The Lethal Bones

by Nick Thacker

  She exclusively took on contracts like this. Unlike some assassins in the Club, Ember had a particular code about which contracts she would and would not accept. No kids, no one who has young kids, and no personal grudges. She would never take on a contract for some rich asshole who wanted to eliminate a business rival, for example. She’d had many chances to get rich doing that sort of contract work. Never had she accepted one. Rodney Palmer was a perfect example of a contract she was happy to take on.

  Ember loved the simplicity of the Club’s rules when it came to contracts. One contract, one assassin. No competing or rivalry. Once a contract had been accepted by a Club member, no one else could take it on. The hiring parties were not allowed to pit assassins against each other. Everything was documented and completed according to the Club’s myriad bylaws.

  Ember skulked through the campsite, eyeing each tent as she passed. Rodney’s was the green GoLite dome at the eastern edge of the campsite, staked down with bright orange tent pegs. Hard to miss. The tent looked like a two-person, which meant actually big enough for one person and a backpack. She would make sure he was alone in there once she got closer.

  Ember held the dart gun in her left hand and a single dart in the right as she stayed low and moved. The ground was hard, a little crunchy in the early October chill, but she kept her footfalls light and made no noise.

  Something shifted in the tent to her left. A person turning over in their sleep. She tensed her body and waited, still and frozen as foggy breath plumed from her lips. One hand inched toward her back pocket, where she kept the non-lethal darts. If she did have to stick someone to knock them out, maybe that person would wake up thinking they’d been stung by a mosquito.

  Then, after a few more seconds of no movement, a fart from inside the tent broke the silence. Low and rumbling, the kind of fart her dad would have let out after a steak dinner. Ember stifled a chuckle as she waited to see if the owner of the smell would wake up, but it didn’t seem so. The general state of the campgrounds did not change.

  Now, on to her target.

  She had to make a decision about the tent flap. She could see from a hundred yards away it had a zipper holding it closed. If she unzipped it, that would make too much noise. Rodney would wake up. She had no problem taking out an awake target, but the issue would be whether or not he would have time to scream or yell and wake everyone else around them. Due to the layout of the campsite, Ember had parked her car a thousand yards away. Fleeing deeper into the valley was an option, but not one she wanted to pursue. Some of these people would have their phone nearby and still have cell service. One call to the cops, and she could be trapped in the park.

  No, she would not open the tent flap. She would examine the tent and then stab the dart through it, into his neck. A risky move, since she would have to guess at his exact location inside.

  Ember crouched outside the tent and listened. Breath pushing in and out of her mouth, trying to stay as still as possible. Goosebumps dotted the pasty white flesh of her arms.

  Something in the tent shifted. Rodney had turned over in his sleeping bag, and now she could picture him inside the tent. She knew where to stab to get him in the neck. Everything was ready for her to complete the contract.

  Ember held the dart high, ready to stab, when she heard a shuffling sound behind her. She spun and her eyes opened wide when she saw the figure.

  Another assassin, standing over her.

  Ember looked up to see Niles Thompson standing over her. An assassin from the Five Points Branch of the Denver Assassins Club. He held a serrated hunting knife in one hand. Decked head to toe in black, with a skullcap pulled low and a black bandanna covering the lower half of his face. But Ember knew him by those almond brown eyes. Rail thin and lanky, testy and prone to emotional outbursts, Niles was one of the bitchiest gay men she had ever known.

  “Niles,” she hissed. “Get out of here. This is my contract.”

  Niles shook his head. She couldn’t see his lips behind the bandanna, but his eyes suggested he was smiling. “My contract, Ember. I have paperwork.”

  “So do I. Get out of here before you wake up half the campsite. This is a very tenuous situation out here, and you’re going to make it worse. I’m almost done so you need to keep out of my way.”

  For a few seconds, they stayed rooted in their spots. Ember crouching next to the tent, Niles hovering over her, knife in hand. This was not a good situation. The Club forbade more than one assassin from taking on a contract. The Club also forbade bidding wars or anything that would pit registered Club members against each other. Plus, it made no sense for a Five Points member to be here. Five Points assassins specialized in messy contracts. Brutal kills meant to send a message. Ember, while only taking contracts to kill people who deserved it, was also a clean assassin. She usually tried to maker her kills look like accidents. That’s what she was hired to do in this case. Kill a rapist and make it look like he’d had a heart attack so there was no way it could ever come back on the victim.

  If Niles went to work on this rapist, he would leave the guy in a puddle of blood. Such a thing would have serious repercussions for everyone involved.

  “You think you’re hot stuff in your push-up bra and lipstick.”

  Ember raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You really need to go now, before this whole thing turns sideways.”

  “I’m not moving. Step away from the tent.”

  “Niles, stop being a dick about this. You’re going to blow it for both of us. I don’t know how else to say it to you to make you understand.”

  ”Get out of my way,” Niles said in a low growl.

  “No. Let’s go somewhere and have a reasonable discussion about this. There’s been a mix-up.”

