Death of an Assassin (Saint Roch City Book 1)

by Ian Hiatt

  Splash.

  I tumble beneath water, my lungs already begging for less smoke and more oxygen, and now they are rightfully upset with me. I kick for the surface and draw in a breath, only to be met with the foulest smell I could ever possibly experience as my world rings with the great boom of Han’s roar fading into the distance as I’m swept away.

  I try to suck in more air as I tread water, and it hits me where I am.

  One of the cleaner parts of Saint Roch. The lovely sewer system.

  And in spite of the sludge, the smell, and the disturbing solids I’m bumping into, I laugh with glee.

  o,” Tim says, squishing as he walks across his retired train car toward me. “I’ve got this guy pinned. He’s flailing, and I’m sure he’s an Inhuman. No one could rob a bank like this guy did, right?” He wipes his face clean with a towel and immediately throws it in the trash. His dog, Cerb, sits on the far side of the train car and whimpers at the smell of us. “And I realize, shit, I’m in the park. At night.”

  I close my eyes and wince as I sit back on the chair, not feeling an ounce of guilt for ruining his furniture. My arm screams in pain at the slightest of movements, and I’m trying to figure out who I can go to now for a touch of medical care. Tim tosses a towel at me. I move to grab it and cry out in agony, the towel draping over my face.

  “The guy keeps insisting he wasn’t the one who did it. He wasn’t the guy who robbed the bank, shot the night guard, and drained him of his blood. I mean, who does that, right? And then wham.” He grabs my hand and before I can react, pulls it forcefully out and drops it. I throw myself from the chair and scream, cursing at him, and choking vomit onto his floor.

  He sighs and laughs. “Only way to do it. Sorry about that. Sorry I dislocated it in the first place, too, but I figured it was better than being eaten, right?”

  Dropping to the floor, I catch my breath in gasps and heaves. I gather myself, and though my body is still in the throes of pain, it’s considerably better than it was. Cerb saunters over and nudges my face with her snout, at great personal cost to her sense of smell. I sit down, and when I reach up to pet the animal, she rethinks her decision and moves away.

  “And the guy who killed the guard? I take it you finished him off?” I ask, a vain attempt to reassert my ability to handle this hellish situation.

  Tim grins. “Nope. Gremlins got him. Nasty park to spend time in at night.”

  A light plastic bottle hits my chest, and I glance up at Tim.

  “Pain meds. And there’s a shower in the back. It’s a touch narrow, and the water’s not terribly warm, but it’ll help you clean up.”

  Once I can finally pick myself up off the floor, I stumble back to where he’s pointed and crawl into the shower, beaten, bloody, burned, and caked in the shit of Saint Roch. All of this is done slowly and carefully so as not to jar my body anymore than it already is. And all of it is wasted as each drop of water makes me feel like a punching bag leaking its stuffing all over the floor. I don’t bother to look for soap. I just stand and let the water that smells strongly of chlorine wash over me, rinsing away the more glaring filth and blood on my body. And there’s plenty of both.

  I dry myself off with a nearby towel and realize my clothes are destroyed. In my shower-loving stupor, I didn’t hear Tim come in, but the evidence of his presence is sitting on the small sink. Black tank, black pants, black boots. All strangely fitting me very well, but I’m too grateful to question it.

  Popping open the door of the small bathroom, I find the cabin of the train car, now lit by the built-in electric lights lining the side. It takes me a moment to come to terms with the fact that it’s not a mobile train and I can in fact walk without steadying myself, but I do anyway.

  Tim is stretched out on one of the couches bolted to the train’s side, digging food out of a can, and my stomach growls at the prospect. He hears it and grins, pointing to a hot plate on the other side.

  “Made a can for you.”

  “Thanks for the clothes,” I say as I walk over and pick up the can using a nearby towel to keep from burning my hand. One of the few parts of my body not completely defeated by the events of the past week. I sit on the other side of the car and eat quickly while Tim watches me.

