“I work in construction,” he said timidly, as if he wasn’t sure whether he was allowed to converse with me. Or maybe he’d figured out that he was officially retired.
“No, I mean what did you do to deserve this?” I asked. Frank had told me that usually the motive was money; inheritance, insurance, or simply getting the other person out of the picture for a bigger piece of the pie. Though sometimes it was about love, unrequited or more commonly, scorned. Either way, I figured that if someone was going to drop a hundred grand to have you killed, you probably deserved it. That’s the way he saw it too.
“I…I don’t know.” Walter said, beginning to sob once more.
I turned to Frank, looking at him expectantly. Then Walter followed my lead.
“For fuck’s sake,” he muttered. “You know what you did.”
“I don’t,” I piped in.
“He put a hit out on his own brother. They think alike.”
“No,” Walter said. “You? But Charlie…I paid him…it isn’t supposed to work like this.”
Frank rolled his eyes. “Don’t worry, I did your job first.”
I practically squealed over the delight of the double-cross. One brother murdered, the other missing, assumed responsible. Well played, Frank.
Walter cried harder. Frank glared at me.
“It’s okay, Walt,” I said reassuringly. “I’m sure everything will even out in the end. Karma and all that.”
Frank watched him closely while he walked over to me, keeping me safe before telling me off. But even I knew Walter wasn’t going to try anything. He was too overcome with emotion, airing his dirty secret, the mutual betrayal of his brother, and soon the loss of his life, all in the same night
“Go back to the car,” he said sternly.
“Oh, Frank. Please? I’ll be good. I’ll stop talking,” I begged. I had a feeling that this was the last time he would let me anywhere near his mark, and I had to make it up to him so he’d change his mind.
Then something unexpected happened. Walter started defending me, not from having to go back to the car, but from the mean assassin at my side.
“You don’t have to listen to him, Vincent,” he said, his voice suddenly confident. “You’re young. Things can change for you.”
I gaped at him. Even Frank looked stunned, but he understood what was happening before I did, and he got a cruel smirk just as the realization came over me. Walter was trying to pit us against one another. He saw me as an innocent, someone mixed up with the wrong crowd. He must’ve thought that if he talked to me the right way, I’d turn against Frank and save him.
“We can help each other, Vincent,” he continued, using my name again like we were old friends and not mere acquaintances.
I laughed, harder than I’d laughed in a long time. “You have got to be kidding,” I said, watching the hope vanish from his face. “I’m the one you ought to be scared of. I killed my fucking goldfish.”
I moved closer to the edge of the grave, pointing my gun at him sideways like I’d seen them do in the movies. I could feel Frank’s watchful eye on me, and I could imagine the bemused expression on his face. I was on my absolute worst behavior. “Bang!” I shouted, and laughed again. “Keep digging, Walter. We’ve got a ways to go.”
Frank pulled me back by my shirt, but I wasn’t finished yet.
“It’s called loyalty, Walt. If you weren’t about to die, you could look it up. You’re out of your mind to think I’d ever trade him for you.”
“Enough,” he said, his mouth close to my ear. He didn’t sound angry, just no longer amused.
“Well, it’s true,” I said defensively, and stood behind my man.
“Dig,” Frank said. “It’s past his bedtime.”
No one spoke after that. Walter dug in silence, crying occasionally but he seemed to have accepted his fate. There was more I would’ve liked to tell him; that Frank was a sweet guy, that he was only doing this job for the money, and if he got to know him he might even like him, but I kept quiet. I was probably in a lot of trouble, and opening my mouth again would only exacerbate things.
As the sun was just beginning to glow on the horizon, Frank told him to stop. That’s when Walter lost it, screaming at us and holding his shovel defensively, as if swinging it could ward off bullets. All that accomplished was making Frank angry. He didn’t like when people shouted, and he got very defensive when anything could be interpreted as a threat against me.
