I KILL

by Lex Lander

  Published in 2016 by Kaybec Publishing

  441 Avenue President Kennedy

  Suite 1003

  Montreal

  Québec

  H3A 0A4

  Copyright © Lex Lander 2016

  Lex Lander has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work under the terms of the 1988 Copyright Design and Patents Act.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All the characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-0-9949981-2-5 (kindle)

  E-Book Production by www.eBookCreators.co.uk

  All rights are reserved to the author and publishers. Reproduction in any form currently known or yet to be invented, or the use of any extract is only permitted with the written approval of the publishers.

  I KILL

  Contents

  Cover page

  Title page

  Copyright

  Also by LEX LANDER

  Part I - Clair

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part II - Lizzy

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Part III - Annika

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Part IV - Nobody

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The next volume

  I

  Clair

  One

  Though my nightmares only come with the dark, they do not come from sleep. I view them in a state of wakefulness, through wide open eyes. It makes no difference whether I go to bed alone or with company, whether the room is lit or in darkness, whether I am at home or in some faraway place. An irresistible impulse rolls me onto my back, compels me to gaze ceiling-wards, to confront over and over the lifelike holograms that scroll across the plaster expanse, richly-coloured and so tangible I can smell them, taste them, even reach out and touch them.

  They never vary, these nightmares. The images begin with the Italian girl. A glorious fifteen, maybe sixteen years old, hair falling to her waist in a golden cape; on the threshold of serious beauty. Across the paved piazza she runs, her gait slightly knock-kneed, her shadow bounding ahead, sharp-etched in the harsh Sicilian sunlight, into the arms of Luigi Pavan, her father. The man I have been hired to kill.

  ‘Papa! Papa!’ she cries, followed by a gush of Italian that is clearly a question, unintelligible to me, but faithfully lodged forever in my subconscious. ‘Chi è quest’uomo? Cio che egli vuole?’ And her papa hugs her, keeping her back turned towards me as he murmurs in her ear, regarding me without blinking.

  The gun is already in my fist. A Beretta PX4 Storm, the 17-round magazine version, coupled to a sound suppressor. Slide racked, awaiting only the command from my curled forefinger. The timing is impeccable – would be impeccable were it not for the presence of the girl. The girl is not part of the plan. Nor is backing out. I am in too deep, my identity revealed, as it always is at the moment of execution. The next step must be forward.

  The piazza is deserted. From a nearby tangle of bougainvillea the lazy drone of a bee pursuing its life’s work. The windows of the encircling buildings are blind, shuttered against the furnace of the afternoon sun. Only the liquid outpourings of Pavarotti trickling through a gap in the shutters on the top floor of Pavan’s taverna bear testimony to the presence of other humanity. Yet he is not cowed, this big, near-blond Italian who hails from Torino. A man with a taste for Ferraris and a mistress for every day of the week, funded by trade in heroin, crack, and worse. A man whom no laws can touch. Not a man to admire or respect, except perhaps for his guts in looking his executioner in the eye as his life is about to be ended.

  At this point, in my spectral vision as in the reality, it becomes apparent to me why he holds my gaze so unflinchingly. Not after all in defiance, not in some last great show of bravado, but to distract. To gain time. As one hand caresses his daughter, the other is out of sight, up to no good …

  I jump up, kicking the plastic chair clear while simultaneously extending my gun arm to sight on his head.

  ‘Let the girl go, Pavan!’ I yell. I don’t speak Italian but his English is good enough to get my drift.

  His response is an unintelligible snarl. As the startled girl twists round in his arms to face me, his weapon comes into the open – a snub-barrelled revolver with a shrouded hammer. I stay cool, confident in my ability to take him out without harming his daughter even as her presence, shielding all but his head, makes me hesitate, almost fatally. In the micro-second that separates intent from implementation he pumps two fast shots at me, the first parting my hair, the second smashing into my shoulder, sending me stumbling.

  Somehow I keep my balance, converting the stumble to a dive. As my belly meets the ground and a third bullet ricochets off the paving somewhere behind me, overlaying a squeal from Pavan’s daughter, I am already lining up the Beretta on his head. A single shot would be enough. But at the very instant the hammer comes down he clasps the girl to him, effectively protecting his head with hers. Maybe he still hopes to deter me and simply underestimates my speed, or maybe he is prepared to sacrifice his flesh and blood to save himself, or just maybe it’s really no more than a reflex.

  The girl’s eyes widen. They are a bluish grey, I notice. In that fragment of a moment her pretty, immature features, contorted more by surprise than fear, are stored in my mind like a saved image on a digital camera. Her mouth pops open to form the beginnings of a squeal that is sheared off when the soft-nosed bullet ploughs into her temple, a fraction below the hairline. The top of her skull bursts into fragments, spraying bright blood and brain and chips of bone over the table and over me. Even lying on my bed, knowing full well that the scene is no more than a re-enactment of history, I flinch as the slender body in its blue T-shirt and yellow biker shorts seems to deflate like a punctured ball, beauty and life instantly flying from it.

