Chapter Forty-Four
Bella screamed in frustration, chipping her fingernail as she tugged at her zipper. This should’ve been a happy moment for her. She’d always wanted tits. But now that she had them, she wished they’d go away. She knew what it meant.
This wasn’t the first time she’d been pregnant. She’d had four miscarriages before she left home, back when she still had hope of a womanly figure and thought that her breasts had finally grown, not realizing she was knocked up. This pregnancy would end in a miscarriage too, if she didn’t take preemptive action.
Even if she wanted to keep the stupid bairn, which she sure as fuck did not, there was no way she’d carry it to term. There was something wrong with her inside. She wasn’t letting any smart old fuckers stick their hands up her, but she knew it. Her father and the other men, venereal disease and drug use and other miscarriages, too. Having an abortion would save her the trouble of letting her body kill the thing. And save the gory mess it made.
The zipper finally gave way, enveloping her breasts in silk. She didn’t take a moment to appreciate how well her Betsy Johnson dress fit, hustling down the hallway to see the doctor, an old Czech man who understood English perfectly except when spoken with a Scottish accent. He smiled at her. Fuck, she missed Casey.
“How can I help you?” he asked.
She sat on the bed where nearly all the current residents had once lain bloody and in pain. “I’m pregnant,” she grumbled, then made a motion of a bump over her stomach.
“How far along are we?”
She hated when people referred to her as we. It was a small comfort that she wouldn’t remain we much longer. “It doesn't matter. I need to get rid of it.”
“When was your last period?”
Bella scowled at him. How the fuck should she know? She didn’t keep track of that shite. If a white dress got ruined she could always wear a red one.
He pulled up the stirrups that undoubtedly got laughs from all the men, and tapped them like he wanted her to put her feet up for an examination. If he hadn’t been Silva’s friend she might’ve shot him.
“Just get me the pills.” She hopped off the bed. Those metal plates wouldn’t touch her feet if Gianni Versace himself had designed them from beyond the grave.
He straightened the sheet. She’d give him until nightfall. If he didn’t get his shite together she was throwing him out a window. He may have been able to pull out bullets and stitch together slabs of meat to form a man, but when it came to a real emergency he was fucking useless.
She went to the kitchen and poured herself a dram of whisky. It must’ve happened the first time they slept together. They’d worn condoms since then. She hadn’t ever been with a man who knocked her up on the first go.
So Casey was a man after all. And he’d never know it.
She blew some smoke into her prominently displayed cleavage. It was a pity she couldn’t keep the tits. It was almost a pity she couldn’t keep the baby. Casey would make a good father. Dad. She started crying then, a wave of tears upon her that stopped as suddenly as they’d started. Fucking hormones. She’d get rid of the fucking thing as soon as fucking possible. But until then, she supposed it wouldn’t hurt to be nice to it. She dropped her cigarette into her whisky glass and left it sitting on the counter.
Chapter Forty-Five
Neither Joe nor I realized he was on babysitting duty until Bella made me get out to check her taillights and then drove off without me. She’d been in a hell of a mood lately, almost on par with Frank’s swinging shades of hostility, so I took the face full of exhaust in stride. I had made her wear pants, after all. Even though it only lasted a second and a bet was a bet, she’d taken it badly. I would’ve been just as upset if I’d lost the bet, and ended up in a dress.
It wasn’t as if she were going in reverse, but Joe had pulled me back as she accelerated like I was a child who’d chased a ball into the street. His reaction made sense once I’d gotten his story from Frank. Joe was a father. Was. His wife had buckled their baby boy into the backseat and connected a hose to the tailpipe, then went for a long drive with the car in neutral.
I hadn’t really gotten to talk to Joe since the day Bella blew up her flambéed Maserati, but he was always nearby, looming like he was concerned over my well being while the she-devil dragged me around. I had that effect on a lot of people. Sweet little me needed to be guarded from the big bad world. That was how Frank and I had performed most of our hits, baiting our marks in a duet of cat and mouse.