“Go to the car, Vincent,” he said, not allowing for any argument in the matter.
“I’m sorry about your brother, Walter,” I said, gently touching Frank’s arm to let him know I was leaving. Then I walked to the car, not daring to look back even as I heard a single shot fired.
I sat on the closed trunk, watching Frank shovel dirt back into the hole. It wasn’t like before, when he’d dug a small pit to burn our things. His body language had changed, complete professionalism filling every heave of the shovel. There was no sign that the Frank who occasionally smiled was still in there.
When he signaled for me to come, I ran to his side. He’d only partially filled the hole, the sand covering Walter’s body and nothing else. It dawned on me soon enough that this was my punishment.
“If I apologize―”
“You are filling this hole, V,” he said sternly, forcing the shovel into my hand. At least he was calling me V again. He tended to only call me Vincent when he was being serious.
I sighed and started scooping the loose dirt back in. I was already dustier than he was, and he’d had to jump in the hole to retrieve his shovel. Wearing black in this case wasn’t necessarily the best idea, though it wouldn’t be black that much longer.
“Am I in trouble?” I asked, watching Frank instead of paying attention to the slow process of filling a six foot deep hole.
“That was interesting, wasn’t it?” he asked with a sparkle of wonder in his eyes. It reminded me of seeing a preview for a new soap opera episode; no matter how off-the-wall my theories were, the show’s writers always came up with something unexpected. “His reaction to you, I mean. A gun in your hand, and he thought you could be on his side.”
“So, I’m not in trouble?”
He smiled cryptically. “Not as much as you think.”
A vague answer. Of course. I wouldn’t know whether I was riding in the trunk until it was time to go. “If I was really your partner on this job, would I have done okay?”
Frank took his time answering that one. He could’ve very easily insulted me, which I wouldn’t have blamed him for at all. But he knew how much I wanted this, and he had to accept that I had tried, however badly I failed. “Your emotions give you away,” he said. “They rule you. In this business, that could be catastrophic. But everyone’s different, V. This isn’t a normal job. There aren’t a standard set of qualifications. What you consider to be a weakness may be one of your greatest strengths.
“Women work well in this profession, for instance, because they’re seen as the fairer sex. Bella could shoot someone in broad daylight, and she’d have to beg them to arrest her. I imagine for you it would be similar. You look like an angel. I, on the other hand, look like a killer.”
“Sometimes you do,” I said, knowing that resembling a criminal bothered him more than being one. “But it’s more of your demeanor than your face. If you would smile more often, maybe people would see you clearly.”
“Perhaps,” he said, not letting my words penetrate his mind in the least. “Did you really kill that poor goldfish?”
“No,” I laughed. “I was just trying to be tough.”
“I thought not. But you sounded very ferocious.”
I rolled my eyes. Now he was teasing me. Although, he had told me a good deal more than usual about what it would take for me to be like him. “Does this mean you’ve changed your mind about teaching me?” I asked hopefully.
“No,” he said. Then he winked at me, and walked back to the car to smoke a cigarette.
&
nbsp; I took that as a good sign.
Frank was saying something I couldn’t understand, and Charlie was there, smoking two cigarettes at once. Charlie smiled, and said, “You’ve got one year to live.” Then Frank shot him.
I opened my eyes in the darkness, the sound of the shower running the only thing giving me a sense of direction. His side of the bed was still warm, because I was on it.
Light burst into the room as the bathroom door opened. I turned my face away, hoping he hadn’t seen my head move. When I had bad dreams, Frank got bad feelings. And when he had a bad feeling, chances were good that he’d come to investigate. Fresh out of the shower, without taking the time away from rescuing me to get dressed. It was my birthday. There couldn’t have been a better present.
“You okay?” he called out.
I waited a couple of seconds, then moaned a little.
“Nice try, V.”
Thwarted again. I pulled the pillow over my head.