  “So you ran afoul of the Donahues? I take it you’ve been involved with their woes this week?”

  I refuse to meet his eyes. “More or less.”

  He nods, scraping his fork on the bottom of his own can. “Now, what I’m having trouble understanding is why you came to me. I mean, I’m grateful for a chance to waste some Inhumans and their toadies.”

  “And about a dozen innocent people in the hallway?” I meet his eyes now. “And whoever was in the club before that?”

  He laughs. “What do you think I am? Your kind? There was no one in those hallways when I blew it. Or the club.” He points to a pile of devices on the folding table in the corner. “Those are what I used to take Han’s little Club of Horrors down. At first, all they do is emit the foulest-smelling odor that gets most people viciously nauseated. Triggered that the moment I saw Han was big and leathery.”

  “So it was empty? The whole building?” I’m only a little shocked at my own care for the people in the club. Something the Layla I was a week ago would not have given a second thought to.

  He nods. “I always make sure the innocent don’t get hurt when I decide to blow one of your kind back to Hell.”

  He sets his can aside, and it occurs to me.

  Where’s the damned dog?

  I sit forward and he holds his hand out.

  “I wouldn’t. That couch is rigged to be triggered by a specific weight. You plus the can.” He points at the beans I’m clutching in my toweled hand. “You move too much, lose or gain any weight from that couch, and we both get turned into pretty little corpses for the Saint Roch Fire Department to study.”

  Now I get to grip the can of beans like a freaking lifeline. “Thought we were partners?”

  He scoffs. “We were. Now we’re not. You lied to me.” He stands up and moves around the car, fetching his crossbow and another can from a nearby shelf. “You lie to me again, and I’ll toss this can of the finest Boston baked beans for you to catch.”

  “And you’ll kill us both?”

  He shrugs. “I’ve had a good run. And you being a siren, I think it’d be damned poetic to take you down with me.” A joke I don’t get.

  He sits down across from me and loads the crossbow. “I take it there was a ransom involved? When you snatched Thomas Donahue? Failed to mention that was the Thomas you were trying to fetch.”

  “Ransom?”

  He stops loading the crossbow. “Don’t test me, bitch.”

  I take a deep, but careful breath. “I don’t know anything about a ransom. I can tell you everything you want to know, just please turn this… thing off?”

  A dark laugh escapes him. “Hell no. Your only option right now is to tell me everything with that bomb still set to blow you to little pretty bits. Because either way, you’re not leaving this car alive. But if you talk, that extends your life. And who knows, maybe even ups your chance of getting the drop on me.”

  I close my eyes. It seems the appropriate thing to do when I’m spilling my guts. The thugs at the Donahue Estate could do with learning Tim’s methods.

  “I was hired to kill Andrew Donahue and Thomas Donahue. Andrew was easy, scumbags always are. Thomas, not so much.” I peek out to see if he’s upset by my admission of killing Andrew.

  “Old Drew had himself a rap sheet,” Tim comments, his crossbow pointed at my chest. “I almost capped him myself once. Go on.”

  I sigh, but I’m terrified of the air I’m losing, worried that it will be just enough to kill me now. My eyes close again.

  “When I couldn’t kill Thomas, they sent someone else to do it.”

  “They?”

  I resist the urge to shrug. “A good assassin doesn’t ever know who ‘they’ are…”

  �
��Good to know.”

  “I stopped them.”

  “Because it was your contract,” Tim says―practically spits.

  “No! I… I don’t know why. Thomas is… He’s not like his brother. And then they came after me, and Thomas tried to give himself up so they’d let me go. But they took him and tried to kill me, anyway. It didn’t take.”

  Skipping over my stay with the Westies, I open my eyes to watch Tim.

  “In my line of work, I’ve become good at spotting liars. Interrogation is my bread and butter,” he says. “Gets me to my next target.”

  The silence of the car is such that I can’t even hear the two of us breathing. Statues on a train.

  “You’re full of shit. You killed his brother, his parents, and then tried to ransom him, didn’t you?” He lifts his crossbow and aims.

