“I know you wanted to come along, but that’s just dumb.”
“I thought you were teaching me to shoot so that I could come along.”
He shook his head. “I’m taking you someplace safe. That’s the end of it. You can’t change my mind, so don’t try.”
* * *
Cade
I strode through the door of a small flower shop downtown.
“Why are we getting flowers?” Shell asked.
“Quiet,” I said. “Act normal.” We walked through aisles of blooms and arrangements, the perfume of roses tickling our nostrils.
At the back of the store, there was a door marked Employees Only. I pushed it open.
We emerged into a small room. One wall was a mirror from floor to ceiling.
I placed my palm against it.
Nothing happened.
Damn it, I was always having trouble finding the spot. I moved my hand a few inches to the right.
A small square of the mirror slid away, revealing a keypad.
An electronic voice said, “Enter code, please.”
I typed it in.
The mirror split in the center, opening to reveal an elevator behind it.
“What the hell?” said Shell.
I pulled her inside with me.
“Where are we?” she said.
“Nowhere,” I said. “You can never tell anyone about this place. I wouldn’t even bring you here if the situation weren’t desperate.”
“I don’t get it,” she said. “This is some serious spy shit.” Her mouth dropped open. “Oh my God. You work for the government. You’re like B613 from Scandal.”
“What?” I said, arching an eyebrow.
“Like, you’re a secret organization of spies and assassins who take care of problems for the federal government. And these are your secret headquarters.”
I coughed. “That’s… ridiculous.”
The elevator hit the bottom floor and the doors slid open allowing us out onto the main floor of our destination. There wasn’t much to see, just a room with ten cubicles, each containing a computer and phone.
“Hi, Ripper!” said a cheerful voice.
I waved to our receptionist, Kiera Quill. She was a hacker we’d recruited straight out of her graduating class from MIT. She’d only been nineteen at the time. Her job was more than just to receive calls and greet people, but since she couldn’t tell anyone what her job really was, we jokingly referred to her as the receptionist.
“Kiera, this is Shell,” I said. “Shell, Kiera. She’s our receptionist.”
“Oh, sure she is.” Shell folded her arms over her chest. “Because you have so many people just wandering down from the flower shop, randomly guessing whatever secret code that you had to put in to get down here. She has to receive gazillions of visitors, I bet.”
Kiera laughed. “It’s kind of a joke title. I’m really the mascot.”
“Can you hang out with Shell for a few minutes?” I said. “I’ve got some stuff to take care of.”
Kiera shrugged. “Sure.”
“You’re leaving me?” said Shell.
“For like ten minutes,” I said. “I’ll be in the building.”
“Why can’t I come with you?”
“Stay here.” I started walking away so that she couldn’t argue.
“Cade, seriously?” she called.
I darted back over to her, cringing. I shook my head.
Her mouth made a little O.
Kiera smirked. “Your name is Cade?”
“No,” said Shell, looking at her feet. “I just… call him that, because I like the name, and—”
“Forget it,” I said to Shell. I pointed at Kiera. “You keep your mouth shut, okay?”
“I don’t see what the big deal is,” she said. “You know my name.”
“Yes, but I haven’t hacked into the security systems for dozens of people that you’ve killed.”
She shrugged.
I rubbed my forehead. “Okay, Shell. Stay here. I’ll be back.” I walked off again. This time, she didn’t call after me.
I walked through the room, looking inside cubicles until I found someone. “Danger,” I said, pulling a chair up next to the desk he was sitting at. That was his handle. I didn’t actually know his real name. Safer that way.
He raised his eyebrows at me. “Ripper. What are you doing here?”
I didn’t come in that much. This place was kind of my baby. I’d built it from the ground up. Back when I’d first been getting it on its feet, I’d been around a lot. I’d personally overseen every single hitman I added to the roster, made sure he was a good fit. But all that hands-on work had meant that I hadn’t had time to take many jobs, and I’d started getting stir crazy.
I remembered one night, after not having killed for over three weeks, sitting in a bar downtown, looking at the legs of single women and thinking about cutting them.
The next day, I’d made a plan to get myself back into the business and out of the admin side. Nowadays, I wasn’t around much.
“I have a favor?”
He furrowed his brow. “Favor doing what?”
“Uh, sort of… bodyguard stuff.”
He turned back to his computer. “Forget it.”
“Seriously? You don’t even know what I’m asking.”
“I’m not a bodyguard.”
“I’ll pay you.”
“No.”
I stood up. “What are you doing in here, anyway?”
“Nothing,” he said, giving me a funny look. “You know, Kiera’s always here and sometimes she’s alone, and… nothing.”
I nodded slowly. “Okay.” I jammed my hands in my pockets. “You sure that I can’t interest you in—”
“I’m busy,” he said.
“Right,” I said.
* * *
Shell
“So, how do you know Ripper?” asked Kiera.
“Uh, we met when he took me hostage,” I said.
She laughed. “You’re a lot prettier than the last girl he brought here.”