  The bullet that kills her does not spare Pavan. On exit it slices along his jaw, gouging a groove all the way back to his ear, tearing away the lobe. More blood sprays. The revolver slips from his grasp, but he has lost all interest in it. Sinking to his knees, he holds his mutilated daughter at arm’s length, shaking her, and sobbing ‘Bambina mia!’ over and over, his voice made incoherent by his shattered jaw. Gore dribbles from his mouth onto her T-shirt. All that beauty, all that perfection, gone in the flicker of an eyelid.

  Back on my feet, shaken by the consequences of my shot, I am barely aware of t
he throb of my wounded shoulder. The revulsion, the remorse, these emotions do not hit me yet. The adrenaline still courses, instincts still fire on all cylinders, and above all I remain bent on honouring my precious contract. I circle the table. Pavan pays me no heed. Moaning volubly, he lowers his daughter gently to the ground. He seems to have forgotten I am here, and why. Behind me, on the far side of the piazza, a shout, male, is followed by a shriek, female. Members of his family. Pavan’s unsilenced shots have alerted them, negating the value of my own weapon’s sound suppressor.

  Pavarotti is coming to a crescendo, the last rousing bars making the very air shimmer. It seems poetic somehow to finish the job as the tenor’s mighty voice soars to its climax amidst the final crash and thump of the orchestra.

  ‘Here it comes,’ I say softly to Pavan. ‘With love from the brothers.’

  Hunched over his daughter’s body, he does not react. About killing him I have no compunction at all. I blow a hole in the back of his head from a range of two inches and he subsides soundlessly on top of his daughter, in a pose that borders on obscene.

  More shouts, then shots as I sprint for the unmarked stolen Fiat with the false plates. The shooting is wild, panicky. Glass shatters. I am moving too fast for them to draw a bead on me. No time to pause and regret the death of the girl, terrible though it is. Self-preservation, finely honed from years of evading pursuit, expels me from that place. As I start the engine the left rear window explodes inwards, scattering baubles of glass over my head and shoulders. Another shot goes nowhere. Then I am accelerating away, hurling the Fiat into a bend that instantly screens me from view.

  It is not until the late evening of that day that emotions crowd out the physical stresses of the getaway. When I am safely across the water in Valetta, ensconced in the corner of the bar at the very old but ordinary Castille Hotel, my shoulder wound dressed (it’s no more than a groove in the skin), cuddling a glass of Cheval Blanc, Malta’s unique home grown wine. Only then, with the pressure easing, does the enormity of my crime descend on me, like a black thundercloud. My eyes moisten. There, in public and for the first time in my adult life, I let tears flow, and if anyone notices I don’t care. Through a decade of contract killing I have never harmed an innocent person, far less a child. My track record is pure, my professionalism absolute. Until this day. Albeit that I have achieved the result I have been paid for, it is a bungled job and there is no getting away from the fact.

  As I gradually regain control over my dolour I make an effort to quash the “if only” recriminations. It will be a passing phase. A good night’s sleep will heal the wound, and put the incident behind me. Life, for me at any rate, will go on. But there I am wrong. The remorse does not diminish after a good night’s sleep because sleep itself is denied me and indeed is to become a luxury. Days pass and become weeks, weeks become months, and still that young girl’s lovely face lives on in my mind. If anything the balloon of my conscience swells in size and intensity, heated by the roaring fires of guilt. It becomes my ever-present companion. It squats on my shoulders like a vengeful imp, riding me, pricking me, and giving me no peace.

  * * * * *

  After that experience I retired from my deadly profession to heal the wounds of my mind and plan a new beginning. It was a route I had gone down before and the outcome this time around was no different. No obvious new beginnings presented themselves, and I sank gradually into depression. To lubricate the passage of the empty hours and blot out the guilty memories I took up the balm of liquor. Additional anaesthetic was provided by a plethora of sex, whenever and with whomsoever I could get it, paid or unpaid. Not because my sex drive had suddenly escalated; if anything the opposite was true. The sex was incidental, the object was to avoid spending nights alone. I wasn’t particular, nor was I proud.

  In this pathetic, pitiful manner, so help me God, I whiled away a summer and two winters. Now, as another spring got under way, I sensed the approach of the proverbial moment of truth. A coming to an intersection in my road to nowheresville, where I would be presented with a choice between two alternative routes: carry on down the one I was travelling, surely a dead end, or take the fork in search of the fabled sunlit uplands, if I knew where they were. The prospect was daunting. And if my instincts were right, and that choice would shortly have to be made, was I still capable of rousing myself to make it?

  * * * * *

  Behind me the girl stirred, muttered drowsily. After our lovemaking, no matter what the hour, she always slept the sleep of the exhausted. And always awakened bursting with renewed desire and energy and the need for a cigarette. Name of Simone, from Grenoble. Dropped-out student doing a summer stint as waitress at the Hotel Mercure, down in Andorra-la-Vella, the diminutive capital city of Andorra the country, where I had made my home these past two years. Just nineteen years old – Simone, not the city. Put another way, half my age. She didn’t mind, why should I? A female body, with all the necessary trappings, was all I required. She served a purpose.

