A Last Act of Charity (Killing Sisters Book 1)

by Frank Westworth

  To view a text message, a simple message: ‘Help me’.

  The caller ID was his own name; ‘Stoner’.

  ‘Interesting. Thank you for that.’

  ‘I did consider it a little strange that you would leave your cell there with him, but then I did consider it strange that you would ask Chas . . . Chastity for help. A strange choice for you to make, given that so far as I knew you were likely to be her next target. I did wonder when I got the call whether it was a trap. I expected that it would be, in fact.’

  ‘OK. Excuse my slowness here. I asked Chastity for her help? For what? I needed no help. And in any case, you sisters swap phones?’

  ‘No. Chas didn’t pick up, so the call transferred to me. We usually do that. Charm would’ve picked it up if I’d not answered. Answering machines are so . . . robotic, somehow. We like to offer a more personal service than that.’

  ‘You can work it out then, Miss Personal Service? What happened?’

  ‘Yeah . . .’ she drawled her reply. Slowly, as though she was still considering it. ‘You took his phones. You could trace his activities.’ She paused. Stoner nodded his agreement. ‘You’d done the fighting thing, whatever it was that you boys were fighting about, and you considered him neutralised, but had no reason to kill him yourself? You gave him your own phone so he could . . . so he could, what, exactly?’ She paused again.

  Stoner lifted the bottle to his lips, sipped. Held her gaze. ‘Call for help. What else? My phone; I can watch who he calls. He called a number I didn’t know. It could have been anyone. I expected a second call; one for a medic, one for a counter-attack.’

  ‘He didn’t make the second call?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The short blade was perfectly placed, Jean-Jacques. He couldn’t move, hardly at all, and his trachea was losing air. That is almost exactly how Chas likes to leave them, when she takes on the killing. Life leaking away. She enjoys watching it go. Watching the ebb of it. As they fade, she takes back her short blade. Sometimes she takes out the carotid with it, sometimes not. Sometimes she lets them linger. She can be very . . . cold. She says she feels loss, that the moment of death is a thing which can be shared if she’s close enough. Like there’s a moment when the dying soul touches her own. As it leaves. She says she lives for that moment. That it means something, something real in a life filled with lies, deceit . . .’

  ‘What do you say, Charity? Hmmm?’ Stoner was completely relaxed, focused on her. Both of his hands on the table before them. A deliberate no-threat indication, a sign that could not be missed.

  She looked up, sipped a little from the bottle. ‘She leaves them like that, Jean-Jacques. She leaves them as soon as she feels their passing. She is . . . clinical. And sometimes they’re not . . . not dead. Their life has left them but the body, the biological machine is still running. I truly hate that. I hate that. I hate that!’ Almost a shout, She was breathing loudly.

  Stoner’s voice was calm, his tone gentle.

  ‘You clean the scene, then? Make it so confused that there’s nothing for SOCO to hang on to? And you . . .’ he was smiling; she staring at him in reply to that smile, ‘. . . you take their heads and you set them in front of a laptop and you transmit the image to the website and then you just pack up and go?’ If anything, his tone was admiring rather than revolted. She looked at him and nodded.

  ‘Pretty much. That’s pretty much how it goes. When it goes right it baffles the brilliant and when it goes wrong . . .’ She was visibly shaking now. Her customary cool seemed to have departed, although Stoner doubted that it was far away, she was far too experienced for that.

  ‘There’s more, isn’t there? I’m missing something. I’ve been to . . . four of your recent scenes and . . .’ His voice faded, then returned, loud with surprise. ‘You fuck them. If they’re not entirely dead you fuck them! Got it. Stone me. Twice.’ He raised his bottle to her, saluted with a nod of his head and drained the bottle. ‘Drink up. I’ll get us another couple.’ And he rose, walked to the bar and returned with four opened bottles swinging from his fingers, placed them on the table. Charity stared at him, wide-eyed, surprise writ large across her face. She lifted her right hand from its place at her side and raised the long, dark, flat, black cutting knife, the boning knife, to the table.

  ‘Tell me one thing. Two things.’ Stoner kicked his chair away from the table before sitting down again; he had anticipated the knife or something similar, but wanted no more worries about weapons.

