Death of an Assassin (Saint Roch City Book 1)

by Ian Hiatt

  My rifle, a generous step up from the one I purchased from the undiscriminating Westie dealer to pop Thomas, feels solid in my arms. A payment from Tim for helping him waste a room full of “draggers.” Saint Roch racism at its finest. I’m not too ashamed to take the rifle and spend an hour learning more about it than I thought I could in a year. With a flash suppressor on the end, I’m prepared to take my shots, but can’t find any targets. As I go from window to window, I can’t find a single person on the estate, and it isn’t until a car pulls up the long driveway and parks on the other side that I’m certain someone is there. But there are no guards on the perimeter. Mistake number one.

  It only takes me a few minutes to move from the tree line to the house itself, keeping to the shrinking shadows of the rising sun when possible. My borrowed sniper, great for the long-distance kill, is stowed in the forest now. An hour of training from my former partner wasted. The defenses of the Donahue estate have fallen far short of what they once were. For now, I’m armed with my old friends. A boot knife moved up to my hip and my pistol, lovingly clutched in my hands, freshly cleaned by Tim and loaded with ten rounds, with several other magazines ready for the reload strapped in pockets on the tactical vest he’s loaned me.

  But, in truth, I only need three bullets. One for each of Angela Donahue’s kneecaps until she gives me answers and calls off the price on me. And a third to put in her skull if I don’t like her attempts to negotiate.

  A shudder slips through me like a wave of cold winter air that is anything but. Because, deep down, I know I intend to use the knife on Thomas. Slip it up beneath his chin, slide the cold metal into his skin, and watch him bleed out. If he lied. Because he’s destroyed my career and flipped my life on its ass, and he better have a damned good reason for doing that.

  I don’t know the layout of the mansion as well as I’d like, but I find a door at the back of the house that isn’t locked. And that’s as good an entry as any. Keeping my gun aimed at the door, I open it and jump into a darkened room smelling of fabric softener and linens. The laundry room. The house stands quiet around me but for raised voices echoing up the cavernous mansion. Feeling my old self returning, I glide across the linoleum to the far wall, finding a door that must lead to the interior of the house.

  It’s the scent of blood on the air, Layla.

  That rush, sweetie. That need to kill. You know that feeling, right?

  My mother’s voice. Her hopeful tone. When she left me for the last time. Outside a cold fire station on the northern edge of Saint Roch, she put a coat over me even though I couldn’t really feel the rain soaking my body. I wasn’t really sure what was going on. Or where I was. Or who it was waiting in the car for my mother.

  I wanted to beg and plead with her. Take me with you. Don’t you love me anymore? Please, Mommy…

  But I was still in shock. I know that now. I was a quiet little girl who could still remember the fury on my mother’s face while she held me under the water. The determination to kill her only child. And when she walked away, I watched her go. Get into the passenger seat of the car and disappear from my life forever. Nothing more than a memory.

  I never made a sound.

  A loud crash wakes me from the past, and I turn the knob of the door and the house lights up with noises.

  “I want her fucking head!” a girl screams. Another loud noise as glass or ceramic shatters. “I didn’t pay you to―”

  A low laugh crawls across the walls as I peer down the hallway, dark for lack of windows. She speaks slowly, with such burning malice that I can feel my stomach wanting to throw up what little food I have in it. “You haven’t paid me a freaking cent. This isn’t a business of credit. I do a job, you pay me. That’s how it works, princess.”

  I know that voice.

  “I told you, you get paid when you finish the job. When everything is lined up, you’ll get paid. I have a very wealthy backer―”

  “To hell with your backer. And to hell with you. I’m not a bodyguard, and I’m not a whore. I’m here for one thing. My money. And if you don’t give it to me, I’m going to do to you what I did to your dearly devoted parents.”

  Her. The assassin. The co-ed cheerleader-looking freak who took my job.

