Turning on the shower, I stood there, my face looking upward into the hot spray of water that fell on it, my eyes closed, just reveling in the feeling of the delicious warmth washing away the sweat and fear from my body.
Toweling off, my mind went back to the yellow Camaro. I’d seen it twice now, the last time being when Eddie and I had just dumped the body of Francis’ stalker, and that was too much to be a coincidence. There was no way that Camaro just happened to be there, right around the corner from where we dumped the body at the exact time we were leaving.
No way.
And even though I didn’t know who owned it, they had better take care if they planned to keep following me. I was inclined to kill them already after this morning’s crazy rude awakening.
I pulled on some sweats and headed for the door, realizing it had been too long since I’d been to see Grams. She was probably worried about me, and I felt guilty at the thought. Besides, glancing at the clock on the stove as I headed for the door, my timing was probably perfect to catch her in time for breakfast this morning. Look at me, straight from guilt to ulterior motives!
***
Grams answered the door almost immediately after I knocked, so I knew I hadn’t woke her up. The big smile on her face said loads about how happy she was to see me, and if there was any remaining doubt, she had her arms around me giving me a big Grandma hug a moment later.
“Oh, I’m so happy to see you,” she exclaimed. “I was getting worried. It seems like it’s been days since I’ve heard from you.”
The guilt reared it’s head again, competing with the happy feelings of seeing her again. “I’m sorry Grams. I’ve been working and things just got really, really busy.”
“I figured as much, and that’s what had me worried. I know it’s probably silly, but I do worry about you so.”
“I know Grams, I know. And I’m sorry. Really. I’ll try to make sure I at least call if I get so busy again.”
Grams smiled again and hugged me tighter. “Oh, I’ve missed you! Come in, come in. You look like you haven’t eaten since I’ve seen you last. Let’s get that fixed up. How does some of my home-made waffles sound? Scrambled eggs to go with them? Bacon too?”
I couldn’t help but smile at Grams as she headed off into the kitchen, not bothering to wait for an answer as there was only one she’d accept anyway.
“Sounds great. I’m starved. Can I help?”
“You can put the bacon on if you want,” she said, as she busied herself getting out the ingredients for the waffles.
Grams knew I liked to cook bacon. There was something about the sizzling, popping sound of bacon frying that I just loved, never mind the amazing smell! I busied myself with getting the bacon from the fridge, getting out the pan, and getting started. There was something so comforting about being at Grams cooking with her. It was one of the few places that I could just let my cares melt away and enjoy the moment.
***
After stuffing myself to the gills on waffles, bacon, and eggs at Grams, I excused myself with the promise to return later that evening for another visit. I had a lot to do today, not the least of which was to put in an appearance at school to maintain some semblance of the normal life of a teenage girl. Not only that, but I hadn’t seen Rachel in forever either, and I felt guilty about that too.
Sometimes it’s hard living with secrets.
School passed quickly, although it didn’t feel like it. I found myself wondering if it wasn’t time to call it quits. I was close enough to my diploma, and the more I thought about it, it really didn’t make much difference if I finished up through correspondence or even just wrote the GED tests. I wasn’t even sure if college was still going to be in the plans, at least not right away. Things just kept getting busier and busier, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to try juggling the demands of a post-secondary education with the demands of my job.
Rachel, God bless her, was the same old Rach. Happy to see me, no bitching about where I’d been the last little while or why I hadn’t called. I swear, other than Grams, there’s no one else that understands me like that girl does.
We walked home together after school, the mundaneness of it a nice contrast to the events of the last couple days. We laughed, caught up on the gossip we’d picked up from around school, and laughed some more. Good times. Normal stuff, at least for normal girls my age.
As I headed up to Rachel’s apartment with her, the conversation turned serious. Rachel was getting more and more worried about her dad, and as I listened to what she was telling me, so was I.
Remember I mentioned before that Rachel thought her Dad had uncovered some corrupt cops
at work? Well, things had developed further. Rachel’s dad still wasn’t saying anything to her about it, but he’d gotten more and more antsy lately. Paranoid you might say. Jumpy at the seemingly smallest things.
Except, I knew better than anyone else that just cause you’re paranoid, don’t mean they ain’t out to get ya.
So Rachel had done some snooping while her Dad was at work, and she’d come across a file he had stashed away. Actually, it was a little more than stashed away. It was hidden under a loose floorboard in the back of the closet in their kitchen. Rachel said she probably wouldn’t even have thought to look there if it wasn’t for the fact that she’d spilled some cereal there one morning and had noticed one of the floorboards was loose while cleaning it up.
Most of the file was kind of cryptic, written in what she could only guess was some kind of shorthand her Dad had come up with, like hiding the file wasn’t enough. He had to write in some kind of code too. Still, after reading it through a few times, she thought she was able to glean the jist of what was going on.
That, and a few names.
Harper and McGinnis. Those were the two names that she thought were dirty cops. There was another name too. Cryer. She wasn’t sure how he fit in, but she didn’t think he was one of the good guys.
