The Hitwoman and the Chubby Cherub

by JB Lynn

  “I can’t just give up looking for my sister.”

  He turned his head slowly so that his eyes met mine. His gaze was stormy. Still he remained silent.

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  “A ghost,” he said in a voice so low it was difficult to understand him.

  “A ghost?”

  He nodded.

  “That’s not much to go on,” God interjected from the dashboard.

  Both humans ignored him. We were too busy gazing into one another’s eyes. I was searching for answers in Patrick. He was trying to will me to do as he asked.

  We both failed.

  Frustrated I turned my head away. “I don’t understand.”

  I heard him suck in a breath.

  “It’s complicated, Mags.”

  “Explain it to me. I’m not a moron.” I smacked the steering wheel for emphasis.

  “It’s above your pay grade.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I fought the urge to smack him.

  “I just need you to trust me on this,” Patrick said slowly. “She has nothing to do with your sister.”

  I heard the sincerity in his voice and I believed him.

  “And if you don’t stop poking around you’re going to get me in trouble with some very powerful people,” he added quietly.

  I looked back at him, reading the truth on his face.

  “Okay,” I acquiesced.

  “Thanks, Mags.” To show his appreciation he kissed my lips softly.

  I didn’t encourage him to take it any further. After all, I still really had no idea what the hell was going on.

  Instead I pulled back and said, “I have to go. It’s almost time to put Katie to bed.”

  He nodded, a great sadness clouding his eyes. “Take care of yourself, Mags.”

  He got out of the car and walked away without so much as a backwards glance.

  Remembering there’d been something else I’d wanted to tell him, I rolled down my window and yelled, “Thanks for the safe house.”

  He raised a hand in acknowledgement, but never looked back.

  I went back to the B&B, a shroud of disappointment clinging to me.

  I’d barely tucked Katie into bed for a nap when my cell phone rang.

  I frowned at the unfamiliar number as I hurried down to the basement, answering just before it switched over to voicemail. “Hello?”

  “Gotta! Gotta!” DeeDee whined.

  “Quiet! She’s on the phone,” God ordered.

  “Hello?” I repeated when I didn’t get an answer from the caller.

  “I need your help, Maggie May.”

  I sank onto the couch. I’d been expecting the call to be from Patrick, or maybe Delveccio, not my dad.

  “It’s not a good time, Dad,” I said tiredly. “It’s been a long day.”

  DeeDee rested her chin on my knee.

  Piss emerged from the couch to sit on my feet.

  “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important,” my father said.

  “Your definition of important and mine are different. Kind of like our ideas about stability,” I threw in for good measure.

  “He’s after me,” Dad whispered.

  “Who’s after you?” I bent down to pet the cat.

  “The Cupid Killer.”

  Considering I’d just seen him try to kill Delveccio, I found that highly unlikely. Still, I found myself asking, “And why would he do that? What connection do you have to Belgard and Delveccio?”

  “Just your mother.”

  I sat back in my seat. “What?”

  “I’ll explain everything,” he promised. “But you’ve got to come get me right away.”

  I sighed. “Where are you?”

  “Teresa’s grave.”

  Personally, I don’t think graveyards are great hideouts. There isn’t much shelter and they tend to be pretty deserted.

  “You should call someone,” God said as I sped across town to the cemetery that contained the headstones for my sisters Darlene and Teresa.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Patrick,” DeeDee supplied helpfully from the back seat.

  “Would that I could.” My lover had provided me with a safe house, but not a phone number to reach him at.

  “Angel,” Piss suggested from where she was curled up on the floor of the front passenger seat.

  “And what would he do?” God mocked. “Exercise the Cupid Killer to death? I’ve heard him working with Katie. I don’t think he’s capable of counting higher than ten.”

  “He’s counting repetitions,” I explained.

  “Griswald,” God declared, hanging ten from my bra strap.

  “Which one?” I asked.

  “Any of them.”

  It wasn’t a bad idea, but I didn’t know how my father would react if he knew I’d called in law enforcement to help him out. After all, he already believed I’d ratted him out once before.

  Reaching the cemetery, I quickly cut through the winding narrow paths. It was a route I’d taken too often.

  Jumping out of the car, I let the cat and dog out before marching toward the spot my father had declared our meeting place.

  “I don’t like this,” God declared.