  “Then why the hell would I kiss the dumb bastard?” I ask―screech―maybe even cry.

  Either I’m so hopeful that I’m delirious, or his aim falters. His finger rests on the trigger and he watches me.

  “Well, I know you did. So why?”

  Lie, lie, lie.

  “Because I thought it would kill him.”

  Or be suicidally honest. Well done.

  His arm stops moving low. “Yep. You’re gunna die.” Finger to the trigger.

  “I don’t know! My mother told me if I ever kissed someone, they’d die! I was trapped… I didn’t… please! He’s still out there. Someone has him.” I relax when I find myself lifting from the couch too much. I freeze, terrified to sit back or move forward.

  Tim watches me and smirks. “When a siren kisses someone, two things happen. And only two things. First, you’ve immunized your boy from your wiles. Just yours, though. He can resist you all he wants. And second, it lets you feel for him. Maybe a little more than you even should. I don’t really know what it feels like, but I know you do. So if you’re telling the truth, your mother lied to you.”

  “Yeah, I kind of figured that,” I say, my legs beginning to ache at holding such an awkward position of mid-rise, mid-fall. “She also tried to kill me when I was a kid, so it wouldn’t be the first time she tried to destroy my life.”

  This has Tim blinking as he lowers his crossbow.

  “Huh.” He shakes his head and groans. “It’s a shame, Layla. I was just getting to like you.”

  He sets the crossbow down and I breathe a sigh of relief.

  Then he lifts up the can of beans and throws it to me. Shit.

  e won’t stop laughing. “You really should’ve seen the look on your face. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I hate your scum-sucking kind with every fiber of my being, but this might be the first time I’ve ever truly enjoyed letting one of you live.”

  I’ve only just stopped my knees from dissolving to jelly, and Tim cracks open a beer bottle before passing it to me. “Why in the hell would I blow up a perfectly good train car when I could put a bolt through your chest?” He laughs at his own sick humor as he pops open his own drink and takes a swig.

  “You are a sick, sick man.”

  “I’m a vigilante; it comes with the territory.”

  I nod, taking a cautious sip of my drink, desperate to get away from the man who’s held my life in his hand far more times than I’m comfortable with over the course of a night. He’s moving about the car, and that in itself makes me nervous. Eventually, he comes back to the small folding table, now gratefully free of his explosives, and sets a laptop down.

  “There’s something you need to see.” He boots it up and loads up a local news site.

  A reporter, much too peppy to be anything but human, is standing by a structure I know all too well. The gates of the Donahue estate.

  “This news report was from a few days ago, but I’m assuming you haven’t had the pleasure.” Tim sits down on the far side of the table and flicks his butterfly knife silently while I watch the video.

  “Thanks, Paul. I’m at the Donahue home where only hours ago shots rang out as this family, a paramount of morality and charity in our great city, was torn apart.”

  The camera pans the outside of the great house, as though the building itself will tell the story of all of the death it contained.

  “An unknown number of assailants armed with automatic firearms and what one source is calling a ‘biological weapon’ attacked this family, only twenty-four hours after their oldest son, Andrew, tragically drowned in the Swift River at his own engagement party.”

  Now, a picture of Andrew and his bride-to-be appears on screen, showing them as a happy and loving couple.

  “Police are unwilling to speculate if this incident is connected with the drowning of their son, or the hit-and-run killing of Richard Donahue’s nephew, Terrence O’Halloran.”

  A new picture appears of a college-aged kid. A face I know all too well because there’s likely still a photo of him sitting in the bottom of my safe at my apartment. A photo tucked in a manila envelope that was slid under my door by my broker.

  “One source, a neighbor who has been unwilling to identify themselves, stated that multiple bodies were removed from the Donahue home, but there has been no statement released by―”

  Tim turns the video off. “Your handiwork?”

  I shake my head. “That… that was the person who replaced me. She was a little more indiscriminate than I like to be.”