From what she’d been able to figure out from the file, it seemed like they were messed up in quite a few things, not the least of which being drugs and guns, probably extortion too if she was reading the file correctly.
Not good. Drugs, guns, and extortion. We’re talking stuff that’s usually pretty profitable, really profitable. Big time money. And where there’s big time money, there’s usually big time trouble. People having been killing people over money since Christ was a cowboy, and often for what wouldn’t seem like big amounts to most people. Seeing as these guys were cops, and it appeared as though they’d been into this stuff for a while, the odds were probably good we weren’t talking about small amounts of money.
Not good. Not good at all. And from the way Rach was describing her Dad’s behavior lately, it sounded as though he was worried that someone might have figured out he was on to them. It looked like I was going to be getting busier again a lot sooner than I’d thought. I still had Demario to deal with, and now I didn’t think this situation with Rachel’s dad could wait any longer before I looked into it. The last thing I wanted was for her to loose her Dad too, especially when I knew I probably could’ve done something to stop it.
I asked Rachel to show me the file so I could have a look at it myself. Her Dad was working the afternoon shift and wasn’t due back until at least midnight, so she didn’t see the harm in it. We had plenty of time get the file back into it’s hiding spot before he got home.
Reading through the file, I could see Rachel was right about the shorthand. It was obviously something her Dad had come up with to keep things private, maybe something he’d been using for a long time. Who knows? Lots of people have their own version of shorthand, not just cops. I had one myself. Maybe that was why I was able to get a little more out of it than Rachel was.
I read through the file, and then read through it again. Amateur mistake to only read something once. You can miss a lot that way, and this was a situation where I needed all the information I could get, especially if I wanted to help out Rachel’s dad
.
What I read confirmed what Rachel had told me. It looked like Harper and McGinnis were a couple of dirty cops, and it looked like there wasn’t much they weren’t into. Cryer, now he was a bit of a mystery. I didn’t think he was a cop, but he was definitely closely involved with Harper and McGinnis. Contact maybe? But contact to who or what? Unfortunately, I wasn’t seeing any answers to that question jump out at me.
I finished reading the file for the second time, and then I went back and looked at a couple of things one more time before putting it down. Rachel looked at me expectantly.
“Well?” she asked.
“I think you’re right. These Harper and McGinnis guys are dirty cops from what I can make out of your dad’s notes.”
“And Cryer? Did you figure out anything more on him?”
“No,” I replied, not wanting to worry her any more than she already was by adding any of my suspicions. “There’s not much in the way of details on him in here, at least not that I could make out. Your dad’s shorthand is pretty hard to read most of the time.”
Rachel nodded, probably not expecting any more than that since she’d doubtless been over the file more than once herself.
“What do you think I should do?” she asked.
I shrugged. “What can you do? It’s doesn’t sound good, but I don’t see how there’s anything you or I could do.”
She stared at me for moment, and I found myself wondering if perhaps she suspected more than she let on about what it was that I really did in my spare time. Finally she sighed and smiled, a tired looking smile, like she’d been over this problem so many times it was wearing her out.
“You’re right. I just thought... Well actually, I don’t know what I thought. I just hoped maybe you’d see something I didn’t, or maybe have an idea I hadn’t thought of.”
I smiled back at her, my best reassuring smile, wanting to tell her something to make her feel better, but knowing I couldn’t. Not now anyway.
***
I was sitting on the Ninja, kickstand down, helmet resting on the right handlebar. The Ninja was parked in between a couple of cars at the side of a residential street, the quiet kind where you could tell with one look it would be OK to raise a family. I’d left Rachel’s with more questions than answers, and even worse, I felt like a bit of a heel for not being able to reassure her or tell her I was going to look into it. What are you going to do? Comes with the territory. Some things I just don’t talk about.
Five or six houses up from the one I was parked in front of was a two story, red brick, the kind you pictured a nice family living in. You know, Mom, Dad, two or three kids, maybe a family dog. Probably a hamster or something too. And it was where Harper lived, at least according to the digging around I’d done. That’s why I was here. I wanted to confirm it was his place.
I’d found a picture of him online, a couple of them actually. One from a newspaper article about some charity or something that he was involved in through the police department, and another one from his Facebook profile. It was amazing the amount of information you could find out about people these days simply from hacking their Facebook page.
A black Chevy Traverse rolled down the street from the opposite way, slowed, and pulled into the driveway of what I suspected was Harper’s house. A moment later, Harper stepped out. I watched as he walked up to the front steps, opened the door and went inside. He didn’t pause to unlock it either, which didn’t say much for his security consciousness, especially since he was a cop. Oh well, nobody said he was a smart cop.
I waited a moment, picturing him taking off his shoes and heading deeper into the house to greet the family before pulling my helmet back on and hitting the ignition switch on the Ninja. One down, one to go.
***
Heading downtown, as I drove my mind flashed to the exploding car I’d been dreaming about. It’s not really my thing to kill people by blowing them up, although I’m not saying I would never do it. Never say never. Every situation calls for it’s own solution, and I don’t like to rule out anything before I’ve gone over all the possible options.