  ‘André?’ A lazy, sultry drawl from the rumpled bed.

  ‘You awake?’ I said, turning from the window.

  She was not only awake but sitting up. Her breasts were shaped like isosceles cones, perfectly symmetrical. She stretched and made them quiver, doing wicked things to me. Simone, my teenage playmate. Simone of the sandy hair, brown eyes, sensuous lips, magnolia skin, spotted here and there with moles. When we had sex, did she lie back and think of France, I wondered?

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘when you stand with the sun behind you, your hair looks like a little field of corn.’ She made a V of her arms and a pout of her lips. ‘Come back to bed, chéri.’

  I’m a sucker for the unclothed female form, so I obeyed the summons. My sex drive remained reliable, regardless of my state of mind and sobriety. But as we lunged and plunged away at each other, she with her thighs back under her armpits – the girl was double-jointed, I swear – I saw as always another face, with blonde hair and wide blue-grey eyes, heard anew the cries of ‘Papa! Papa!’ dinning away inside my head, endlessly, endlessly, endlessly …

  Around nine am, just as I was stepping under the shower, my cell phone chirruped. Fuming gently, I wrapped a towel around my waist and went into the bedroom, leaving a spoor of damp footprints. The rumpled bed was empty, my playmate long gone to serve at tables.

  ‘André Warner?’ It was Giorgy, business associate and maker of calls at inconvenient times. ‘Good morning, my friend, how are you?’ he breezed on, without waiting for an acknowledgement. His greetings were consistently breezy and never more so than when he caught me pants down.

  ‘I was in the shower,’ I grumbled, in no mood for his pleasantries.

  ‘You are always in the shower. What is it that makes you so dirty?’

  ‘The jobs I did for you maybe?’ I quipped sourly.

  Giorgy – full name Giorgio du Poletti – was a Sicilian who worked for an organization he referred to as the Syndicate. Maybe a euphemism for the Mafia, though I didn’t think so. He was a tall, slim, elegant man with silver-streaked hair and an infinite supply of Savile Row suits. A man I had known on and off for six years. A man who, until my retirement, had provided me with regular employment killing the enemies of his masters.

  I suppressed my surprise at this contact after months of silence. We chatted on about last night’s soccer match between Juventus Milan and Liverpool before, in that switch-on switch-off manner of his, he came to the point: he had work for me and was I in the market?

  ‘You must be desperate. You know I’ve quit the game.’

  ‘Some professions are not for quitting. Your retirement was never convincing. It is time to give up the pretence. So … I ask again, are you available for work?’

  ‘Maybe.’ The word passed my lips with no help from me. It left me mildly stunned. After all, for over a year now I had been dealing him a strictly negative answer to that question.

  ‘You mean it?’ The surprise in his voice was a manifestation of th
e surprise I felt. ‘You really are ready to go back to work?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said again, only now it sounded more like ‘probably’. My damp skin was chilling. I towelled parts of it one-handedly.

  ‘But this is marvellous news!’

  ‘Yeah, well, don’t throw your toupee into the air just yet, Giorgy. I’ll need convincing.’

  ‘You want more money? This can be arranged.’

  It was gratifying to know that my services were so valuable. And after a fourteen month furlough the desire to find a new purpose in life was becoming a necessity.

  ‘The subject, is he a bad ’un?’

  ‘The worst,’ Giorgy confirmed.

  Thus far in my work I had only ever accepted contracts on bad guys. I had managed to convince myself that by eliminating bad guys I was saving some good guys and gals from their clutches. Sanctimonious? Maybe. Naive? I hope not, but the inner me needed some sort of vindication. I couldn’t have killed an innocent. Not coldly, deliberately, for wages. Yet, of course, I had once done just that, if not for a fee, certainly in pursuance of profit.

  I trusted Giorgy enough to accept his unqualified assurance. He had never steered me wrong in the past.

  ‘Where?’ was the all-important, ultimate question. There were countries where I now feared to tread, or at least to ply my trade, and Giorgy was aware of it.

  ‘Do not worry. This one is in Morocco.’

  ‘Well, at least the sun shines there.’

  ‘You don’t need sun, my friend. For your kind of sickness, you need work, purpose, something to occupy you and keep your mind off dead Italian girls.’

  ‘Ouch. You know how to punch low, Giorgy.’ I sighed hard into the handset and a chuckle came back at me. ‘But you’re not wrong. Email me the when and where, and I’ll see you then and there.’

  After he rang off I postponed completion of my shower. Instead I raided the bedside bottle for my morning pick-me-up, which I carried out onto the balcony. Even this early the sun struck like a death ray, and the tiles were warm underfoot. The house was on a split level, built into the hillside, and the outlook across the valley and the village of La Massana should have been a tonic for my glazed eyeballs. It wasn’t though. These days my outlook was all monochrome.