The Hitwoman Gets Lucky (Confessions of a Slightly Neurotic Hitwoman) (2 page)

"You don't have to be psychic to know that's far from the truth,” she muttered.

Armani was right, but I'd never admit that to her. I'm far from fine. I'm stressed out and I'm tired. Very, very tired.

For a couple of months, I'd been heading straight from work to the hospital to visit Katie, but that got to be exhausting. Now I go to visit on a rotating schedule with my aunts. Aunt Loretta visits on Mondays after she's been to the beauty parlor. Aunt Leslie goes on Tuesdays after her N.A. meeting. I go on Wednesdays and Fridays after work and on Saturday mornings before I get busy running errands. Aunt Susan goes on Fridays when she's done working. Two or more aunts go on Sundays.

That way Katie gets a visitor every day, but I'm not running myself quite as ragged. The schedule was Aunt Leslie's idea. She's actually come up with some pretty impressive ones since she got herself off drugs after hitting bottom on my doorstep a few months ago.

On the way home, I stopped at the convenience store to buy some milk and a Lean Cuisine. While I was there, I bought a lottery ticket. I didn't think Armani's prediction was right, but I'd have been a fool to ignore her completely.

The second I walked into my apartment, Doomsday (a.k.a. DeeDee), an eighty-pound Doberman Pinscher who sounds like a blonde bimbo, greeted me with, "Gotta! Gotta! Gotta!"

Grabbing her leash, I took her on a quick walk before her bladder burst.

Once she'd done her immediate business and was entertaining herself by sniffing every blade of grass that popped through the cracks in the asphalt of the parking lot of the apartment complex, I asked, "How was your day?"

"Hungry," she whined pitifully.

"You act like you're never fed," I grumbled, rubbing the spot between her ears. She sat down and leaned her full bodyweight against me, so that I wouldn't stop petting her.

Her eyes drifted closed in delight. "All day God eat."

Since Godzilla is an anole lizard who prefers to dine on live crickets (he once went on a hunger strike when I deigned to give him freeze-dried bugs), I tend to dump his jumping and chirping buffet into his terrarium when I leave for work so I'm spared witnessing the carnage he wreaks.

"Hungry DeeDee." The dog sighed.

Her starvation pleas once convinced me to leave a heaping bowlful of food out for her when I left for work. I learned my lesson when I returned home, exhausted after a hospital visit, to find a pile of vomit in the center of the living room. Armani wasn't so far off when she suggested I should stop feeling sorry for everyone.

My cellphone buzzed. I had to stop petting the dog to pull the phone from my pocket.

She tilted her head back and whined.

"Hello?" I answered, not recognizing the number.

"Hey, Mags."

My heartbeat did that funny little stuttering thing it does every time Patrick Mulligan calls. I did my best to sound normal. "Hi, Patrick."

"Hungry?" he asked.

"Hungry!" Doomsday barked.

Sometimes I forget how acute her sense of hearing is.

Jumping up, she put her front paws on my shoulders so she could get closer to the phone. "Hungry!" she barked again.

Patrick chuckled. "I think she recognizes my voice."

"Guess so," I murmured.

"So?" he asked again. "Hungry?"

I thought of my Lean Cuisine defrosting on my kitchen counter. "Sure."

"Bring the dog in so she doesn't make a scene."

"Are you watching me?" Turning, I scanned the parking lot. I couldn't see him. That came as no surprise since there’s no way I’d ever be able to recognize his car. I've never seen him driving the same vehicle more than once.

"Inside, Mags," he said softly.

DeeDee didn't need to be told twice. She raced toward my apartment, dragging me along behind her. Considering that I was pretty sure Patrick was watching, I did my best not to let the dog knock me on my ass.

"Company's coming," I told God as I rushed into my apartment, ran into my bedroom, and turned the volume of the television down. I leave the TV on for him, otherwise he claims I'm trying to bore him to death.

"Change the channel," he ordered lazily. "It's almost time for Wheel."