I turned to her sharply. “Last girl?”
“Yeah,” she said. “And older too, now that I think about it.” She cocked her head.
“Older?” I was in my mid-twenties for fuck’s sake. How old could this other person have possibly been? And he’d made all that noise about how I could never tell anyone where this place was and all of that. I was suddenly livid. But I didn’t want to let it show, so I took a deep breath, and made my tone casual. “So, he brings girls here a lot?”
“Not a lot,” said Kiera. “But you’re not the first person I’ve entertained while he ran off to take care of something.”
I pressed my lips together.
“So, after he took you hostage, then what?”
“Well… I don’t know. I guess he just charmed me somehow. Also, there’s a psychopath trying to kill me.”
“A psychopath? Wow. That’s new.” She inspected her fingernails, which were painted bright blue. “Why you?”
“Oh, I don’t know. He’s got some beef with Ripper, and I’m caught in the middle. His name’s Ice.”
Kiera’s expression froze.
“You know him?”
“He used to work here,” she said. “I have to say I wasn’t sorry to see him go.”
“He worked here?”
“Well, I mean as much as anyone works here,” she said. “Ripper set this place up to be a very loose association of independent contractors. But they share resources, and there’s an insurance plan—”
“An insurance plan?”
“Well, I mean, on paper we don’t specify exactly what the contractors are contracted to do.” She grinned. “But yeah, Ice was a real piece of work. And sometimes I’d get the impression that he was undressing me with his eyes.” She shook her head. “No, not undressing me. Peeling off my skin.”
I cringed at the image.
“Yeah, pretty much a psychopath.” She nodded.
“I guess that most of the guys who work here are that way, though.” I sighed. “You’re probably used to it.”
She shrugged. “Not necessarily. Jobs I help out with are always strictly bad guys. Ripper’s rules.”
“Right,” I said. “His code.” I leaned closer. “About these other girls—”
“Wait a sec.” She drew back. “Are you and Ripper like… together?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I mean, are you involved?”
“It’s complicated,” I muttered.
She shook her head. “Christ on a cracker! For real?”
“I thought you said he brought other girls here.”
“Well, not like that.” She squared her shoulders. “Like one time, he brought this girl who was the daughter of a senator or something, and she’d been in the crossfire of this hit, and she was really upset. She was only like seventeen and—”
“Seventeen!”
“He wasn’t like with her. He was just helping her out. He does that, you know. He helps people. I thought he was helping you.”
“He helps people?” I was confused. “I thought he killed people.”
“That’s how he helps people. That senator’s daughter, she’d been kidnapped. Ripper was hired to get her back. Which he did.”
“Oh,” I said, understanding now. “But killing people, it’s… wrong.”
“It can be,” she said. “But sometimes, it’s necessary.”
I wondered if she was right.
“I can’t believe you’re involved with him, though.” She eyed me. “He’s ruthless. I’ve seen the things he’s done. I wouldn’t want to be on the other side of him in a lover’s quarrel, if you know what I mean.”
“He wouldn’t hurt me,” I said.
She shrugged. She reached into her desk and got out a bag of dried cranberries. She held out the bag to me. “Craisin?”
* * *
Cade
Twenty minutes and three hitmen later, I had come up empty. No one was interested in keeping an eye on Shell for me, not even for big trucks full of money. They were all busy with jobs or pressing research.
I made my way back to Kiera’s desk, where I found her and Shell eating dried cranberries in silence. I guess they hadn’t really hit it off.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s not ideal, but what I want you to do is stay here, love. I’ll be back after I do this hit. You’ll be fine here. No one knows about this place.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Except Ice, because he used to work here.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, well, we changed the codes when I fired him.”
“Why did you fire him?” said Kiera. “I’ve always been curious.”
I turned to look at her. “He was on a job for some of the Russians. They wanted someone to take out some Mikailhovs who were smuggling in women. He did the job, but then he took what he called a bonus. Some of the women. And I wasn’t cool with that. We went round and round on it, but I said that anything he set up with the company couldn’t be tainted that way, and he wouldn’t promise to behave, so…” I shrugged.
Shell looked sick. “They were smuggling women? Like sexual slavery, in other words?”
“Yeah, they were poor girls from the Ukraine, most probably,” I said. “They trick them, tell them that they’re going to be taken to some party to meet American men to find a husband, but then they drug them and sell them. I had no problem with killing those men. None at all.”
“But Ice tortured those women,” she said. “And killed them? And you still have a problem with killing him?”
I massaged the bridge of my nose. “I never said I wouldn’t kill him. Can we talk about this later?”
She sighed. “I’m not staying behind. He’ll find me here.”
“If Ice is after her, I don’t want you to leave her here,” said Kiera. “Because I think Ice has fantasized about removing my fingers from my hands, and I don’t want to have to try to fight him off.”
Shell touched my arm. “Let me come with you. I can help. You can give me a gun.”
