Les Recidivists (Chance Assassin Book 2)

by Nicole Castle

  But not even Frankie, who was raised around the most delicate of women’s clothing, would think to wipe off his hands before touching her purse. For this, she gave Casey money for her purchases. And offered him a smile. Before kicking him out.

  Chapter Six

  The client looked like a lawyer I used to blow for room and board back in Chicago, but he had the voice of Jerry Orbach from Law & Order. He pleaded for his life, splayed out on the carpet amongst papers he’d knocked from his desk when I’d shot him.

  “No one fucks with my family,” I said. I raised my gun to shoot him again but instead of gunfire I heard my name being called. I turned to Frank, who was standing behind me impassively. “You missed,” Frank said. I looked back to the client and sure enough there was no second bullet hole. Even the first wound had disappeared. I was about to protest when my name was called again and I blinked awake.

  The bed was cold without Frank. So was the cup of black coffee Casey tried to bribe me with after waking me from my unneeded, but still much desired beauty sleep. It had been considerate of him to stay downstairs all night, leaving our shared wall to the gagged groans of pleasure Frank forced out of me, so I didn’t strangle him for waking me right as I was saving Gideon’s life. Not that strangling, or anything else for that matter, could’ve wiped the grin off his face.

  The telltale signs of his inspiration were apparent, sleepless eyes and smudges of graphite on his cheeks and forehead from where he’d pushed his hair out of his way. Artist’s block broken, thank you Bella. That meant I was already right about her being good for him.

  “Can I borrow the car?” he asked. He could’ve taken it and been back before I stopped dreaming of Law & Murder, and Frank would be out in the wilderness until I called him to come make me breakfast. But asking my permission gave me the chance to get myself in trouble before I’d even gotten out of bed, and I never missed an opportunity for mischief.

  “And what does Ms. Bella need this morning?”

  He laughed. “Is it that obvious?”

  “New fashion magazines are out today,” I suggested. I could already feel the beating Frank would give me for encouraging him. I just couldn’t help myself. It wasn’t every day I got to play matchmaker, and they did have a few things in common. Casey could really dress for a semi-straight guy, and Bella had the same cockney screaming coming through her car speakers as he had on his iPod. If nothing else, they could discuss clothes and music.

  “Great idea!” he exclaimed.

  I’d let him figure out their compatibility on his own. “The keys are by the door.” Yes, I’d be in trouble. But we needed Casey out of the house so we could figure out who hired his girlfriend to kill his stepdad. And if everyone thought it was my idea to send him on an errand, all the better.

  One really could get quite a bit accomplished if one got up early enough.

  I smiled at how clever I was, listening for the sound of Frank’s car starting and the crunching of gravel as Casey backed up onto the unpaved road. Nobody could drive up to our house without making enough noise to alert the dogs, if not Frank and me. Not that anyone ever came here.

  Our closest neighbor was a veterinarian and his family about two miles away. We did occasionally venture to each other’s homes; they’d towed over their Peugeot for me to fix, and in exchange we got to tow over our dogs whenever they played too rough. But we were secluded enough that our shooting at birds and rabbits never warranted so much as a concerned phone call.

  If only we had gravel in our doorway.

  Bella’s presence startled me far more than Casey’s had, even without having coffee shoved in my face. She looked completely different without being dolled up, and if it wasn't for her hair, I might not have recognized her. She was wearing a plain silky nightdress and hauling a makeup bag the size of carry-on luggage. With her hair down and her face free of all but the remaining smears of makeup, she looked like a little girl playing dress up. Her mysteriously missing cleavage completed the allusion of youth. I would’ve offered her a teddy bear and a glass of milk if Frank had been around to protect me.

  “Where’s the loo?”

  “I guess you should’ve accepted the tour,” I said.

  She glared at me. It lacked her usual ferocity, the absence of sleep and eyeliner doing wonders to soften her viciousness. But I knew firsthand that looking harmless and being harmless were two very different things. “Second door on the right,” I said, watching her stomp away in bare feet and feeling my smile return.

