Her instincts told her to remain patient.
She had wanted it to be perfect.
And it was frustrating. Everywhere he went, even to fuck, he took his four friends.
Now the target and four of his gun-carrying friends were dead.
But the job hadn’t been perfect.
She took the plastic off her hand, tucked that and the expended shells inside her purse.
Fingerprints were on shells, not on bullets that missed their target, not on bullets that were left inside their target. She ignored the smell of death: bladders and bowels releasing their final loads.
She pulled her jacket back so she could return the gun to her abdomen holster, then looked down at her outfit, a pristine First Caribbean bank worker’s uniform, one that reminded her of uniforms she had worn to Catholic school when she grew up in Chicago, and hoped no bloodstain had spoiled the fabric.
She turned, looked out at the yachting marina, the tropical hills and the other yachts in the harbor changing from silhouettes to being easily seen. The
Alfa Nero
was in the distance and in good company:
April Fool, Maltese Falcon, Gliss, Esense,
and
Skylge
being the most impressive of the superyachts.
She wondered what it was like to be that rich, to be filthy rich and own a yacht that leased for a million U.S. dollars a week, to have the kind of money to afford a life of diamonds, gold, and emeralds.
And a closet filled top to bottom with every creation by Manolo Blahnik.
With that much money, she could live out her
Sex and the City
fantasy every day of her life.
She had to hurry, had to collect things, had to finish this job, darkness losing its battle with light.
This job should’ve been done at least thirty minutes ago. While this world was still a shadow.
Actually it should have been done days ago.
Matthew had told her it should have been done days ago.
Since London her husband had completed a contract in Bogotá, Colombia. A midlevel mobster who had fled the U.S. and went back to his homeland. A man who lived and died for soccer. Matthew told her he’d knifed the target during a stadium brawl at a soccer rivalry game, the target dying in the middle of almost eighty people who had been wounded in the riot, added him to at least twenty of the soccer lovers on the ground with stab wounds. Matthew had stumbled into a riot, and that festival of hate had been the perfect cover for his job. He had completed his job the same day he had arrived.
And now he was back in the U.S. waiting for her to come home.
He had offered his help. She had refused. She had to do this on her own.
She was doing this before she met Matthew. She didn’t need any man’s help.
She had trailed her target for most of the week, searched for the perfect moment.
Last evening, while the men were out liming at strip clubs, she had snuck onto the megayacht. Boarded in the darkness. Waited for hours. Waited until they came back with girls. Waited until they had fucked the girls. Waited until they had paid the girls. Waited until the girls left. Waited until the men slept. Five men were dead. Death, like a bad lover, had come quick.
From what she had overheard, all the men had been bad lovers.
Very bad, very selfish. And the women had been cheap as well. Amazing what a woman would do for thirty dollars, how they let men trade them and degrade them in the name of orgasm.
She returned her gun to its holster. The holster she had on now wasn’t like the standard holster most police departments issued; her holster was made for her body, more agreeable to the frame of a woman. She hurried out the door, wiping down all she had touched as she retraced her steps, looked out at the deck, saw no one was looking her way, then, umbrella in hand, left the yacht unseen, its British flag waving in the gentle breeze.
She took to Rhodes Lane, a dirt road peppered with cozy and modest one- and two-level homes.
The distance had been measured. After she exited the dockyard she had to walk a quarter mile, about as far as she could jog, the equivalent of one lap around a track field. She had walked so she would leave no tire prints. So no one would notice the license plates on the scooter that had been rented in the dockyard at Big Ed’s. So no one would remember her transportation being there all night.
The items in her oversized purse, she felt their weight. A MacBook, a Canon camera, three Rolexes, iPods, wallets, cash in both British pounds and Eastern Caribbean dollars.
It would look like a robbery.
Six shots, five of those kill shots.
That one missed shot troubled her, weighed down her stride.
She shook her head as she walked. The umbrella wasn’t needed at sunrise, but she kept it up to hide her face, in case anyone was watching her casual stroll up Rhodes Lane, in case anyone was leaving Harbour View Apartments, or outside working at Antigua Rigging, or coming out of La Boheme, or outside D’s car rental service, maybe spying out one of the windows at the half-dozen Caribbean-style homes that lined the dirty and rocky and tattered lane, this area reminding her of rural parts of Arkansas or Mississippi—agricultural in smell, goats and horses on the sides of the road, unprocessed goat manure and unprocessed horse fertilizer seasoning the tropical air—only there were palm trees, and at the end of the narrow, uneven road were condos and yachts, a juxtaposition of blue-collar living and wealth. As if she were on a road of poverty that led to wealth. She thought that was a good sign, being on that road.
Hit complete, something inside her relaxed. Once again she felt normal.
Once again she thought about how Matthew had gone off on her after the London job.
Killing was easier than loving. Killing involved no emotions; loving involved too many.
Marriage hadn’t been like she thought it would be. Monogamy was hard. Too fucking hard.
Same meal every day with the same seasoning, always served on the same plate.
She thought it best that she marry a sensible man, someone to save her from her money-spending ways. But she had been wrong. She was who she was, and that was who she was.
Hot. She was so damn hot. Her heart beat fast as she tried to control her pace.
Amazing.
She was almost back at the main road, weighted down by her bag, sweat rising on her neck.
Soon she would be ten thousand dollars richer.
Ten thousand dollars. A lot of money, but not nearly enough to suit her needs.
The thing she had to do in New York. That would cost twenty-four thousand.
So the ten thousand would soon be gone. Soon she would need more to survive.
She thought about her other problems, felt a stress headache coming on just like that.
Fucking IRS. Fucking mortgage company.
Fucking credit card bills. Fucking note on her Range Rover and Maserati GranTurismo.
And a fucking husband who kept tabs on every fucking dime she spent.