Joe’s past would’ve made him an easy victim. It also explained the reason he spent so much time in the garage, brooding by himself. “Emissions are way cleaner now,” I said before I could stop myself. “It would probably take days to suffoc—” I bit my tongue. “Sorry about your son.”
“He would have been about your age.”
Frank had already told me that. He didn’t want me to get the wrong idea about Joe. Some men were capable of looking at me without ever wanting to fuck me. “What was his name?”
“Kyle.” He smiled and pulled out his wallet. It was a good thing he was looking through the worn brown leather, or he would’ve seen me cringe.
The picture was of a towheaded infant wearing blue overalls. “I looked like that when I was little. Well, kinda. I was cuter.” This time he definitely saw me cringe. “Sorry. I talk too much.”
“That’s a bad habit to have.”
It was. But that didn’t make it any easier to shut up. “Why did she do it?”
He sighed. “To get back at me. We were always fighting. Mostly over money. I’d lost my job that day. The third job in a month.”
“How come?” My parents used to get fired all the time too, but they never fought. They got fired for playing hooky so they could be together. They loved each other so much not even poverty could keep them apart. Or death.
Joe smiled sadly. “Being an all around fuck up.” Now that was something I could relate to. Fucking up was one of the things I did best. “And I’m sure the drinking didn’t help.”
“You did that a lot?”
“Yes. I was at a bar when she…” He rubbed his face. “She told me I’d regret it. That was the last thing she ever said to me. ‘If you walk out that door, you’ll regret it.’”
Talk about a she-devil. “Jesus.”
“I’ve been in this business for twenty years. I’ve worked with unscrupulous, brutal men who would kill you as soon as look at you. But not one of those men would kill a two-year-old baby out of spite.”
“Karl would eat a baby.”
He laughed. “If he was hungry, sure. But not out of spite.”
“What kind of car was it?” I asked. That’s what I was really curious about. Frank had told me it was an “old brown one.” He’d seen it. He said it smelled like someone who had died in a gas station in the middle of the desert and wasn’t found for three days. The car seat was still in there.
“Dodge Charger. 1969.”
“No shit.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“That’s the car my parents were driving when they died!”
Joe smiled. “No shit.”
“What color?”
“Original copper metallic.”
“Ha!” I couldn’t help but give Joe a manly punch in the arm to show camaraderie. Brown indeed! “Theirs was too!” I added, then remembered that I shouldn’t go around punching assassins, even former ones. “That’s…um…cool. Sorry.”
Frank wholeheartedly believed in fate, that things happened for a reason. He was twelve when his mother died. I was twelve when my parents did. Joe’s son died in the backseat, and would’ve been about my age. I’d been in the car when my parents died. Driver’s side backseat. Just like little Kyle. How about that?
“Cool,” Joe agreed, and gave a full smile, all the way to his brown—dare I say it, copper metallic—colored eyes.
“Do you know much about cars?” I asked when it was clear he wasn’t going to h
arm me for my excessive display of manliness.
“I know a bit.”
“Did you ever try to fix the ones that Frank broke?” Frank had been known to do worse things to the convoy of BMW’s Charlie gave him than he’d done to marks who got on his bad side, but nothing quite so horrible as the string of cars we destroyed together on his quest to teach me how to drive.
“Some of them. Charlie had me try to fix them up. Sometimes he’d give them right back to him.” He laughed. “It’s how I knew for sure that he was traveling with someone. Charlie may not have been smart enough to figure it out, but I could tell the cars had been worked on before they came our way. So Frank was teaching you to drive?”
No teenager could’ve destroyed that many cars on their quest for a driver’s license. “I was afraid of driving because of the car accident. He figured if I experienced enough accidents without dying I wouldn’t be afraid of them anymore. He was right. Driving lessons were first. Then the fun stuff.”
“The fun stuff.” He didn’t even have to ask what I meant. “Well his work didn’t suffer so he must’ve done a good job.”
