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Get ready to read with one hand
STRANGER
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MOST PEOPLE don’t go around hiring killers. They don’t even know how. So, if they get around to deciding they want one, they go on the dark web, find a local hack, pay a few thousand dollars, and the vic gets knifed down or bludgeoned in the streets.
That’s not me.
I go in at night. They never wake up. Nobody sees me, hears me or even knows I was ever there. I’m a ghost. Nothing more than a shadow in the wind.
And I don’t work for normal people. No housewives or lawyers. Which makes this next job ... strange.
Ender9551: Her name is Mia Whitten. It has to happen in March. Not before.
Usually, I have a month or two to vet the client, study the target, cover my back.
But March is a long time away.
It’s barely September now, the sun still hot, the trees thick with summer leaves, still in their brightest stage of green. Who takes out a hit for seven months in the future? And why? Someone either dangerously deranged or meticulously organized. Or both.
“New contract?” My brother, James, shifts on his wheelchair, the vinyl seat making a sound like a fart under his ass. From this distance and angle, no way can he see the screen.
“What do you mean?” I turn to face him.
He tosses his book at the coffee table, his nostrils flaring. “You just got a new target, right?”
I make a non-committal face. He doesn’t know what I really do. He thinks I run private security hacks, probe protective service plans for flaws. It’s what I tell everyone who asks.
Right now, he’s either fishing. Or I’m projecting.
He rolls his chair closer to me, his thumbs on the rims, and I minimize my screen just in case.
“Who are you going to kill this time?”
My stomach tightens instantly, and I draw a long, slow breath. From the set of his shoulders, he’s not fishing. I’m not projecting.
“How long have you known?”
“Since the last time. I read the news.”
I meet his eyes, hazel like mine, like our mom’s before she left us. Shadowed by dark brows, thick and black like mine, like our dad’s before he left us, too.
The silence between us is loud. I have no idea what to say. Yes, James. I’m a killer. I kill people. That’s what I do.
Gogo—don’t ask, I didn’t invent that monstrosity of a name—a hound dog, groans from her spot on the floor by his feet. She showed up here a few weeks after I bought the house, skinny, tail wagging, those soft liquid eyes staring up at me, no identification beyond a single blue tag with her name on it. A ridiculous name for a dog with a face that looks eternally unimpressed. She looks bored, but acts like a live wire.
Somehow, I started feeding her, and she never left.
Her tail thumps when I glance at her, but she doesn’t rise. No support on the canine front.
I glare at her.
Her tail thumps.
The silence thickens.
“You don’t have to do it,” he finally says.
I push up from my chair and cross the living room.
I stop at the windows overlooking what I’ve come to think of as my mountain. “Tell me then, go on. What am I doing?”
The leaves haven’t started changing yet, but the green has darkened. The colors will come soon.
“I’ll have the prostheses soon. A few months. Then I can start working again, get a place of my ow—”
“This is your place.” I bought it for him, two days after he was injured. I have no use for all this furniture. Rugs and chairs and pillows and shit. Houses and cars and mountains are for normal people.
I’m not normal.
“No.” His voice comes out loud, maybe louder than he expects because he pauses before continuing. In the six months since his accident, I’ve barely heard him speak in more than a hush or a whisper, as if he’s eternally trying not to be a burden. “This is your home, Stranger.”
“I have no home.” Don’t need or want one either.
He tosses out a hand, like he’s physically rejecting my words.
“Then make one. Start writing again. Stay—” He breaks off sharply, like he’s trying to pick his words carefully. “Stop, before you get yourself killed, or arrested, or become a sociopath.”
I’m probably already a sociopath. I slide my hands into my jeans pockets. “I’m happier alone.”
“You’re not happy. You’re a robot.”
It’s true.
“I don’t blame you, Stranger. I never did.”
The surge of anger, unexpected and hot, has me turning to face him, my fists clenching. “This has nothing to do with Mom.”