Always chastising every little thing she did. Could never do right by him.
Her husband. Matthew. The assassin known as El Matador.
But to her he was just Matthew.
He had been orphaned at three months, grown up in foster care like her, shuffled around more than two dozen times, just like her, had run away when he was a teenager, just like her, everything so simpatico. Meeting was kismet, and she was with him because she hoped he would understand her in all ways.
In a system where they aged out and lost most of their financial benefits when they turned eighteen. Where more than 50 percent of the people she had known became homeless within two months of their eighteenth birthday. A broken system where half of the kids earned a high school diploma. Where 2 percent obtained a bachelor’s degree or higher. Where 84 percent became parents.
That had been her world. That was the world she ran from.
Growing up without made her want to have things, all things, no matter what the cost.
Dying rich was as stupid as shit. Working hard, dying, and leaving money for lazy fucks to have, for free, becoming someone else’s lottery ticket, that was the dumbest shit she’d ever heard of.
Well, maybe the second-dumbest thing.
The dumbest thing was the way her husband was always asking her to stop shopping.
He might as well have told her to stop breathing. She’d be shopping on the day she died.
That was what had happened in London. That was what went wrong.
That fucking Gideon.
She was following the target down Neal Street, had Matthew on the phone, directing him to cut off the target, Matthew’s plan being to put a knife in the contract, leave him dying on a side street. The target had spotted her. She had wanted to be spotted. She wanted the target concerned with what was behind him, not paying attention to what was in front of him. It was going according to plan.
Her only thought was it would be such a shame to kill a man who looked so ruggedly handsome.
But in a few minutes it would be done.
That was her only thought, until she passed by that window, saw what she saw in the corner of her eye.
Blahniks.
She had looked in a window and saw a collection of
Blahniks.
All sisters and cousins to the Blahniks she had on at that very moment.
She stopped at the window no more than five, maybe ten seconds. Buckled sling-backs. Mesh leopards. Snake low-heel slides. Pointed-toe suede pumps. Jacquard halter sandals. In her mind she was buying them all, spending every dime of the money she was going to make on the London job.
She trembled a bit, sighed, the sight of Blahniks giving her a shoegasm.
When she looked up the target had vanished in the crowd.
Neal Street ended at Shaftesbury; she didn’t know if the target had gone left or right.
She had taken off, moved as fast as she could, come up on Matthew, and Matthew hadn’t seen the target. She had stopped, frantic, began looking in the opposite direction. If he had gone that way, there was no way to find him in that crowd. He could be on a bus, in a cab, gone down one of the hundreds of lanes that ran like parts of a spider’s web. With an angry smile Matthew told her she had done a nice fucking job, a real nice fucking job, cursed her for blowing it, chastised her, asking her what the fuck had gone wrong within the last sixty seconds. One second
she
was on the target, the next
she
had lost him. People didn’t vanish. People you had your eyes on, they didn’t vanish like in a magic act. She had no answer. No way would she tell him about the Blahniks. He wouldn’t understand. He had grabbed her hand, grabbed her hard and pulled her along the street, cursing her, no longer searching for their prey.
Because they had become prey.
Matthew had seen him first. She looked up and there the target was, walking a few yards behind her, his reflection in the store’s window. The target had ended up behind them, was following them.
“Two against one,”
Matthew had whispered to her.
“Don’t worry.”
“He’s too close, Matthew. Close enough to pop one of us.”
So they stopped and faced the target, two hunters facing a growling lion.
Matthew moved his coat, brandished his weapon, the gun, his knife still in the sleeve of his coat.
Matthew. In the business he was called El Matador. The man who loved to stab, kill as if he were in a bullfight. Matthew was a knife man but used a gun when he had to. Only when he had to.
The target had a gun in his hand, the devil in his intense eyes telling them he would shoot them right then. She had never seen eyes that intense. She had never felt the energy that came from the man she had followed in London. He scared her. She put her hand inside the plastic bag, took her gun out. In public she had taken her gun out. She didn’t feel as if she had much of a choice. Matthew wasn’t a great shot, could hit only from point-blank range, couldn’t hit a moving target, not like she could.
The next thing she knew Matthew was shoving her into a taxi and they were speeding away.
Matthew called in, told the handler what happened, told the handler what his
partner
had done.
His
partner
had fucked up London. He had no blame. His
partner
had fucked up the deal.
She had fucked it up.
She stared out the window, lips pulled in, leg bouncing, wanting to cry, knowing she wouldn’t.
At the hotel room at Knightsbridge, arguing, shouting, then he walked out, left her on the verge of tears, had vanished for hours, then came back with bloodstains on his clothing.
She had asked him if Gideon was dead.
He cursed her out, told her Gideon wasn’t dead. Gideon had vanished.
But someone was dead. The blood on his clothing. The way he scrubbed himself clean.
She knew her husband. She knew El Matador. She knew his temper, his rage.
All because she had been hypnotized by a pair of mesh leopard pointed-toe Blahniks.
Therapy. Maybe she should go to a rehabilitation center. She had tried to go once. But she’d passed a sale at Nordstrom and just couldn’t seem to make it. Spent her therapy money in a matter of minutes. Was depressed after. But the E brought her back up, made her happy enough to hug a tree.
As she walked and held her umbrella up high, sweat dripped down the back of her neck.
She dabbed her forehead and cursed. She felt so out of shape. So heavy. Her ideal weight was around one forty-five, but she was closer to one sixty. All the traveling and the hotel eating. The weight had changed her from a B cup to a C cup. Now she had a twenty-nine-inch waist. Five-five and a half. Forty-one inches around her hips and ass, most of it being her rear, not much to the hips. The weight gain had been proportional, made her handler tell her she put the
ass
in
ass
assin.