“Aw thanks, Joe!” A compliment was a compliment, even when it was backhanded.
“And retirement…was that because you got hurt?”
We weren’t retired because of the injury itself. We were retired because of how I got hurt. Even though Joe was kind of in the same boat, I wasn’t about to get into that with him. I gestured to his legs, then ended up gesturing to the rest of him as well. “You know how it goes.” Frank had told me that one of Joe’s jobs had gone bad, and someone came after him. Or a lot of someones. They’d broken nearly every bone in his body one by one, dragged him to his handler’s doorstep, and shot the old man to pieces in front of him. I thought I’d had it bad with Frank’s brother. The only thing he broke was my head. And our relationship.
He sighed. “I do.”
“Do you miss killing?” I asked, and not just because I wanted him to ask me back. Frank and I never really talked about it. Frank must’ve feared that I’d say yes, just as I feared that he’d say no.
“They almost sent me to investigate what happened to Charlie’s sister. Did you know that? But when it came down to a decision, a guy named Dalton was closer and time was of the essence. He missed it. A bible-thumping spinster who had lived alone for thirty plus years suddenly has a mysterious Englishman visiting her every day for over a month, and she ends up at the bottom of a staircase with a broken neck. Sounds suspicious, doesn’t it? More suspicious than a teenager at a bus stop.”
Frank’s associate had given him the all clear after Mary Conway died. We’d proceeded with my final hit because of it, a false sense of security while Charlie was hooking up with Frank’s brother, planning a family reunion that would give Charlie what he considered his fair share of Frank’s unwanted inheritance. And nearly cause my premonition of dying young to come to fruition.
“Yes, I miss killing,” he said. “But not as much as I did a couple years ago.”
I smiled, knowing exactly what he meant. There was only one thing to satisfy that craving once it was in your blood. “You killed Dalton.”
“I went through a very dark time after my son died. I was living in my car, picking fights, robbing tourists. Then I met Conrad, my handler. I robbed Conrad, or at least tried to. Here was this eighty-year-old guy, smaller than you are, fresh out of the casino. I pulled a knife on him, threatened to slit his throat. He just looks at me and says ‘They already robbed me in there, and now you’re robbing me out here?’ like I’d offended him. Then he grabs the knife by the blade, tosses it aside, and clocks me right in the jaw.”
I laughed. Hearing the exploits of tiny people never got old. Especially when they were littler than me.
“They had to wire my jaw shut, and Conrad came to visit me in the hospital. Well, he came to the hospital to get stitches in his hand from grabbing my knife, but he stopped by my room. He said that if I really wanted to get my aggression out, there was a better way of going about it. He taught me that there could be honor in killing. He gave me a reason to be proud.
“After Conrad died, killing was no longer an option for me. So I chose to be what he’d been.” Joe smiled insecurely, and added, “At least to the best of my ability. For men like Dalton, and Charlie, to be in the same position, was disrespectful to Conrad’s memory. When I found out what happened with Frank’s brother, I went to see what Dalton had to say for himself. He couldn’t answer. He had no excuse. So I shot him.”
I looked down. “I wish you’d been our handler.” Things could’ve been so different for us. I’d gotten used to domestication for the most part, but there was a glaring absence of excitement in my life. Especially since Frank was still refusing to put it to me the way he used to. We'd gotten so close, only to have my headache stamp me Fragile again in that hotel.
“What do you do when you miss killing?” Joe skipped over the first line of inquiry as if he could see the bloodlust in my eyes.
“Have sex.” Or at least try to. “What do you do?”
“Nothing,” he said, the word sounding as agonizing as it must’ve felt. Like having an itch you couldn’t scratch, all of your senses muted while your skin burned for release.
“You should try hunting.” I knew how he felt about females. I could’ve suggested switching teams, but my days of flirting with straight men were over. Mostly. “It almost does the trick.”
“There’s too much walking involved.”