  I stalk up the hallway, moving toward the voices, but being cautious not to make a sound as I do so. Because the house is silent again. Until…

  “Shut up.” As quietly as Angela says it, I hear it from my position in the hallway.

  I finally reach a room with light only to find that it’s a vast living room, bigger than my entire apartment and Cass’s combined. It’s empty, but the voices are coming from one of the rooms off this. There are more than a few doors to choose from, and I pause to try to gamble which door.

  The dark laugh bubbles up again. “If you don’t have the stomach to talk about offing your mommy and daddy, you shouldn’t have hired me. Do you know what your father said before I drained him of life?”

  Click.

  Having been in similar situations before, I know the sound of a gun being cocked.

  “I said shut up.”

  I can place it now, and I move from hardwood to an area rug, surrounded by furniture that costs more than the life of an embezzling stock broker or a pumped-up frat boy who gets in the way of luxury cars. My footfalls are light, but not light enough. The floor creaks beneath, me and I freeze, raising my gun toward the room.

  I hear movement coming from within. But it’s not fast. It’s not attacking. It’s casual. A confident stroll. The assassin. She’s wearing loud shoes as she walks on hardwood, the loud clacks being as discrete as a bomb in the quiet. “Oh, come on, Angie. You’re not going to shoot me. I’m your only hope here. Let me go and talk to the guy. I bet I can get whatever you need out of him.”

  I move again. Testing a theory. The floor creaks. But now I’m right beside the door, not able to see inside, but perfectly capable of swinging the corner and firing where I’m certain the two women are.

  “What are you talking about?” Angela says. But her voice trembles. She’s a terrible actress.

  The assassin takes a seat, all too apparent by the sound of her getting comfortable and causing the furniture to crack and slide across the floor. She makes noise. Way too much noise. She didn’t hear me. She wiped out an entire mansion of people to get to one. Or maybe three, if the parents were on the contract, too.

  She’s an amateur. She can kill, but she can’t assassinate. She was sloppy for a reason. And now I know enough about her.

  “I know you’ve got your brother here. Or somewhere. I know you must need him for something, or why wouldn’t you have called off the flock of reporters still yammering about him being kidnapped? So he must be here, and you must be keeping him squirreled away for some reason.”

  “I don’t know where my brother is,” Angela lies. Badly. I’m not the only one picks up on how fast she answers and the sharp tone her voice hits.

  “Yes, you do. And you need something from him. You’re panicking. You pulled a freaking gun on me!” The girl chuckles grimly. “Why don’t you just let me have a turn with him, then? I take it whoever you hired hasn’t been having any luck with him?”

  Silence.

  The next sound is a pitying laugh. Not at all dark, and more like the noise that drunken girls make at clubs when they’ve had too many. “Shit, you really don’t have any money, do you? You couldn’t hire anyone. Did the slanty-eyed freaks from the Eastside clean you out?”

  The gun clicks back off. Angela gives a shaky, almost sobbing sigh. “No. I couldn’t pay them, either.”

  “So why are you still alive?”

  “I gave them that club from the news,” Angela says.

  “The one that burned down?” The shitty assassin laughs. “How did you give them their own club?”

  “It wasn’t theirs!” Angela’s moving back up to the tantrum mode I first heard her in. “My family owns this city. They own the East, the West, the North, and the South.
They probably even own you, and you don’t even know it. We owned the land that club sat on. They were paying us for the pleasure. I gave them the deed for the club, and that Han guy was more than happy with the arrangement.”

  “So what is it you need from your brother?” the dark girl says. I can hear her boots on the hardwood floor and a sliding chair, likely scratching gouges in the floor.

  “A deed. For a specific property. And he knows which one. If you can get the information from him, I will double what I owe you.”

  “And if I don’t?” It sounds like less self-doubt and more of a threat.

  “Then you get nothing. And you might as well shoot me, because my backer will do worse.”