  “Me neither,” I whispered back.

  I was relieved to see Dad was alone. I was alarmed that he didn’t seem to be the slightest bit aware of his surroundings as he sat on Teresa’s gravestone.

  “Dad?”

  He turned around and raised a bottle of whiskey at me. “Drink?” Then, realizing I was flanked by the cat and dog he added, “She brought her pets. I tell her my life is in danger and she brings her pets.”

  “Maybe that’s because last time you attacked her,” God ranted from my shoulder.

  Dad squinted at the squeaking lizard and laughed.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said, trying to take control of the situation.

  “And go where?”

  “Someplace safe.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “I know a place. Come on.” Without waiting to see if he was following, I turned back and trudged toward the car.

  “You should leave him here,” God said.

  “He smells,” Piss hissed.

  “This isn’t my fault you know,” Dad said.

  Looking behind me, I saw that he was stumbling along. “Nothing ever is,” I muttered under my breath.

  “I didn’t ask for any of this to happen,” he continued.

  I marched on toward the car. I opened the rear door on the passenger side and let him climb in.

  “Watch him,” I instructed DeeDee as I opened the door behind the driver’s seat for her.

  “Protect Maggie,” God told her as I climbed behind the wheel.

  I watched in the rearview mirror as the dog bared her teeth at my father and growled softly. “Maggie protect.”

  “Your dog is going to attack me,” Dad complained, pressing away from her.

  “Only if you deserve it,” I told him, putting the car into drive.

  The ride to my safe house was silent as the animals kept a close eye on my father and I concentrated on my driving.

  Once I got him inside the shop, I was ready for some answers.

  The dog and cat lined up beside me, letting him know where their loyalty lay. God perched on my shoulder.

  “You’re the one in control,” he whispered in my ear. “You can do this.”

  Balling my hands into fists, I asked a tad too loudly, “What does Mom have in common with Delveccio?”

  “One of them, Tony or Anthony, I don’t know which, I’m not sure she ever did either, was in love with her. Just like Belgard.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  My first reaction was that he was lying.

  After all, telling untruths was his modus operandi.

  “You don’t believe me?” he asked, seeing my incredulous expression.

  “Can you blame me?”

  “What’s so hard to believe?
Your mother is beautiful. Charming. Magical.”

  “On her good days,” I agreed.

  “She used to have more good days than bad.”

  I tried to determine what was true in his story. Delveccio had never mentioned even knowing who my mother was and when he’d referred to my father, he’d only seemed aware of him because of his criminal exploits.

  Yet…

  If he knew her, if he was infatuated with her, it might explain why he’d been so willing to take me under his wing.

  I hated the idea that the mobster had fooled me for the entire length of time I’d known him. Our relationship was odd, but I’d always thought we were honest with one another.

  “And that’s why he wants to frame me,” Dad continued.

  “Who? Delveccio?”

  “Cupid.”

  “What does he have to do with anything?” I asked.

  “Excellent question,” God opined.

  Dad shook his head at the squeaking lizard. “He’s trying to frame me for the murder of the cop and the mobster.”

  “But you said he was after you,” I reminded him.

  “He is. He wants me to be blamed. If I am, I’m a dead man. It’s just a question of whether it’ll be the cops or Delveccio’s men that will kill me.”

  I shook my head. His story bizarrely made a kind of strange sense, but there was one major component that hadn’t been addressed. “Then why did he kill Fern Cardinale?” I challenged.

  “Oh that was just business,” Dad assured me.

  “Just business?” I remembered standing in Cardinale’s restaurant and hearing Cupid use those very words just before he’d killed the old man.

  Dad nodded.

  “So he killed Belgard, tried to kill Delveccio, and is now framing you?”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “And how do you know all this? Do you know him?”

  Dad shook his head.

  “Then how?” My voice cracked with exasperation.

  “She told me.”

  “Who?”

  “Is anyone else getting a migraine from this conversation?” God groused.

  Ignoring him, I asked my father again. “She who?”

  “His daughter.”

  “Cupid’s daughter?”

  “Delveccio’s daughter,” Dad revealed.

  “The one who’s locked up in the same loony bin as Mom?”

  He shook his head. “The other one.”

  “The one who pretended to be Dominic’s mother,” I murmured. “But how would she know?”