  “There’s more.” He loads up a new file.

  Two news anchors are sitting at a desk, shifting papers around. One, a middle aged man with salt-and-pepper hair that he likely purchased, and a woman, not as peppy as the last, but no less annoying as she watches her co-anchor deliver every line like a dog watching a sandwich.

  “Now, as you know we’ve been following the events befalling one of the greatest families in Saint Roch, and we’re going to play the video shot here only an hour ago. One girl’s desperate plea to have her family restored…”

  A girl, only a little older than me, stands at a podium, so many microphones adorning the wood that it looks like a garden of them, each one sprouting to higher heights than the last.

  “Most of you now know that my family has been attacked this week,” she says, stifling a sob and sweeping back locks of curly brown hair as she reads a paper before her. “Only days ago, my cousin Terrence was killed in a tragic hit and run while visiting our family. And on the day,” she sobs but manages to go on, “on the day of my brother’s engagement celebration, he too was taken from us far too early…”

  I can’t place her until the video finally finds it worthwhile to label things for those in the audience not glued to their television.

  Angela Donahue. And I see the glassy eyes. The blood streaked body. The girl I was certain was dead.

  Not so much now…

  “And last night, my parents were brutally murdered in our own home, and my brother was taken. So I come before you today not to speak to you”—she gestures to the sea of reporters that up until now have only been apparent by the constant flashing of cameras—“but to you.” She locks eyes with the camera. “To the person or people who have taken my brother. Please. Please, bring my brother home… I just want my family back…” She breaks down, and a suited man approaches the podium to comfort her, leading her away from the cameras.

  The video turns back to the two anchors, sitting at their desk, attempting to look like they care about Angela Donahue and her family’s woes.

  “Such tragic events,” the woman says.

  The man nods. “Yes. That was one courageous young woman, pleading to have her brother returned. And we can only hope that this story, though horrible, will have a happy ending.”

  The video ends and Tim closes the laptop. He stands, looking down on me. My eyes wander, though. Staring around the car while I try to put puzzles pieces together. But I’m missing several pieces, and I don’t even know what the picture looks like.

  A faint scratching at the far end of the car is enough to take Tim out of the moment, and he walks away from me
to open the door and let the bounding dog come back in from the cold. She jogs across the train, panting before sprawling at my feet.

  “Have there been any other news reports? Anything confirming that Thomas is back at home?” I ask.

  Tim shakes his head as he sits down beside the dog, groaning a little as he does so. His hand rests on the tawny fur of the animal, lightly running over her. “They just keep replaying the poor girl asking for her brother.”

  “She was dead. We saw her body. Thomas was a wreck he… He knew she was dead…”

  “Well… my keen detective skills foresee two possibilities. The most likely of which? Thomas lied to you.”

  I was hoping an outside observer would say something else. Anything else. For all the annoyance, hassle, and complete life-screwing-uppery that Thomas has caused, I don’t want him to be like that. I don’t want him to deserve to die. Because then I should have killed him. “And the other?”

  Tim shrugs. “You saw her body looking very dead. But she’s human. They don’t come back.” He pointed to the screen. “She’s not dead now.”

  “But why would she…?”

  “Plenty of reasons. Maybe she played dead. Thought the assassin would assume her dead.”

  I shake my head. “No. Even if she were dumb enough to do that, no assassin would leave a potential target like that alive. She killed his parents. And they were definitely dead. I confirmed that myself.”

  “Well, then she faked it for Thomas. So that’s the golden question. Why would she play dead for her own brother?”

  The leaves squish in wet, mucky clumps as I shift around. My knee is getting soaked, but I can’t help but try to force a feeling of nostalgia as I peer through the scope. In the early-morning light, the Donahue estate looks far more pristine than it should, having been the site of mass murder only a handful of days earlier. Being that I’ve been unconscious for so much time, I have no idea how many days, really. One of my first plans when I finish the job is to get to a newsstand by my apartment and pick up a paper to figure that out.