  My competition starts walking. “Just point me in his direction. I’ll find your precious piece of paper. Does he have―” She walks out of the door and deadpans as she sees me. Our eyes meet, and the world may as well be just us.

  My gun is raised. Has been for the last few minutes while their dick-measuring went on. And now it’s pointed right at her face. No loading necessary. No cocking. No hesitation.

  “Wait―” she manages to say before I move. This girl is sloppy. She screwed up the life of someone I care about. Maybe even love. A bullet in the head is what she would get in a fair and just world.

  But if she wanted fair and just, she should’ve gone to Tim. I drop my hand and fire twice into her gut, blood spraying out from her stomach as she topples backward. My vest and pants are soaked with her life as she hits the wooden doorframe hard with a shriek before collapsing to the floor with muffled protest. I swing around the corner and fire a round into the wall where Angela was standing, but she dashes out another door and disappears into the depths of the house.

  I consider giving chase, but this is not a maze I know. As inept as she is, she’s on her home ground. And I know she’s armed with at least one gun.

  I turn around and slip back into the living room, moving quietly.

  “Fuck you…” the girl groans from the floor, twisting in agony at the lead swirling about her stomach right now, her insides less recognizable than a Picasso.

  “You’ll have a slow and painful death with those,” I mutter as I pass her. “If you’re lucky, you’ll be reincarnated as someone who knows better than to fuck with me.” I put another round into her knee, willing to give up my position for the pleasure of hearing the bitch scream in fresh pain. I leave her writhing in the living room and move to the rest of the house, careful to check each doorway before I dash through, my gun now four rounds lighter. I’m saving the other six.

  I stalk out of the living room, through the wide atrium with the ebony staircase leading upstairs, curling with ornate patterns carved into the wood of the banister and each individual step. It must’ve been hard growing up a Donahue. Apart from the vague sounds coming from the failed assassin in the other room, the house is silent. Angela might be an incompetent, but she knows to keep silent now. If she’s even still in the house.

  Pistol raised high, aiming up the stairs, I move past them, slinking around the kitchen and a bathroom. I recognize the door ahead of me, and it’s only through some hope that Angela would behave as I would that I open it and look down. The darkness of the basement leads away from the foundations of the house, likely extending beneath the front yard.

  Now it’s all memory. I can’t find a light switch on the wall. Not even a pull cord ahead of me. Cautious but confident, I descend the stairs. On each step, I dip my foot into the darkness of the next, waiting to find the concrete floor. My only chance is that Angela has since had the bodies of the slaughtered bodyguards removed. I know if I trip over a single one of them, my chances of escape are slim. But there’s no smell. And bodies have a distinct odor when they’ve been sitting around for too long.

  When I finally reach bottom, I step lightly, feeling my way along. Even though the door I want is on my right, I have to feel along the left wall to keep my gun up and pointed at the darkness. Every moment that I’m not moving forward, I’m pausing and listening. It’s one thing to have another hitwoman get the drop on me, or an Asian gang, or a psychopath vigilante. It’s a very different matter to let some twenty-something, plush girl put a round in me.

  When I reach the corner, I try to remember how far down the room is. The room that I spent some unknown amount of hours being punched. Kicked. Cut. Because if I were Angela, that’s where I would keep him.

  My slow steps eventually bring me far enough that I hear a noise that is not mine. And it’s not in the hallway. In the absolute darkness of the basement, I move to my right, feeling along the drywall until I find the bullet holes. My fingers just about fit through them. My hand slides until I find the doorframe. The door. The knob.

  Locked.

  Fuck that.

  I brace myself against the far wall and give the door a strong kick right about where the knob should be holding it.

  BAM.

  The noise cracks like a gunshot as the door rockets open, slamming back on its hinges and hanging open. I still can’t see, but it’s enough to feel the opening ahead of me as I shuffle in.

  A grunt. A groan. A heavy breath.

  “Why are you doing this?” a raspy voice speaks. “Please, Angie… talk to me.”