  She nodded. Took her hand from the long blade and raised her second bottle to her lips. Her eyes held a long focus; they were looking somewhere beyond the club, beyond that conversation, that moment.

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘OK. Am I still your target? My interest in your headless chickens died with Hartmann; I have no . . .’ he paused, a half-smile. ‘I’ve no professional interest in you guys any more. If I’m still a target, your target . . .’ he shrugged, lifted his shoulders in the Gallic way . . . ‘I’ll worry about it another night.’

  Charity shook her head. ‘I don’t usually know the targets once we’ve agreed a contract, only Charm would know them all. She hands the details to Chastity one or two at a time. Chas sends me a text when her part’s done and it’s time for mine. So . . . so I finished Hartmann before I thought it through. It’s not too easy. If I took time to think it through I probably couldn’t go through with it at all.’

  ‘But you know that I’m the next target? You sure? I would need to take steps, in that case. Or is this a truce? Do your truces apply to your sisters? To Chastity in particular?’

  ‘You were the next target. I was waiting in your apartment upstairs for Chas to call. She felt that you would take two to take down.’

  ‘I should feel flattered?’

  ‘If you like. This is your home ground, you’ll have hidden resources. We know that.’

  ‘Chastity has devices hidden here, I believe.’

  ‘She may. That didn’t bother you? You wanted to play the guitar on your own rather than search out some . . . devices? That is very cool. Very cool indeed. The Hartmann thing, then – a big thing for you?’

  ‘We go back a very long way. I completely missed his dishonesty. Dishonesty with me. I am one paranoid bastard; it’s not easy to see how I missed it all. I’m still . . . lost in that.’

  ‘Oh come on!’ Charity stared at him wide-eyed and incredulous. ‘You didn’t know about him and your tall black whore? You really didn’t? You really needed Chas to show it to you? Love is blind, is it? Blinding? You were as good as the best and you missed that? We saw it as soon as you were involved in the operation. You must have known. At some level you must have been aware.’

  Stoner shrugged. Ran fingers through his hair, then scraped their nails against the stubble on his cheeks. Looked up.

  ‘So we sit and wait for your sister, is that it? Then we have a huge fight. Everybody dies. That’s the most likely outcome. Or is she already here somehow?’

  ‘You really don’t see it yet, do you?’ Charity made no move, but watched his face closely. He said nothing.

  ‘Our contract was ultimately from Hartmann. Through cut-out and cut-out after cut-out. In fact, we weren’t sure until you took him out . . . then all signals stopped. Chas . . . Charm is one great researcher. She was almost there, I think, before you topped Hartmann, but that confirmed it. She spoke with Chas; Chastity called me maybe an hour ago. And here we are. She’s not coming for you. We can go in peace. You’re shaking.’

  ‘I’m fine. Tired. Never kill friends. It’s tiring. Fuck.’ He paused, reflecting. ‘Do you know why he was doing it? The house for Lissa? All that?’

  ‘Just winding up, is what Charm thinks. Winding up all his old networks and clearing out his contact book ready for his new job. He would have become a public figure, probably, and . . . are we to understand that you have a lot of dirt on him?’

  Stoner nodded; smiled grimly. Shook his head. ‘All I wanted was out. I ju
st wanted to be out of it. I nearly was. He knew that . . . OK. He wanted Lissa. OK . . .’ he paused again. ‘It does make some sick sort of sense. He . . . they . . . he should just have told me.’

  ‘You’d have killed him. He was never an operator. He couldn’t take you. Not nearly. You’d have ripped him to pieces. You did that, Jean-Jacques; you did that. Destroyed men.’

  ‘Did you fuck him?’ Stoner was struggling to maintain any kind of level tone of voice, to avoid an emotional escalation to a level he couldn’t manipulate.

  ‘He was dressed. Chas’s guys are usually stripped, ready for it. That’s how she does them. How she gets them vulnerable. Disarmed. Distracted. Fatal distraction. No. No, I didn’t. Dying . . . I don’t know. Dying just gives some guys a hard-on, really. It’s . . . I know it’s weird, I know it’s insane, I know how wrong it is, but it makes it easier for me. To end them. Kill them.’ She was breathing loudly, panting almost. ‘And they don’t know, and they can’t tell. They can’t talk about it. To anyone. Important to me. Very. But,’ her gaze quite suddenly locked focus with his, ‘you’re not to know that. Mr Stoner, every girl’s best friend, every girl’s dream.’