“That’s the third time this week,” he said, and shut the bathroom door to get dressed. It was his fault I was having nightmares. He’d been especially quiet since the Walter Jones job, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day when usually that amount could last him weeks, and I was picking up on his tension.
Frank came out of the bathroom, his hair wet, his clothes clinging to his damp skin. “Happy birthday.”
Indeed. “It’s our six month anniversary.”
“Anniversaire is the French word for birthday,” he said, and he sat beside me on the bed. “What were you dreaming about?”
“You were refusing to give me any birthday spankings. It was awful.”
“Be good,” he said, and handed me a small, flat present in blue wrapping paper.
“Oh, Frank!” I exclaimed. “You didn’t have to get me anything.” That was true. I had the same amount of personal belongings now that I had when I was technically homeless. I smiled at him and carefully removed the shiny blue paper, hoping that while it wasn’t gun-shaped, or gun-sized, or gun weight, that it would still somehow be a gun.
When I saw what was underneath, I dropped it. Luckily, Frank had his hand out in preparation. He gave it back to me while I gaped at him speechlessly.
One of the first things I learned in foster care was to pack lightly. By the time I had done a few rounds in the system, I’d been down to a single photograph of my parents. And now I held it in my hands.
I’d pleaded with Mark for over a year to let me live with him, but he only agreed to it after things got really bad. Bruises were nothing new at that point, and since my trusted track coach hadn’t done anything to help me in the past, I’d repeatedly gone back to Social Services. Except that after two homes in a row where someone smacked me around, they were starting to doubt my stories. Living with Mark was my last hope of surviving in one piece until graduation.
The last home was by far the worst. Even the other foster kids hated me. There was a girl, Sarah, who had lived with the family for awhile. She was a year older than me, gawky and thin. My new father had been fucking her since she moved in, but when I showed up, all that changed.
Sarah wasn’t much of a looker at all. She had gross skin and an angry, masculine face. I was fourteen, and a spitting image of my mom. Up until the day she died, my mother could’ve been considered the most beautiful woman in town. Everyone looked at her; men, women, even children, as if seeing a princess from a Disney movie. She probably wouldn’t have been that impressive with more competition, but for Branford, she was the epitome of a home town beauty queen.
From day one, Daddy started paying me more attention than Sarah, and I became her enemy. She was in love with him, more so than I’d ever been with Mark. She played the part of dutiful daughter, while secretly wanting the role of wife, and I was intruding on her fucked-up fairytale romance. I hated her back on principle, though that was beside the point.
It only took a week for him to make his affections known to me; climbing into my bed in the middle of the night with a beer in his hand, trying to feel me up over my pajamas. I’d screamed my fucking head off. Woke the whole neighborhood. He’d tried telling his wife that I was having a nightmare, but I could see on her face that she knew exactly what he was up to. And she couldn’t care less.
I’d thrown on my shoes, grabbed the photograph, and gotten the hell out of there that night, walking six miles to Mark’s house in the dark, shaking from head to toe.
The very first time I’d been hit by an adult, I’d gone to Mark. I considered him my boyfriend, and foolishly thought he’d defend me against the world. But he hadn’t. Instead, he asked what I’d done, reminding me that I had a tendency to let my mouth get me into situations I couldn’t handle. It was true, I had a big mouth, and more than once I’d made things worse for myself by neglecting to shut the fuck up. I’d even considered that he might’ve been right, that maybe if I just behaved I wouldn’t have gotten hit. But no one asks for rape, especially not when they’re sleeping. Or at least if I did ask him to rape me in my sleep, I didn’t mean it.
When I told Mark what had happened, it did the trick. Not only did he let me move in, he didn’t try to fuck me again for months, something I couldn’t have been happier about. Sex with Mark had never been pleasurable for me; I was too young and he was too eager. Although, it hurt more to know that while he’d willingly let someone knock me around, heaven forbid anyone else try to get their cock in me.