  I rush forward only to slam into a piece of furniture, a table jams its corner into my gut, and I lurch over and wince, slamming my gun down on its top. “Shit,” I curse through gritted teeth.

  “What…? Layla?” the voice says.

  Thomas.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” I mutter, my breath coming back to me.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” His voice sounds cracked. Weak. Beaten. I’ve been in his place. Having your family turn on you. Someone you love look you in the eye to let you know that they want to end your life. I don’t blame him.

  Once I get my bearings, I reach out. “Where are you?”

  He fumbles and I hear wood creaking. “Here. The corner.”

  My hands extended out, I find a wall and follow it until I stumble over something. This time it’s soft. And warm. And tied to a chair.

  “Found me,” he says dully.

  I reach down and feel his face, eyes swollen and cheeks warm. He fidgets, forgetting he’s tied. I lean down and let my touch wander over his body, checking for glaring injuries in the dark.

  “You have to get out of here. Not that I don’t appreciate the pat down…”

  I scowl into the darkness. When I don’t find any crippling wounds to his body, I lean down, my hands moving back up to his chest. His shoulders. His neck. His chin. His cheeks. My lips find his, and though I can taste blood and he’s far too weak to really return the affection, I feel life coming back to me. Gratitude. And complete hatred for so many.

  “Stay still.” I pull out my knife, and with some hesitation, seek out the ropes binding him to the chair and cut them with very small movements so as not to stab the poor guy.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks again, this time sounding angry.

  “It’s called a rescue, idiot. You’re in trouble, someone comes and bails you out.”

  Thomas pulls his hands free and reaches out for me, fumbling until he finds my wrist.

  “That’s what I did when I tried to save you. And you got shot then, remember?”

  I pull him to me using my own ensnared arm and I say, in my own angry-enough tone, “Yeah. I made it through that, too. Now let’s get you the hell out of here.”

  And all too suddenly, I can see him, only an inch or so away from my face. We both blink at the blinding light now shining over us both, standing awkwardly in the room where he met the real me. The floor is still stained with blood and splinters of wood and plaster, though free of dead bodies. For the moment.

  Because once the fluorescent lighting stops flickering, so do our eyes, and we spot her. Standing in the doorway with a six shooter pointed at him. Or me. Wavering back and forth. Angela Donahue.

  “Why couldn’t you just te
ll me where the hell it is, Tommy?” she asks through her teeth, stifling a sob. “All you had to do is tell me where the deed is and none of this had to happen.”

  “None of what?” Thomas shoots back. “You going fucking insane? Killing Mom and Dad?”

  “Oh, like they didn’t deserve it? You, their perfect little boy, got to be completely shielded from their garbage. Sent you off to college, didn’t they?”

  My hand feels empty, and I see my gun on the table, too far away for me to leap and get it, and my knife won’t be enough to kill her if I throw it. Barely even distract her before she’d be able to squeeze off enough rounds to kill one of us.

  “Don’t you put that on them. You could barely get through high school, Angie.”

  “Shut up!” she screams, decidedly pointing the gun at him. “Do you even know? The shit they did? That they let happen?” She steps forward, the gun shaking in her hand, but never pointing far from Thomas’s face.

  “Angie. Just… put the gun down. It doesn’t have to be this way.” His placidity makes it clear to me, but maybe not her. He’s not too worried about his own life. He breathes normally; his eyes are focused on her. He’s ready to die. He’s fighting for her life now. Because if she pulls the trigger, he knows I’ll be able to kill her before the gun can even chamber another round.

  Angie nods frantically. “You’re right. It doesn’t. You worked with Dad last summer. You know where he kept all of his important documents. Now where is it?” She’s shrieking now, and her finger inches toward the trigger.

  “Angie, I don’t know. I already told you where he kept the deeds. You already went there and got them all. It should have been in there.”

  “You’re lying. I know you are. You lie just like Dad did. Just like Mom. Just like Andrew.”