He tilts his chin back, surveying me. “I didn’t bring her up. You did.” He glares at me. “You still think that was your fault.”
I don’t think it. I know it. She wouldn’t have left if I’d been different. I could have gotten a job, helped out. Instead all I did was get myself kicked out of school, get arrested, land my ass in and out of juvie.
“This has nothing to do with her,” I say again.
“Then why bring her up?”
“I shouldn’t have left.” He’d been barely fifteen, with peach fuzz on his upper lip, and I left him in a group home filled with a motley assortment of drugged-up bullies and budding criminals.
“I got it then. I get it now. I’d have done the same thing. I did the same thing as soon as I could.”
That sends a fresh wave of pissed-off racing through my blood. If he hadn’t joined the Marines, he’d never have ended up in that chair.
He rocks his chair toward me. “Stop punishing yourself. Move on with your fucking life.”
“There’s no ‘punishing’. Just want to get you set up so I can move on.”
And I’m close. I’m a hundred thousand shy of the eight million mark. A conservative 4% return would only net 240K per year—a secure living. Enough for someone with ongoing medical bills, and who knows about inflation. That would set him up for life, with a little left over for me.
He can live here in comfort with a roof over his head, a soft bed, and a nurse to wash his stumps until he’s old and gray.
And me? I’ll be far away. Where I can’t do any more damage.
His mouth forms a tight line. “I won’t take your money. As soon as I get the prostheses, I’m leaving.” He wipes his hand over his mouth, and his biceps bulge.
He’s gotten big in the months since the accident. The constant physical work of lifting his body, the obsession he’s developed with weight training, it’s paying off. Where once he had the same rangy body-type as me, now he’s thickly bound. Like a reverse Pop-eye, his biceps are swole up, thick as bowling balls.
He rotates one rim and spins his chair so I can’t see his face. “Don’t you dare kill someone and tell yourself you’re doing it for me.”
I can only see his face in profile as he stares at the empty mountain.
I say nothing.
Gogo rises and, toenails ticking, goes to stand by the door, panting pointedly. She wants a walk.
“Who’s the target?” James asks, voice quiet again. The apologetic tone is back.
I open the door, and Gogo races out, her tail waving like a pendulum, her black and brown fur shining under the blinding sun.
The target. I tug on my earlobe. What do I know about her?
A lot, actually.
Mia Whitten.
Providence, 27, wealthy family, engaged, went to an expensive private university where she met the man she plans to marry. Pretty. Really pretty.
Thanks to the combined efforts of social media and wedding websites, everything I wish to know about this woman is online, easily accessible. I even know that she has a penchant for insanely colorful things, judging by her registry. Pink platters. Tea saucers with turquoise, yellow and hot pink flowers. A cookie tray painted with every color under the sun. Napkins embroidered with bold birds, leaves, more flowers. Her registry is like a fucking walk through a fake rainforest, full of fake fancy flowers. Expensive, useless shit, all painted up and pretty.
I also know who her bridesmaids are, her parents, her siblings.
Stalking gets easier every day.
I would know.
She’s a writer too, who writes under a pen name, Mia Reed.
That made me laugh. It’s too damned perfect. Like fate dropped me down the easiest mark. No security. In country. No passports needed. No struggle to get weapons under a foreign government. And she’s annoying. I don’t know her, but already the colors and the flowers and the birds are spinning in my head like an overload of rainbow-bright noise. And she’s a writer.
Motherfucking perfect.
I’ve been writing for about as long as I can remember. Stupid ass journals and angsty poems as a kid, but later, in the Marines while posted up, real stuff. Stuff that helped me forget, let go, move past all the bad shit I’ve done.
She’s not just any writer. She’s a sex writer.
One review read, “so smokin’ hot, you’d better get ready to read with one hand, and the AC jacked down as low as it goes.”
She’s the job that’ll end this all.
It’s got to be fate.
So what do I tell James?