  But, Niles didn’t make any effort to move. In fact, he gripped the knife in his hand harder. An almost imperceptible move, but Ember noticed the tightening of his fingers out of her peripheral vision.

  He was about to strike. As ludicrous as it sounded, he seemed poised to attack her in the middle of a dozen tents full of sleeping civilians.

  Before he could make his move, Ember leaped to her right, rolling herself into a ball at the last moment so she wouldn’t slam into the ground and make too much noise. With tents spaced out every ten or twelve feet, it was like trying to maneuver in a field full of landmines.

  Niles turned toward her and jumped, knife high. In mid-air, he aimed the knife down, poised to land on top of her. She could barely make out his black-clad form in the darkness.

  On her back, Ember had only a split second to react. She pushed herself hard to the right, and Niles landed flat on his face in the hard dirt. She had to stop her momentum when she almost rolled right into the side of a blue tent.

  He was momentarily stunned on the ground. Ember flipped back over to the left, on top of Niles. Immediately, he struggled, making too much noise for Ember to contain the situation. Hs knife was on the ground next to him, and he tried to buck Ember off as he scrabbled to reach out for it.

  She didn’t want to attack him. It was a terrible idea. But, she didn’t have a choice. Any second now, people would wake up. They would be exposed. Above all, a member of the Assassins Club had to maintain secrecy and anonymity among the general public. The Club and its two hundred members had only survived and thrived for the last sixty years because civilians knew nothing about it.

  She reached to her back pocket and snatched one of the stun darts. With two in her hand, she dropped the lethal one on the ground so she could grip the one she wanted to use. Ember jabbed the dart into Niles’ neck. But, when she pulled her hand back, she realized she had used the wrong one.

  A red dart stuck out of his neck. The blue one, the stun dart, was sitting on the ground next to them.

  She had dropped the wrong one and stuck Niles with a lethal dart.

  “Oh, shit,” she whispered, panting. She’d killed him.

  The bandanna covering his face had
fallen away in the scuffle. Spittle formed on his lips as his jaw strained. His eyes darted around. Within a couple seconds, his moments slowed and then stilled. Dead.

  “Damn you, Niles,” she whispered. “We’re only here because of you.”

  She sat back on her butt and glanced around the campsite. No stirring, no flashlights lightening the interior walls of the tents. But, that didn’t mean no one had woken. She drew another dart and returned to Rodney Palmer’s tent. With a quick jab, she thrust the dark into the tent fabric and into his flesh, high on his chest, above the sleeping bag. She heard him make a quick gasp, then nothing.

  Ember pulled back the dart and examined the tiny hole it had made through the tent. Fortunately for her, the tent was well-worn and had plenty of scuff marks. No one would notice this little hole.

  Then, she stood, shoulders heaving. Niles dead on the ground. She scurried back over to him, found his bandanna, and then hoisted him up, over her shoulder. His weight almost took her down, but she bared her teeth and spread her legs to balance his lanky bulk.

  Ember hefted him all the way back toward her car, moving as fast as she could with a hundred and fifty pounds over her shoulder. Once a minute, she checked behind her as the campsite was further and further away. No signs of movement from back there. No one had woken up.

  She popped the trunk of her car and dumped Niles into it. His body folded like a collection of rugs, splayed about at odd angles. His eyes were fixed on a point beyond her, his jaw still shut tight, as it had been the moment he’d died. Maybe Ember hadn’t liked him, but she took no pleasure in seeing another Club member in good standing dead. Especially when it had been so pointless.

  Ember clenched her fists. “Damnit, Niles, why did you have to be such a jerk?”

  As a chill set in and goosebumps tickled the back of her neck, the reality of the situation’s consequences dawned on her. Ember had killed another member of the Club. A cardinal rule, held sacred by every single member. Yes, she had done it before, but the Review Board had made it plain what would happen to her if she did such a thing again.

  Even though she had only intended to stun him, and even though the whole thing had been his fault because he’d attacked first, none of that mattered.

  “Damnit, Niles.” She found herself growing angrier by the minute. Why had he been there? Clerical mixup? How had two assassins been contracted for the same kill? The Club’s machinery was supposed to prevent this from happening. Sixty years of fine-tuning the Club’s laws and operating procedures were supposed to keep them free of these mistakes.

  A pulse of fear ran through her. A primal and instinctual desire to run. To cover this up and disappear, as she had done before. To pull it off, she would have to never make contact with the Club again. Become someone else, with a new name, in a new country, far away. Like ripping up everything she had built here in Denver over the last three years and starting fresh somewhere else.

  But, Ember knew that was ridiculous. First of all, she would never get away with it. The Club would find her and hold her accountable for what had happened. At least thirty or forty various Club members specialized in finding people who didn’t want to be found, no matter how far they had run. If she holed up in a Buddhist temple in Tibet, she might have a month of freedom before she woke up to a knife plunged into her chest.