For a while, when I first got into the assassination biz, all he watched were true crime shows. But now that he’d attended his first wedding, he seemed to have developed an obsession with nuptial-related programming, but his love of
Wheel of Fortune
still trumps them all.

I changed the station for him, closed my bedroom door behind me (no need to let Patrick see I'd set up my lizard in front of a game show), and hurried back out of the living room, just in time to see something red dangling from Doomsday's mouth.

"Give me that!" I screamed, lunging for her.

For a big animal, she's pretty spry.

She took off for the kitchen before I could grab her.

"Spit it out!" I yelled. "Don't eat it!"

I thought I had her cornered beneath the kitchen table, but she knocked a chair out of her way to make her escape.

"It's not food, you imbecile!" I shrieked. "Don't bite it! Don't chew it! Don't you dare swallow it!"

She scrambled over the couch in the living room, knocking a table lamp to the floor with a resounding crash.

"Drop it!" I shouted.

God yelled from the next room. "You're interrupting my viewing pleasure with that racket." In case you don't know, Godzilla sounds a lot like Professor Snape from the Harry Potter movies, meaning he sounds like a superior, snarky prick.

"Shut up!" I yelled back just as I leapt at the big, black body trying to squeeze past me.

Tackling Doomsday to the ground, I tried to pry her jaws open like I was some kind of alligator wrestler you'd see at Gatorland in Florida. "Give it back!" I demanded breathlessly. "Give. It. Back."

"Give what back, Mags?"

Doomsday and I both looked up to see Patrick standing in the living room, watching us, amusement sparkling in his eyes.

"PAPIP!" Doomsday yelped joyfully. She meant to say “Patrick!” but her mouth was full.

She scrambled out of my grasp and loped toward him, turning back to spit out the bedraggled, chewed, no-longer-red, saliva-soaked rabbit's foot.

"How's my girl?" Patrick asked warmly, bending down to pat the dog's side.

I did my best to ignore the jealousy that ate at me whenever I witnessed his fondness for the mutt. My murder mentor’s got a soft spot for her since she'd helped save his life once.

"What did you take of Maggie's?" he asked the Doberman.

"Hungry!" she panted.

He, of course, couldn't understand her, but I could.

"She took my lucky rabbit's foot." I scooped the sodden mess off the floor and stomped into the kitchen to wrap it in a paper towel.

"A horseshoe over your door and now a rabbit's foot," Patrick mused aloud, picking the table lamp up off the floor and putting it back where it belonged. "I never would have taken you for the superstitious type."

"The horseshoe was a gift from my Aunt Leslie and the rabbit's foot and this new horseshoe"—I waved at the one I'd left on the kitchen table—"were gifts from my friend Armani."

"The woman you work with?" Patrick asked.

"Uh-huh."

"She thinks you need more luck too?"

"She thinks I need to get lucky," I muttered. I regretted it the moment the words left my lips, but if Patrick registered the sexual meaning, he gave no indication. I let out a sigh of relief. Maybe my luck was changing.

"I brought dinner," he said, picking up a brown paper bag he'd propped near the door in the foyer.

"What?" I asked suspiciously.

"Meat!" Doomsday barked.

I glared at her. Sometimes the dog ate better than I did. Patrick had been known to feed the mutt choice cuts of meat while handing me a falafel sandwich.

"Lamb gyros," he said. "Is that okay?"

"For all of us?"

He looked around, startled. "There's someone else here?"

I looked pointedly at the dog salivating at his feet.

"Not for you, sweetheart."

She hung her head dejectedly.

Patrick eyed her quizzically. "Sometimes I think she understands every word I say."

She did, but I couldn't tell him that. "Yeah, that's why she wouldn't let go of the rabbit's foot when I told her to."

"Sorry!" Doomsday panted in her sweetest tone, cocking her head to the side. I swear she batted her eyelashes at me.

It's hard to stay mad at her when she's so damn cute.

"You want dinner?" I asked her.

She ran to my side. I quickly poured her a generous serving of dry kibble and said, "Bon Appetit!" which was our signal that it was okay for her to begin eating.