  ‘Oh fuck off with that.’ Stoner was dismissive, instantly, cruelly. ‘If you want any amount of one-night stands, go play in a band. If you just want to work your way through an endless meat factory, then great. Fine. Get on stage. Put everything into it. The more of a strain it is for you, the more they flock around. That’s all it is. Some impossible idea of some impossible reflected glory. There’s no glory to it. They make it up. They pretend you’re something special. But you’re not. You’re just some guy who’s on stage. Do not go there with this “every girl loves a player” shite. It just isn’t true. Half the time they’re pissed and want to cop off with some guy to impress their sad buddies, the other half of the time they have some romantic notion that, like, just because you can play the guitar or work the saxophone or kick a drum, that you somehow know the meaning of life and have the answer to everything at your fingertips.

  ‘I don’t mean to piss you off with this, especially as you have at least one fuck-off great blade nearby, but Christ on a bike, let’s not trade Great Angst Moments I Have Known with each other. For fuck’s sake, Charity, not only do you have a great name – a great name for a blues singer, hey! – but you’re fitter than a flea on a fiddler’s knee. So what’s this shit – this fucking a dying man shit all about, hey?’

  Stoner’s usual preferred projection of a man under control was weeping with failure; he was shouting. Almost shouting. His voice was raised.

  ‘Girls who whore get paid to be whores, you know? Guys like me get treated exactly the same but don’t get paid. Do not give me all that poor little misunderstood woman shit. I have known far fucking far too many women to believe it.’

  He paused. Reached for his bottle.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry to shout. It’s been another long day in a continuing sequence of long days. I’m fresh out of good manners. You going to slice me now? I might even be too tired to resist. Or are we really all friends together now? What is it with you and the poor little beautiful lady bit, anyway? You talk good and you surely do look good. From here. And we’re damn nearly touching, so I could tell if you had terminal acne or halitosis or leprosy or something.’

  ‘You can’t see, Jean-Jacques. You simply don’t see what’s in front of you. You have become blind.’

  Charity lifted her hands – both hands – behind her head, and lifted her hair away. Stoner became stationary before her. Turned to stone. Silent. He just stared. The entirely bald woman stared right back at him, her eyes black with intensity.

  She pulled open her coat, her long dark coat. Nothing beneath it. A neuter’s body sat facing him. Very fit, well-muscled, flat stomach below a perfectly defined six-pack below a set of pectoral muscles. No breasts. None. Small, near invisible scars. Thread-fine white lines and no nipples. Not a hair. Skin shining in the reflected stage lighting. Her eyes shone in defiance, challenge.

  ‘Neat.’ Stoner ran his eyes over her. Ran them down from her own eyes, past her mouth, over the length of her body to her pubis. No hair. ‘Very neat.’

  Charity rested the long black blade on her right thigh. Opened her legs. Wider, until the lips of her sex parted, audibly unfolding before Stoner’s intensity. The blade was cutting into the taut skin of her thigh; tiny dark drops appearing at irregular intervals along its length.

  Stoner leaned back in his chair, frankly staring. Said nothing. A strange tableau in the unnatural light and hard shadows of the silenced club. Neither moved for a stretched moment. Neither spoke. Then . . .

  ‘And you’re not lying to me. You’re not being kind.’ Charity’s words added to the surreal silence, somehow. Stoner said nothing, shook his head slowly, gaze fixed, transfixed, a moth facing up to its candle.

  Charity lifted the long black boning blade from her thigh, handling its balanced weight with ease, fluidity, practice and precision, and leaned into Stoner’s silent space. Rested the tip of the blade on the crotch of his jeans. Unbidden and probably unwelcome, the denim shifted beneath the weight of the blade, which in turn twisted, slicing without effort into the material, which in turn parted. She rested her left hand on herself, ran a finger each side of her proud clitoris and met Stoner’s gaze with a question. He nodded. Slowly, and with wonder.