  Maggie took no consideration for it being morning, screaming for Frank at the top of her lungs. Obviously I wasn’t capable of coming to her rescue so I stayed put, yelling, “Oops, I meant first door!”

  Bella slammed the bathroom door hard enough to shake the house’s foundation. I could imagine Maggie in bed, doing her best Jackie O and shielding Gideon from an assassin’s bullet. I supposed he told her why Bella was here.

  I hopped out of bed and pulled on Frank’s clothes from yesterday, imagining that I could smell blood on his shirt and briefly pretending that it was a costume from one of our hits and not just formalwear for Casey's show. I wrapped his shirt around me instead of buttoning it and bounded down the stairs as quickly as I could without tripping over his too-long pants. Swinging around with my hand on the banister, I slid across the hardwood floors toward the kitchen and ran to the backdoor. I whistled for Hugo, who had the best hearing; he’d bring Frank back, and then I could tell him how clever I was.

  Opening the fridge, I dumped the half-full carton of milk down the drain so I’d have an excuse to send Casey to the store. Then I grabbed a cup of coffee, ready to place it in my husband’s hand the second he walked in the door.

  Maggie and Gideon came down the stairs slowly, looking around like they were frightened of an attack. “Where’s Frank?” she asked, clinging to Gideon’s arm.

  “Walking the dogs.” I held my cup of coffee closer so they wouldn’t get the wrong idea and think I’d started breakfast for anyone else. The only reason coffee was even made at all was because the machine was on a timer. Frank didn’t know how to use it, so I programmed it for him to prevent him from waking me at five a.m. by dragging it into bed with us.

  “And my son?”

  “Store,” I said, looking down. I couldn’t lie to Maggie. It was something I’d never been capable of. If she asked what on earth her son could be doing at the store this early, I’d have to tell her he was playing errand boy for her husband’s would-be killer.

  “Which store?”

  “Frank!” I called, heading outside to greet him where Maggie wouldn’t follow in her slippers. He was about a hundred feet away, walking behind the dogs that ran to greet me. I walked forward, handing him his coffee and draping my arms around his neck.

  “What have you done?” he asked.

  I smiled to show him it was a good thing. That I wasn’t in trouble. “I sent Casey out.”

  “For what?”

  “So we could talk to Gideon.”

  He pulled me closer with his free hand, resting his arm across the small of my back. “Very good.” He proudly kissed the top of my head. His pride in me had been lacking since I'd nearly gotten myself killed. If I'd known that having a hit on Gideon was all it took to get Frank to send a favorable look in my direction, I would've ordered his death.

  “Maggie knows.”

  “I see that,” he said. I looked back toward the house, the two of them standing in the doorway like they couldn’t believe we could be affectionate with each other at a time like this. “Where’s Bella?”

  “Bathroom.” I hoped no one would mention my directional discrepancy.

  “Go get her. Tell her to meet us downstairs. We have to do this before Casey returns.”

  I walked back to the house, grabbing the shotgun by the front door and heading upstairs. “Bella, we need to talk.” I knocked once with the barrel of the gun and then stood back with it against my shoulder, ready if she tried to attack. Sh
e came out, wearing Frank’s towel and wielding my hairdryer like a weapon. Her lips were bare and pale, as colorless as her foundation. Her hair was dark auburn from being wet, her eyes, now painted, capable of frightening grown men again. The bathroom was scented with perfume and beauty products, a smell that made me think simultaneously of sex and dessert.

  “Now?” she asked, holding the hairdryer like she was ready to strike me with it.

  “Before Casey gets home,” I said from behind the safety of the shotgun.

  She yanked the cord out of the wall and slammed my hairdryer on the counter, grabbing her lipstick and applying as we walked down. I only lowered the gun when Frank gave me a warning look for pointing it at her. He would’ve allowed me to take precautions if he’d known I sent her in to scare Maggie.

  “Get dressed and come to the kitchen,” Frank ordered, taking the shotgun from me and setting it back by the door. She flipped him off as she walked back to the library. “What have you done?” he asked again, glancing down at me.