I groaned. “You cannot come with me.”
“Well,” she said. “I’m not staying here.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Shell
“You can’t come in with me,” Cade was saying. We were parked across the street from a pizza place in a seedy neighborhood.
“So, then, what am I going to do?” I said. I had a gun in my hand. He’d given it to me earlier, and I had thought that I’d be helping him out somehow. I envisioned myself as his backup. He and I were Bonnie and Clyde, and we were on our way to destroy anyone who got in our way.
I couldn’t help but think of what Kiera had said, that he helped people. I thought it was true. I thought it was the reason that I had trusted him from the start. He might think that he was a bad guy, but I knew differently. He wasn’t.
“You’ll be the getaway driver,” he said. “You slide over here, and when I come back and get in the car, you take off at top speed.”
“Oh,” I said. I looked at the gear shift of his car. “I kind of don’t know how to drive a standard.”
He laughed. “Okay, well, then I guess that won’t work, love. But you still can’t come in.”
“Why not?” I said.
“Look, if you’re worried about Ice finding us, I won’t be able to stop him if we’re inside anyway. I’ll be a little preoccupied. So, you’d have to take care of him on your own anyway. And that’s what you’ll do. If you see him, you shoot him, just like I showed you.”
I nodded slowly.
“I don’t want you to watch me do this,” he said.
“I can handle it,” she said. “This guy is a bad guy, right? He deserves this?”
“I don’t want you to see it.”
“I saw you dump the body of that other guy,” I said. “The one in the trunk.”
“Just stay in the car, love,” he said. “I’ll be back soon.”
I didn’t argue. Maybe he was right. Maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to follow him in there and watch it happen. And besides, I didn’t really know how I would explain my presence. Maybe I’d get in there and balk at the whole thing, run screaming out and draw attention to us.
When I thought about actually killing someone, I got cold inside.
So, I just nodded, sat back in my seat, and watched him go.
He got out of the car, shut the door, and walked across the street to the pizza place.
I saw him open the door and head inside.
Then, I waited.
At first, I just fiddled with the stations on the radio, bored and trying to find the perfect station to drive away listening to. Classic rock? Hip hop? I was undecided.
But after I had been around the FM band about three times and still come up with nothing, I began to wonder how long it was that this was going to take.
I peered at the pizza store.
There was a Closed sign on the door. I was fairly sure that hadn’t been there before.
Well, I figured, Cade had probably flipped it. He didn’t want people walking in on a dead body.
But now that I was thinking about this, I didn’t understand why he was going to a pizza place to kill someone. Wasn’t a public place a bad place for a hit? Cade did this for a living, so I supposed he knew better than I did, but it just seemed strange to me. It seemed like something like killing someone would be a thing you’d want to do with as few variables as possible. Being in a public place would have lots of variables, lots of things that you couldn’t control.
I bit my lip.
Had he been in there for too long?
Now that I thought about it, he hadn’t told me who the heck he was killing anyway.
But I knew this person wasn’t a good person.
He’d mentioned Russian crime families at the headquarters, and this was an Italian pizza joint, so it probably meant the Italian mafia.
Shit. Those people were tough. The
y could hold their own.
What if something had happened to Cade? He was all by himself in there, and I didn’t know how long this should be taking, but it was starting to seem like he’d been in there for a long time.
I chewed on my bottom lip, unsure of what to do.
Outside, cars went by on the street, obscuring my view of the pizza place.
I kept staring at it, hoping that when the next car passed, I’d see Cade coming out of the door, jogging towards the car, ready to go.
But he was never there.
I looked at the clock. I wish I’d paid attention to what time it had been when he’d gone in there, but I hadn’t.
So, I resolved that I would give him fifteen more minutes.
I stared at the clock.
It didn’t budge.
This was the longest minute in the history of the universe.
Well, what was I really going to do anyway, if he didn’t come out in fifteen minutes? Was I going to run inside with my gun blazing, shooting everyone in sight?
I couldn’t do that. I’d had one fucking shooting lesson, and I might have only done it well because I wanted Cade to touch me and make me feel good.
Damn it.
He hadn’t laid a finger on me since we left his house, either. Not a kiss. He hadn’t even squeezed my hand.
Not that I should even be thinking about that right now.
But what did that mean? Was he rethinking whatever was between us?
I didn’t even know what was between us.
But I did know that I didn’t want anything to happen to him.
I looked at the clock again. Only two minutes had passed.
But screw it. If something had happened to him, I couldn’t forgive myself if I did nothing.
Decided, I reached over and took the keys out of the ignition. I got out of the car, shutting the door behind me.
Cars passed in front of me, obscuring the pizza place from view.
I waited once more, heart in my throat, hoping he’d come out. But he didn’t. And I started across the street.
When I got to the pizza place, I wasn’t sure what to do. The door was glass, and I peered inside.
All I could see was a counter with a register sitting on it. There was no one there. Behind the counter was the menu. Baked ziti for fifteen bucks.
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