Her face is sweet, classic, not flashy. Her photos speak to a cushy, easy life, as if she’s floated above the shit pile of poverty, terror and pain the rest of the world experiences.
I’ve lived in that shit pile, clawed my way through it and killed some of the worst pieces of shit inside.
“Just a woman,” I say, and instantly regret telling the truth. He’ll be pricklier about killing a woman.
Mia Reed, what did you do to piss off Ender9551?
He blows out a long puff of air. “Who is she?”
I lift a shoulder, scratch the back of my neck. “Just a woman somebody wants dead. Doesn’t matter who she is. You hungry?”
Because I want this conversation to be over yesterday, I head for the kitchen.
James doesn’t follow. “I can make my own sandwich.”
He can, but it’s easier for me to do it. So, I make two anyway. Whole wheat bread, muenster, sliced turkey, spicy mustard, apple slices, with carrots on the side. Just like our dad used to make.
When I bring them back in, I slap the plate down on the coffee table in front of him, and sit beside him to eat.
He doesn’t touch it. “I don’t want to be your reason to kill a good person.”
The apples crunch as I take a big bite out of my sandwich. “Who says she’s good?”
“You did.” Reluctantly, he takes a bite of his own.
“I don’t know she’s good.” She has terrible taste in decorations.
“I can tell from your tone, the way you sighed, how you won’t talk about it, that something bugs you about her. Which means she’s not some foreign dictator or terrorist.”
“Maybe she’s an asshole.”
His lips curl. “You kill people just for being assholes?”
I shrug, take a big bite of my sandwich and speak around the words, “Maybe she’s a really big asshole.”
He doesn’t laugh. “You don’t have to take care of me.”
He’s wrong. I do, so I look away. “Who said I was doing this for you?”
“Show me.”
“Show you what?”
“Her picture.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I finish my sandwich.
Finally, when I can’t really come up with any good reason not to, I go get the laptop. This is surreal, really. Showing pictures of a woman I will kill to my brother over sandwiches like it’s no big thing.
He stares at her picture for a while. “She’s pretty.”
“What difference does that make?”
“None. Can I talk you out of this?”
On screen, the woman stares back at me, that almost-lazy smile, the honey-gold hair.
James rests his elbows on his knees, leans in close. “Just... find out why they want her dead. What she did, if she did anything at all. Just one thing that makes her worth killing.”
I tug on my lower lip. “I don’t care what she did. I don’t want to know some woman I’ll have t—”
“What do you do? Spend a week on recon, getting to know the target? Seems like it wouldn’t be a big deal to spend a day trying to figure out why you’re doing it in the first place.”
I could tell him to fuck off, ignore him. We were close once, but that was a long time ago. We barely talk anymore. It would be the end. A clean end to this pretense of family. Then, on the day he first walks on his prostheses, I could just leave the money here, the deed to the house in his name, take off, sever the final cord in this world that connects me to anyone, to anything, disappear like a ghost in the wind.
Instead, for some unknown reason, I find my lips forming the shape, and my throat making the sounds. “Fine.”
I pick up my computer and disappear into my bedroom, hole up, stalk her some more.
The writing is the way in. Best way, unless I want to pose as a salesman for flowery junk.
She mentioned a writer’s website in the foreword of her latest book. WritersWrite.com. That’s the key.
So I sign up myself, and I become its newest member. Stranger Lowe.
I dig out my latest scribbles.
Not half bad, actually. That’s a relief. I haven’t looked at my work in a couple years, so I see it fresh, almost get caught up in the reading of it.
It’s important that it’s good, so I rework it several times. A woman like her is unlikely to be interested in chatting with a man whose professional work she can’t respect.
If I’m going to pretend to be a writer to flirt with a pretty girl so she’ll tell me all her secrets, I’d better be a damned good one.
And I need to think up a good opening line. One a writer can’t resist responding to.
Simple, I decide. And complimentary.
Writers love compliments.