  She lifted the blade away and he unzipped and released himself, pulled his cock clear of his pants and rested it there. Charity moved the blade again until its point rested on the shaft of his cock, which grew, steadily, relentlessly beneath the pressure, gentle though that was. Stoner stared at her left hand. It worked her clit steadily and her fingers slid between her outer lips, moving easily on their slick wetness. He leaned towards her, reaching a hand to join with hers.

  Charity looked up, shook her head, added pressure to the blade and ran it along the length of his cock, then turned it until the edge drew a thin red line between metal and skin. He took hold of himself and squeezed, the thin red line became a very slightly thicker red line as he did so. She removed the blade. He moved his own right hand on himself in time with her left hand on herself in the strangest dance of his life.

  Without more than a lost beat in their shared rhythm, she slid the long blade into its sheath, spun it lengthwise and without taking her focus from Stoner’s cock slid the black composite handle of the black steel blade into herself. It sank easily inside and she sighed. Stoner was lost in the dance; moving to her rapid rhythm, moving rapidly towards an inevitability.

  Which arrived too soon. Charity shouted, sat rod-upright, removed both her hands, leaving the long blade hanging from her like an improbable ritualistic phallus and half rose from the chair, eyes staring, breath bursting. She shook and shouted something crude and loud. The blade flew from her and landed at Stoner’s feet. He reflexed away from it, his chair tipped and the imbalance wrecked his moment. Lost in a short space of complete confusion, he stood up, stepped back and faced Charity, who had retrieved her blade with astonishing speed, closed her coat to his gaze and was shaking the shape back into the blonde wig. Her expression was timeless, tears stood unwelcome at the corners of both eyes, and a sheen of sweat glossed the skin of her face. The long blade lay on the table between them.

  And quite suddenly and entirely unexpectedly she smiled. A radiant grin. Two teenagers with a shared secret. Stoner felt a reflection of her smile grow on his own lips as his cock sagged and leaked a little, strawberry and pearl jams mingling slowly; regret no doubt for its own lost moment. Charity had replaced her hair, was once again the conventionally beautiful blonde he had known before.

  ‘You should probably put that away now. Chills can be quite bad news, I do believe. And you’re leaking on your jeans.’

  Silently, and with some reluctance, Stoner complied. The silence grew to maturity and bred a silent family of its own.

  ‘I’m the bluesman,’ Stoner announced, obliquely. ‘I should leave
now.’

  ‘But this is your place, isn’t it?’

  Stoner agreed this was so.

  ‘I should leave.’ Charity decided. ‘Leave you in whatever passes for peace in your world, Mr Stoner.’

  Stoner nodded his agreement. Neither of them made a move. Neither wished to be the first to move.

  ‘If I walked backwards to the door I would fall over a table,’ Charity suggested, with a hint of humour, somewhere.

  ‘I’m hardly royalty,’ Stoner’s smile was as cautious as her own, ‘and I won’t shoot you in the back.’

  ‘Nor stab me there?’

  ‘That neither. At no point, in fact.’

  ‘I’m safe with you, then? Despite the business with Hartmann?’ Stoner paused for a beat, then nodded. ‘Yes. No beef with you. You did what I could not, I think. And if that was the last of the dead heads, then we really are clear. I’ll put that another way; if I’m not on your contract list, then we have no problems at all.’

  ‘So far as I know.’

  ‘Weasel words, those, Charity. Too many meanings. I’ve met your sister, remember.’

  ‘If your name’s on a list, I’ll let you know. That suit you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I guess I’ll be on my way.’

  She turned, turned back again.

  ‘Should I stay?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Probably best that way. Last couple of guys I fucked died inside me.’

  ‘Tell me about it. Tell me about it some other time, hey?’

  ‘There’ll be another time?’

  ‘Reckon it’s likely, me. You?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she drawled her words through the strainer of her smile. ‘Do I get a parting song? A tune, Mr Bluesman?’

  Stoner bounced up to the stage, picked up the Stratocaster and sat his stool in the spotlight. ‘A Beatles medley? A Beatles medley at midnight? The Beatles did songs for every occasion. “Nowhere Man”? “I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party”? “Day Tripper”? “Paperback Writer”? “Girl”? “Norwegian Wood”? That’s the one for now.’