  Also, running was dishonorable. For whatever reason, there had been two killers on this contract. In self-defense, Ember had killed the other assassin and completed the job. There would be consequences, and she would have to face them. Maybe the consequences wouldn’t be so bad. The Review Board wasn’t without mercy or reason.

  Ember whipped out her phone and placed a call to her mentor, the grizzled old woman named Fagan. Despite the late hour, Fagan picked up the phone after the first ring.

  “Something wrong, dear?” Fagan asked. She sounded alert and calm.

  “You could say that.”

  Fagan sighed. “Well, you’re still alive, and it doesn’t appear that you’re calling me from jail, so the contract couldn’t have gone that badly.”

  “It did.”

  “What happened?”

  “This Rodney Palmer contract you arranged for me, it came from a legit client?”

  “Yes, of course. It was done over the message board. Full background check, payment in full prior to completion. Everything was done right, as far as I could see. What happened?”

  “And there were no other assassins contacted about this job? No other members of any other Branches documented any paperwork or any notes about it at all?”

  “No, Ember, nothing like that. It was all by-the-book. Are you saying there someone else there?”

  “Yes, you know that really annoying skinny guy Niles from Five Points?”

  “Yes, I know him.”

  “He’s dead in the trunk of my car. He attacked me first, and I meant to hit him with the stun dart, but I was a bit distracted and tagged him with a poison dart instead.”

  For a few seconds, Fagan breathed and said nothing. After a long silence, she said, “Shit.”

  “Yep, that’s exactly what I was thinking. How did we get here? Who messed this up?”

  “I don’t know,” Fagan said. “And, it doesn’t really matter, does it? However it happened, the end result is the same.”

  “I’m hosed. That’s the end result you were referring to, right?”

  “Yes, you are more or less hosed. What do you want to do?”

  Ember sucked in a breath. “Well, I know people in California, New York, London, Madrid, Cape Town. I could be on a plane in two hours. I want to run, but I know that’s just the panic talking.”

  “It wouldn’t do you any good.”

  Movement to her left made Ember close the trunk, but then she realized it was only a trio of deer, wandering along the hillside, toward a creek. Sun must be coming up sooner than she’d realized. “No, I know I can’t run. This was self-defense. He was going to kill me and steal my contract. I did what I had to do, even if it wasn’t the way I meant it.”

  “I don’t know if the Review Board will see it that way.”

  Ember sighed. “I know that, too.”

  “I’ll make some phone calls. The board will want to see you, later today, or maybe tomorrow. Go home and get a few hours of sleep, if you can. By the way, did you complete the contract?”

  “Hell yeah, I did. I’m not going to let a prick like Niles Thompson stop me from doing my job.”

  Fagan gave a morbid chuckle. “That’s my girl. I call you when I know more.”

  The call ended and Ember looked at her phone’s darkened screen. She sucked in a breath of cold mountain air and let it eke from her lips a little at a time. Hell was about to rain down on her.

  If you would like to be the first to know when this series is available, join Jim Heskett’s reader group at www.jimheskett.com/readergroup and Nick Thacker’s reader group at nickthacker.com

  Jim

  For Mik, my partner in crime.

  Nick

  For Harvey — sorry for everything we’ve put you through.

  About Jim

  JIM HESKETT

  Jim Heskett was born in the wilds of Oklahoma, raised by a pack of wolves with a station wagon and a membership card to the local public swimming pool. Just like the man in the John Denver song, he moved to Colorado in the summer of his 27th year, and never looked back. Aside from an extended break traveling the world, he hasn't let the Flatirons mountains out of his sight.

  He fell in love with writing at the age of fourteen with a copy of Stephen King's The Shining. Poetry became his first outlet for teen angst, then later some terrible screenplays, and eventually short and long fiction. In between, he worked a few careers that never quite tickled his creative toes, and hasn't ever forgotten about Stephen King. You can find him currently huddled over a laptop in an undisclosed location in Colorado, dreaming up ways to kill beloved characters.

  Jim believes the huckleberry is the ki
ng of berries and refuses to be persuaded in any other direction.

  If you’d like to ask a question or just to say hi, stop by www.jimheskett.com/about and fill out the contact form.

  About Nick

  Nick Thacker is a thriller author from Texas who lives in Colorado and Hawaii, because Colorado has mountains, microbreweries, and fantastic weather, and Hawaii also has mountains, microbreweries, and fantastic weather. In his free time, he enjoys reading in a hammock on the beach, skiing, drinking whiskey, and hanging out with his beautiful wife, tortoise, two dogs, and two daughters.

  In addition to his fiction work, Nick is the founder and lead of Sonata & Scribe, the only music studio focused on producing “soundtracks” for books and series. Find out more at SonataAndScribe.com.

  For more information, visit Nick online:

  www.nickthacker.com

  nick@nickthacker.com

  The Lethal Bones: Harvey Bennett Prequels, Book #3

  Copyright © 2019 by Jim Heskett and Nick Thacker

  Published by Turtleshell Press

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance of fictional characters to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All right reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, photocopying, mechanical, or otherwise—without prior permission of the publisher and author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.