  I shrugged and went to join Maggie, who was still clutching Gideon like he was her handbag at night in a bad neighborhood. “You want some coffee?” I offered enthusiastically, knowing that acting sweet made me look innocent.

  “You’re out of milk.”

  “Yeah.” I turned away so she wouldn’t see the guilt on my face.

  Frank waited until Bella returned, wearing one of the many pieces of haute couture we’d picked up last night. This one was a strange number that looked like something the Queen of Hearts might wear if she turned dominatrix. Bella and Frank sat down close to each other. It was an interesting seating arrangement. It looked as though the two of them were challenging Maggie and Gideon to a duel. And in a way, they were. Frank had never met an innocent mark. There was always something that earned the price tag.

  With the circumstances of our introduction to Gideon, a thorough background check was never performed. Considering how protective Frank was of the Evans family, Casey in particular, he would’ve normally scrutinized everything about Gideon’s life before allowing Maggie a first date. But when Gideon came into our lives I was comatose and Frank was facing jail time. We needed him, and we let him in. For all we knew he could’ve had the type of past that employed people like us, and that put Maggie, and Casey, in the kind of danger Frank had spent his life keeping them out of.

  I pulled up a seat at the side of the table, arm's length from Maggie and Bella. Sitting at Frank’s side was my normal place, unless we were on the table, but I wasn’t sure whether being between him and Gideon was the best idea.

  For the limited amount of time we’d have to do this interrogation, it certainly didn’t seem that anyone was willing to begin. I’d be more than willing to take the reigns, as I had trouble keeping my mouth shut anyway, but where to start? Should we ask Gideon if he’d annoyed anyone recently and work our way up? Break his fingers until he told us the truth about being a secret government agent?

  “If you’ve done something—”

  “Give it a rest, Frank!” Maggie snapped, taking his allegation as a personal attack against her family. Her eyes got misty and she squeezed Gideon tighter. “He hasn’t…this has to be a mistake.”

  Gideon took a deep breath, stoically calm. “What type of man would—”

  “Person,” Bella corrected.

  “She’s right,” Frank said. “It could very well be a woman.”

  “Your ex-wife,” Maggie said accusingly to Gideon. She despised the woman, and she’d never let him live down the fact that he’d been dumb enough to marry her twice.

  “Would she have anything to gain?” I asked, just to join the brainstorming. I’d never gotten to work in group projects at school. No one liked to have me around unless it was one on one, where they could give me their input right in my mouth.

  “Nothing,” Gideon sighed.

  “Any anger after the divorce?” Frank asked.

  “Against me if anyone,” Maggie said.

  “Who else?”

  “I just…I don’t know.”

  “Did you ever kill anyone?” I asked. I was also the last picked for sports.

  Maggie slammed her fist on the table, jingling her spoon in her untouched cup of milk-less coffee. “Of course he hasn’t!”

  Everyone but her looked at Gideon. “Of course I haven’t!” he said in exasperation.

  “Well, at least we got that cleared up,” I said. “Name ten people who hate you.”

  “V,” Frank warned.

  “Fine. Five.”

  “The client isn’t likely to drop one million pounds just because they hate him,” Bella said.

  Maggie gasped. So did I. That was a hell of a lot of money. More than I ever made, that’s for sure. I’d never even made one million dollars on a hit. Frank’s eyebrows had shot up to the ceiling. He’d apparently never made that much either. “One million?” Gideon asked.

  “Pounds,” Bella clarified, as if being paid in U.S. dollars made her cheap. Or maybe she’d been silent too long and wanted her voice heard. I knew the feeling.

  “Is that…normal?” Gideon asked.

  “It’s excessive,” Frank said suspiciously, as if that made Gideon’s supposed crime even worse. “Let’s start with anyone who has something to gain from your death.”

  I briefly glanced at Maggie, turning my suspicion her way just to see Frank’s reaction. She and Casey were the beneficiaries of his life insurance policy. Last I heard, the proceeds of that were more than the cost of his death.