The photo of my parents was the only thing important enough to grab in my rush to escape. But when Mark decided to go back to his wife and I was no longer welcome, I was in such a state of shock that I left it, and everything I’d accumulated since then, behind.
“How did you…” I started, staring at the newly framed photo in disbelief with misty eyes. It was the same one; the creases from being folded, the torn corner, the tear stains. This was impossible. We hadn’t been in Illinois for months, and since that time he had barely been out of my sight. Though we had gotten pretty close to that part of the U.S., and the man never did sleep. “I cannot believe you did this.”
I threw my arms around him, trying not to get all choked up. “You’re wonderful. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said. He didn’t usually blush anymore when I thanked him, but this time he did. Then I started thinking about how Mark was. He never got rid of anything. All the stuff I’d left behind, my clothes, the photo, he would’ve likely had it in a box in his attic. It might have even had my name on it.
Frank must’ve gone to his house. But I’d never told him Mark’s last name, much less his address. “Did you kill him?” I asked. The other question, how he found him, I could answer on my own. It wouldn’t have been difficult for a man like Frank. All he’d need was a reason, and finding me the perfect birthday present would’ve been more than sufficient.
“No, I didn’t,” he said, not sounding too happy with the fact. “I didn’t touch him. But I saw him, and if I see him again, he’s dead.”
I looked back to the photo, seeing their faces and feeling that if they were watching, they didn’t have to worry about me anymore. I was taken care of. “You’ve outdone yourself.” I said. “You could’ve just let me blow you.”
Frank turned away so all I could see was his bright red ear. I loved doing that to him.
“Do you have any pictures of your mom?” I asked, knowing that he was closer to her than I was with either of my parents. I missed them and all, but only because the wound was fresh. I’d get over it eventually. Frank still mourned his mother, and she’d died when he was a kid.
It wasn’t that he was a raging mamma’s boy, or had some sort of Oedipus complex, she was just all he had. They were best friends. More than that. She was literally the only person he knew. When she died, his world crumbled.
We never took any pictures,” he said, the color of his face gradually returning to normal.
“Do you look like her?”
“I did, when I was younger.”
“Is tha
t why you don’t like your face?” I asked. He’d opened himself up to that one. But I’d always figured it was something like that. He’d been so traumatized during childhood that I was amazed he was as well adjusted as he was. All he’d told me about her death was that it had fucked him up enough to make him stop speaking entirely for two years. I knew better than to press him on that matter. He found strength in silence, wielding it like a weapon when needed, and I didn’t want to ever upset him enough to make him stop talking to me.
That had contributed greatly to why I’d thought he was mute. Charlie had been receiving the silent treatment before I even showed up, so it was no wonder it took weeks to hear his voice. As it was, the two of them were still barely speaking to each other, though Frank insisted this was normal. They’d been pissed at one another for at least five months out of the year since they met.
Frank shrugged. Bad question.
“Well, I think you’re lovely,” I told him, and kissed him on the cheek. Then I changed the subject to ease his tension. “Thank you so much for this. You really didn’t have to.”
“Vincent, I…” He ran his hand through his wet hair. Fuck he was sexy when he was disheveled. “You’re seventeen now. You’re no longer a child.”
“I wasn’t a child when we met, Frank.”
“In age you were. Look, I’ve thought about this…a lot…if you want to learn I have no business saying no.”
I watched him closely. Clearly, he was still thinking about it, but he’d made his decision. “Were you seventeen when you started?”
“Professionally, yes.”
“But you’d killed before,” I said. That didn’t surprise me, though I couldn’t picture him as an awkward teenager despite how awkward he sometimes was as an adult. “How old were you the first time?” I asked, as I had many times.
This time he answered. “Twelve.”
I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. I didn’t know how to react to a statement like that. “Shit,” I whispered, unable to think of anything else to say. “I don’t suppose they count age differently in French?”
Chance Assassin: A Story of Love, Luck, and Murder Page 13
