grocery stores. The aisles are too narrow for my chair. Liquor stores are worse.”
We paid strict attention to our food for a while, but when we finished and he poured cordials and coffee, he said, “So what now?”
“I need to go warn Amanda Rollins and see what I can do to arrange some sort of security for the place. Maybe I can talk Wil into a raid on that drug house where Billy Smythe does his business.”
“Remember, gangbangers are crazy, and often not too bright. They don’t act and react like a rational opponent.” Dad fell into lecture mode at the drop of a hat. I’d never understood why Mom found that sexy, but she spent a whole semester listening to him before she banged him and ended up with me.
“Yeah, I know. It always boggles me that they see people killed all the time, but don’t think it will happen to them. There’s some kind of disconnect in their brains. I don’t know if it’s the drugs, breathing unfiltered air, congenital issues, or what. With a lot of them, it seems as though their danger reaction is broken.”
“How’s your danger reaction?” he asked.
I pulled down the neck of my shirt so he could see the corset. “In the words of my illustrious sire, more people are killed by accident than intentionally. I’ve never seen a gangbanger who could shoot worth a damn. I could get hit by a bullet aimed at someone else.”
I did the dishes, then headed out. The guards Talbot had put on my place were discretely but obviously present, which made me feel better. I didn’t know if the place was being watched or not, but I morphed into a li
keness of Noah Talbot when I left the house.
First stop was The Pinnacle. I dropped a word with Paul about Billy Smythe and showed the bouncers his picture. Then I sat down with Nellie.
“This guy,” I said, showing her Smythe’s picture, “is gunning for me. I got a tip that he might try to target me at Miz Rollins’ place.”
She didn’t say a word, just stood up and walked over to where her brother Tom was working the door. They spoke for a few minutes, with an occasional glance toward me.
Nellie came back, sat down, and took a swallow from her drink. “Tom said he’ll make a few calls. You piss someone off, that’s your business and I’ll let you handle it. Aunt Amanda is family. Nobody messes with family in my neighborhood.”
I held up my glass and she clinked hers against it.
That taken care of, I called Wil.
“Libby? To what do I owe this honor?”
“I’d like to buy you a drink.”
“Business or pleasure?”
“I like to think that any time spent in my presence is pleasurable.”
I heard him laughing. “I’m sure you do. Okay, give me half an hour. Where should I meet you?”
I told Tom that I’d be upstairs and climbed the stairs to find a table in one of the out-of-the-way corners. One of the things I’d noticed about Wil was he was punctual. He climbed the stairs twenty-nine minutes after I hung up the phone.
“What happened to you?” he said as he sat down. “I had three people at the funeral, two inside and one watching outside, and you never showed.”
“I was there. I guess your people aren’t very observant.”
He squinted at me. “So, you missed me?”
“I did.” The waitress came and took his order. “Wil, you have something I just can’t live without.”
He clapped his hand on his wallet and I laughed.
“Very perceptive. I need you to pick up my contract with the Chamber.”
Chameleon Assassin (Chameleon Assassin Series Book 1) Page 15