  Frank roughly slid his empty cup of coffee across the table with the expertise of a trained bartender. It landed hard against my unsuspecting hand, essentially rapping my knuckles without so much as calling attention to my misconduct. “Get me another cup of coffee. Please.”

  As if I’d allow myself to be dismissed. I wouldn’t miss one second of this conversation. I took Maggie’s now-cold cup and slid it to him, spilling half the contents across the wood and hopefully at least a couple drops on his lap.

  Bella grinned, obviously seeing an opportunity for scandal. “Family members are usually the first suspects.”

  “And first acquitted,” Frank said sternly. “Who else?”

  “What if it was Casey?” she joked, earning a punch in the arm from Frank that nearly knocked her off her chair. Maggie completely lost it, blowing her top like Mt. Saint Helens and screaming at Bella to stay the hell away from her son. Bella ignored Maggie’s threat and shoved Frank, who raised his hand to slap her, but didn’t follow through with it.

  I looked toward Gideon, who like me had been calm through the tempest. Only, his stillness was through distraction, hurriedly scribbling on the sketchpad Casey had left on the table. He pushed it across to Frank and slammed the pencil down like he was trying to flatten it. “There. Five names. Five people who have nothing to gain but a sick satisfaction. Those are the type of people you worked for, aren’t they?” he said with disgust. “Who she works for?”

  Frank glanced at the list, then tore it, and the five pages beneath it, from the sketchbook. Gideon may have been trying to end the quarrel, but using something of Casey’s to do it just put him on Frank’s bad side. “Tell me about them.”

  “Do any of them have something against Christmas?” I asked. Frank closed his eyes and squeezed his head like I was hurting him. “It’s important,” I mumbled, and got up to get him a proper cup of coffee.

  “Anyone on this list from that file you carry around?” Frank asked spitefully.

  “Number one,” Gideon sighed. “My client. But he was convicted of embezzlement, not murder. And he’s behind bars for the next ten years.”

  “White collar prison,” Bella laughed. “He could kill you from there himself. Borrow a gun from a guard and take the afternoon off.”

  A gruff bark echoed from the front door, Hugo’s warning that Casey was home.

  “Stay the hell away from my son,” Maggie said again, and left the room like she couldn’t stand to look at
any of us for another second. She should’ve really been telling her son to stay the hell away from Bella, since it wasn’t Bella who was chasing Casey’s skirts.

  Mother and son must’ve exchanged some words in the hallway, because it took Casey awhile to pop his head in, carrying cream but no milk, whisky, and a carton of Bella’s expensive brand of cigarettes. “There’s something wrong with your car,” he said, his brow furrowed seemingly more in concentration than distress.

  Frank didn’t even turn around to acknowledge him. He just looked at me pitifully and sighed, “Please deal with it.”

  I got up, giving him a reassuring kiss on the cheek before dropping the cream and cigarettes in front of Bella. I followed Casey to the hallway, hoping he hadn’t driven into a post or something while daydreaming about how happy Bella would be with the latest issue of Vogue. It was bad enough that I had to hammer out the dents I put into our neighbors Peugeot when I got frustrated with it for not behaving like every other car on the planet.

  “Check it out,” he said joyfully, pulling not one but six fashion magazines from inside his coat. “I figure I’ll surprise her later.”

  “That’s good, Case. What’s wrong with the car?”

  “Nothing, but I wanted to talk to—”

  “You lied to Frank?” I gasped. No wonder he’d looked like he was deep in concentration. Had Frank turned around, he would’ve seen right through him. “Jesus, you’ve really got a hard on for her.”

  “Just talk to me,” he said, pulling me outside toward Frank’s thankfully still pristine black BMW. I sat behind the wheel to add authenticity to our ruse. Casey sat in the passenger seat, fiddling nervously with everything but the glove compartment. Frank still kept a semi-automatic in there for emergencies, even though there was far too much of a temptation to use it on rude French drivers. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing, kiddo,” I said, addressing him as Frank did even though Casey was older than me. “There was a problem with one of Bella’s jobs, so she’s gonna stay with us until everything blows over.”