That said, this dream thing was kinda’ getting to me. First the exploding car, like my subconscious was telling me that was how I should deal with Demario or something, and then this whole thing with the yellow Camaro.
Honestly, between the two, it was the yellow Camaro that bothered me the most, and the reason why was simple. It was an unknown.
Who was the driver of the yellow Camaro? That was the million dollar question. A question to which I didn’t have much of an answer for. My gut was telling me it wasn’t a threat, at least not the immediate, trying to kill you kind, but it was bugging me none the less, especially since I had this nagging feeling I knew the driver, or at least should recognize him from somewhere, which of course, I didn’t.
So if he wasn’t a threat, who was he? The way I saw it, it came down to one possibility that made any sense. One of the three letter government groups, CIA, NSA, even Homeland Security, or another one nobody’s ever heard of. There seemed to be a rumor of a new one popping up almost daily. Made you wonder how the government could afford all these operations, or perhaps, rather than a question, they were an explanation for why the country was broke. The military establishment run amok, a monster grown to such immense proportions that it was just too big to control.
But even if I assumed he was one of those, what did he want with me? It seemed fairly obvious that he wasn’t a threat, at least not for now. I mean, he’d obviously known where I was, right in the middle of a job no less, and yet he’d made no move to interfere. Quite the contrary, it was almost like he’d made a point of showing himself from a distance so as not to force a confrontation, like a rider carrying the proverbial white flag.
Did he want me to do a job? I laughed to myself at the thought. Me! Working for the government! What was next? Me teaming up with Jason Bourne? Ha!
But I realized even as I made light of things in my head that I was doing so for exactly that reason, because my gut felt that this was likely the truth of the matter. He was probably laying the groundwork to approach me about a job.
The worst part of the whole thing was that I didn’t really have any other option except to wait for him to make the first move. I didn’t know who he was, how to contact him, or where to find him, so I was left with one option.
Wait.
And I wasn’t really known for my patience.
I decided to focus on Demario for now. That’s where I was going anyway. I needed to figure out how to deal with him, and to do that I needed to finish my surveillance, to know everything I possibly could about him before I made my move, especially since the mob was involved. That made things more complicated, the need for information more crucial than ever. I wanted to walk away from this without anyone the wiser, and while I wasn’t particularly worried about being able to pull it off, the thought of being hunted by the mob afterwards was enough to make me want to make sure I crossed all my t’s and dotted all my i’s on this one.
I checked my iPhone and wouldn’t you know it, Demario was back at the Delta hotel again, and I’d be willing to bet he was in the company of at least one, if not two, “special ladies”, maybe even the same ones as before. I decided it probably wasn’t worth heading over since the only new information I was likely to gain was confirmation on which ladies he was with, which really wasn’t all that important for my purposes.
The thing that was important was establishing a pattern, and it looked like I had a nice one staring me straight in the face. I still needed to confirm the pattern, needed to observe him there at least once or twice more in the next little while, but it was looking like the downtown Delta might be an excellent location for me to say goodbye to Mr. Demario.
***
I made it back to Gram’s in time for dinner, which delighted her to no end. Two meals in one day, and you would have thought I’d be the happiest one of the two of us, but no, as happy as I was to have two
great home cooked meals AND enjoy Gram’s company, she was ecstatic that I was back again for dinner. Cooking was her thing, and I don’t think there was anything that made her any happier than cooking for people she cared about, which pretty much put me at the top of the list.
Grams was making a roast with all the fixins, and I have to say, the smell coming from the kitchen was incredible! I made a mental note to myself to make a point to get over more often. Why fight it? She loved to cook for me, and I loved to eat it!
As I sipped a cup of tea while keeping her company as she puttered around the kitchen, I had a little epiphany strike me during our conversation. We were talking about how she cooked her roasts, and I was a little surprised that it was really quite straight forward, no big secrets or anything out of the ordinary.
“Sometimes it’s the simple things that are the best, my dear,” Grams said with a loving smile on her face.
That’s when it hit me! KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid. That’s how I needed to deal with Demario!
I’d gotten so wrapped up in the exploding car from my dream that I’d made things seem way more complicated than they needed to be. Demario is a mob guy, an enforcer, a brutal killer. My initial plan had been to do him mob style, slit throat, bullet to the head, cliche mob stuff. Plain and simple. Make it look like an internal problem, like a rival family, or even a friendly family for that matter, had taken him out.
I shook my head and smiled as I watched Grams check the roast. She’d just helped me out on the Demario job and didn’t even know it. Here I was blowing this whole thing out of proportion and making it a way bigger problem than it needed to be. It was that stupid dream. It had me stuck on car explosions when all that was really needed was a simple and quick solution. Nothing a bullet to the head couldn’t handle. Nice and simple, Mob style.
TEENAGE ASSASSIN: Episodes 1 to 4 *** ONLY $0.99 FOR THE HOLIDAYS - REG $3.99!!! *** Page 10