  Dad looked away, not wanting to tell me what he knew, I was sure.

  “Dad?”

  “She hired Cupid to kill her father,” Dad confessed. “She wanted him scared first, which was why she had his friend killed.”

  There was a certain kind of twisted logic to his story, but I still wasn’t sure I believed him. “So what you’re telling me is that Delveccio’s daughter had Cardinale killed and is trying to knock off her father?”

  Dad nodded.

  “But why kill Belgard?” I hadn’t gotten the impression that the cop and the mob boss were tight.

  Dad shrugged. “Maybe because he was closing in on Cupid?”

  I wondered if that was why the red-suited killer had been in Belgard’s house. Had he been looking for evidence that the cop had? I really wished I’d read that diary.

  “You do believe me, don’t you Maggie May?”

  He sounded so sincere, that I almost fell for his act. Catching myself, I shook my head. “What does Mom have to do with any of this?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” I squeaked.

  “The sheer idiocy of this conversation is like a blade being driven straight through my brain,” the lizard complained.

  “For once I won’t even accuse him of being melodramatic,” Piss mewled.

  I glared at my father. “You said--” I began.

  “You asked what my connection was with Belgard and Delveccio and I answered, but that has nothing to do with Cupid,” Dad clarified.

  I squinted at him, knowing that there was still something he wasn’t telling me. “Why would Delveccio’s daughter tell you any of this?”

  A telltale wrinkle appeared between his eyes. I knew the look well. I’d seen it on his granddaughter’s face when she’d tried to convince me that she should have ice cream when she’d already had a cookie.

  “Why would she tell you, Dad?”

  He shrugged.

  “Dammit, Dad.”

  “I may have done some work for her in the past,” he admitted grudgingly. “But I have nothing to do with this, I swear.”

  I closed my eyes and focused on what I knew, assuming I believed him.

  There was a contract out on Delveccio. Cupid would try to kill him again.

  I had to warn him.

  “You stay here,” I told my father. “There’s plenty of food and it’s safe. I’ll come back for you when the coast is clear.”

  “But--” he protested.

  Ignoring him, I turned to the dog. I ordered, “Doomsday, if he tries to leave, bite him.”

  “Bite! Bite!” DeeDee barked excitedly. “Hungry.”

  “Piss, you help DeeDee keep an eye on him too.”

  “You got it, sugar.” She flexed her claws in Dad’s direction.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I promised them all.

  With God on my shoulder, I ran out.

  For once I had to stop an assassination, not pull one off.

  I headed straight for the hospital hoping that Delveccio would be there.

  “You should ask someone for help,” God urged again.

  This time I listened to him. I called Angel.

  “Hi Maggie,” he answered easily.

  “I need you to meet me at the hospital,” I told him, forgoing polite niceties. “It’s a matter of life or death.”

  “Is this about your father?” Angel asked.

  “No. It’s about your uncle.”

  “I’ll be there in five minutes,” he pledged.

  I disconnected the call so that I could focus on weaving in and out of traffic.

  “Families,” I muttered. “They’ll be the death of me.”

  “I’m sure Delveccio has his security detail on high alert,” God soothed.

  “But what if his daughter decides to do the job herself now that Cupid’s failed? She’s part of his inner circle, they won’t be guarding against her.”

  I squealed around corners and bumped over curbs as I sped toward the hospital. I’d grown fond of the mob boss and his quirks. Whatever his relationship with my mother might have been, he’d enabled me to provide the best possible care for my niece and that wasn’t a debt that could easily be repaid.

  I parked illegally in a handicapped spot close to the hospital entrance and raced inside, skipping the security desk and racing toward the wing where Dominic stayed. I heard the rent-a-cop security guards yelling at me, but I just kept sprinting.

  There wasn’t time to wait for the elevator so I ran up the stairs, lungs and legs burning by the time I reached the desired floor.

  “Breathe,” God coached as I hurried on with all the grace of a herd of galloping elephants.

  People heard my pounding footsteps, or maybe it was my desperate wheezing and moved out of my way.

  Everyone steered clear of my path.

  Everyone except Vinny.

  The steroid-fueled bodyguard snarled when he saw me and jumped in front of the door like a hockey goalie protecting his net at the end of a championship game.

  He wasn’t going to let me pass.

  And I didn’t have the time or oxygen to try to explain things to him.