“You can come to our house! We live in the woods. You can hunt from the backyard.” Only then did I remember that telling the residents of Silva’s home where we lived, even Joe, was not only a stupid idea but expressly forbidden. Inviting him over for a morning hunt would get me in the kind of trouble that came without punishment if Frank ever found out.
“Why are you here, Vincent?” he asked suddenly, either not hearing or not caring about the invitation I shouldn’t have given. “Why did Frank come back?”
I shrugged. Did he really expect me to answer that? “Silva’s gonna die soon. Will you go home to Vegas?”
“Perhaps. And you? To France?”
France seemed to leave a bad taste in most American’s mouths, but there was a hell of a lot more implied in the way he said it than a sense of over-patriotism for the good ol’ U.S of A. Or at least, that’s the way I took it. Maybe someone else, someone completely one hundred percent satisfied with their new life overseas being a happy little house husband wouldn’t have noticed any discontent in his tone. “Yes,” I said defensively, as if he’d insulted me on purpose. Insulted Frank. “Our Eiffel Tower is bigger than yours,” I added like a child facing a playground bully. Then I went back upstairs to find my husband, who I was completely in love with and who I would gladly sacrifice my happiness for his. If that were the case. Which it wasn’t.
Chapter Forty-Six
I hightailed it up the stairs lest I run into someone dangerous, letting myself into Silva’s office since I knew that’s where I’d find Frank. They both looked up simultaneously, Silva from his desktop and Frank from the fireplace mantle, where he was admiring a little statue of some old man’s head.
“Hi,” I said, plopping down into the cushy chair in front of Silva’s desk. “Bella went out.”
Silva smiled, nodding for me to take the seat I’d already taken. Frank had a guilty expression like I’d caught him doing something he shouldn’t be.
“What are we talking about?”
“Mr. Adler, of course,” Silva said with a glance at Frank. “I should have an answer for you very soon. How are you enjoying your stay, Vincent?”
“It’s good,” I said. It was even better now that Joe had gotten rid of Karl. I patted my knee so Frank would get the hint and come say hello. Objectifying him in front of his ex-boss was even more fun than objectifying him in front of Maggie. He stood behind my chair instead of sitting on my lap, painfully digging his strong fingers into my shoulders. I hoped he was
just mad at Bella for abandoning me. Frank had an uncanny way of knowing when I’d been misbehaving. “What are you writing?”
“V,” Frank warned. He squeezed tighter, his hands moving slightly closer to my throat. It was an empty threat, but it still made me have to adjust how I was sitting so Silva wouldn't see me get hard.
“Merely bookkeeping,” Silva said amiably. “I understand that you have met Joseph.”
“Yeah. Would he have been our handler if we didn’t retire?”
Silva glanced past me, looking to Frank for an answer to that one. I tilted my head back to look at him too, which I could only do for a little while before my vision started going black and I got lightheaded. I knew I was intruding, but that never had bothered me.
Frank stroked my hair and changed the subject. “We have some things to take care of in town. If you’ll excuse us.”
“Of course,” Silva said, allowing his dismissal in a way I never would’ve. Which was precisely why Frank was taking me out of the situation instead of asking me to vacate. We didn’t have anything to take care of in town. He wanted me to stop asking Silva questions.
I followed him obediently back to the garage, where Joe was still loitering. Frank gave his standard back-off-he’s-mine glare and unceremoniously shoved me into the car. Then he locked the door, which was more of a warning to stay put than an actual imprisonment, since the locks only worked if you were trying to get in.
Joe raised his eyebrows, standing face to face with Frank, who really had no reason to start the fight he was seeking. I honked the horn to be obnoxious, and Frank dropped his tough guy act, coming to get in the car and not even peeling out of the garage.
“What was that about?” I asked.
“I don’t want you talking to him.”
“Why?”
Frank held his hand up, signaling for quiet the way he did when the dogs barked. I smacked him. “I do not obey hand commands, Frank Moreaux!”
Les Recidivists (Chance Assassin Book 2) Page 26