She noisily crunched and inhaled her food in mere seconds.

While she ate, I pulled a couple bottles of water out of my fridge and handed one to the redhead who was watching me carefully.

"Everything okay?" he asked.

I nodded, rather than sharing the fact that I was jealous of the attention he gave my dog.

"You should put this away." He picked up my Lean Cuisine box, a knowing expression in his eyes.

He probably thought that if he didn't occasionally feed me, I'd never eat anything that didn't come straight out of a box, can, or jar. He's wrong. I have dinner with my aunts once a week and nothing served there would count as a processed food. I usually even eat vegetables. If I didn't, Aunt Susan would give me a hard time.

Pulling a couple of paper plates and napkins out of the bag, he quickly set my kitchen table. "So besides the gyros, I got some baba ganoush."

"What?"

"Baba ganoush. It's an eggplant dip. You'll like it." Despite the fact he's a redheaded Irishman, Patrick Mulligan has a fondness for Middle Eastern cuisine. I assume it's because he was married to an Iranian woman... not legally married, but close enough.

He laid out the gyros and some flatbread (even
I
know what flatbread is) and the baba ganoush, which quite frankly looked a lot like Doomsday's canned food.

He must have spotted the skepticism in my expression because he smiled at me. "Trust me."

I nodded because I did trust him. The guy is a cop, a hired contract killer, and my murder mentor, but really, when it comes down to it, he's the person I trust most in the world. Which may say more about the craziness of my world than it does about him, actually.

So the man I trust, and secretly lust after, scooped up the foodstuff that looks like dog food on a piece of flatbread and held it out to me. I considered leaning forward and eating it out of his hand while giving him by best “come-hither” look (as my Aunt Loretta would say), but then I thought better of it. What if I hated it and had to spit it out… that wouldn’t be sexy.

Instead, I plucked it out of his hand doing my best to ignore the little sparks of sensation that zipped through my fingers when they brushed against his palm. Resisting the urge to pinch my nose shut, like I was prone to do every time Aunt Susan had tried to give me a spoonful of medicine when I was a kid, I shoveled a big mouthful of roasted eggplant/doodoo onto my tongue.

It didn't taste like poo or even dog food (not that I've sampled Doomsday's fare). It tasted... good.

Smiling his approval, Patrick scooped up some baba ganoush for himself. "See. I knew you'd like it."

I swallowed before replying. "You think you know everything."

Raising his eyebrows, a devilish glint shining in his green gaze, he nodded. "Pretty much."

"Try?" Doomsday panted pitifully, eyeing the eggplant spread.

"You won't like it." I warned. "It's a vegetable. And it's spicy."

She cocked her head to the side and stared at me, the concept of "spicy" being foreign to her.

"You shouldn't feed her people food," Patrick admonished.

"This from the guy who feeds her meat?" I mocked.

"The fat in meat is good for her coat. No good can come of her slurping down roasted eggplant."

"He's right," I told the dog.

She hung her head, crestfallen.

Unable to endure the guilt her pitiful expression evoked, I unwrapped my gyro, snagged a piece of lamb, and tossed it through the air.

She caught it before it hit the ground and swallowed it whole.

Patrick shook his head. "You spoil her."

"That's my prerogative."

We ate in silence, finishing the ganoush and gyros in record time.

"Thank you for dinner," I said, wiping my mouth with a paper napkin. "Now do you want to tell me why you're here?"

Patrick searched my face for a long moment. "Maybe I wanted to see you. Maybe I enjoy spending time with you."

I took a long swig of water from the bottle in front of me. "Maybe. But I doubt it."

Something flickered in his gaze, intense and hot, but he quickly blinked and looked away. "I could use your help."

"With what?"

"A job."

I considered that for a long moment. Up until now, I'd gotten my instructions for killing people directly from the mob boss, Tony Delveccio himself.

"Does our mutual friend know about it?" I asked carefully. Discussing assassinations requires a bit of finesse.