Or: The Assassin, the Client, His Wife, and Her Lover
“You can call me Dee,” she said, smile glinting like a knife.
The client took her hand with a tender deference.
“John,” he admitted.
Dee gestured at the empty sofa and he sat. There were many Johns in her line of work.
A waiter approached and took their drinks order. Scotch, neat, for him; a second gin martini for her, despite the olive still being half submerged in her current glass.
“You’re not how I imagined you,” he said.
She did not reciprocate this compliment, if that was what he intended it to be, because he was exactly what she had expected. Approaching fifty, bone structure still holding strong underneath the settling features and widening neck, suit perhaps six months and five kilos overdue for a tailor.
“Aren’t I?”
“Well,” he waved at her red dress of sumptuous silk, the blonde curls her hair had been set in. “I feel underdressed.”
Dee smiled again, and accepted the drink from the waiter. Once they were alone again, she nudged the conversation back towards the million dollar question. Instinct told her that this was the kind of client that wanted it but would need some convincing before he followed through.
“So, you haven’t engaged the services of a professional before. Have you, John?”
He answered, but with his eyes downcast into his drink.
“No. This is all quite new to me. It’s my wife, you see…”
Dee nodded. It was a story almost as old as her profession was, and she could have filled in the pauses and hesitations as efficiently as a vocal coach. John started this company, sold it, started another. The current one had been founded with Liam Tuohey, his best friend since business school. He found himself rolling in dough and attracting the attention of women younger and prettier with every new zero in his bank account, and found one he wanted to settle down with. Abigail was twelve years his junior, and they fell madly in love. The first year of marital bliss was a whirlwind of vacations and steak dinners, but the last two years had grown stale. They fought for no reason, almost daily, and he suspected she started the arguments just to produce some thrill in the absence of any other kind.
“Then I hired a private investigator, and he just confirmed what I’d been fearing for months.”
“Caught in the act?” Dee said, wincing and reaching out to touch his arm. It was only for a moment and he raised his hand to where hers had landed, high on his forearm, but dropped it before making contact. She liked that.
“Nothing concrete. My lawyer said it’s only circumstantial. Whatever. I’m sure it’s her personal trainer, Daniel,” he said the name with maximum venom, lips pulled back from his teeth. “But to hell with my lawyer, I don’t want to divorce her.”
Which led him here.
Dee didn’t always get to hear the story behind the men and women who came to her, but she adored it when she did. The rage and the heartbreak, the betrayal and the suspicions. She considered herself a student of the human condition. Here came the tastiest part of these all-too-rare discussions, when they came right out and said it.
“Then why are you here?” she asked, biting her lip.
John Burgess stared at the nearly-empty glass. It swirled like amber in the crystal.
He downed the last mouthful and gritted his teeth against both the burn and the finality of his next plunge.
“Because I want you to kill my wife.”
Dee smiled, showing all thirty-two perfect teeth. She gestured an elegant flick of the wrist to the bar, and got a nod in return. Things were much more interesting now that they’d broken the seal.
“I thought you’d never ask, John.”
He clapped his hands onto his knees, and blew out a harsh lungful of air. A great relief washed over him now that he was finally rid of that secret, but still a tear swam in one eye.
“Ah! I can’t believe I said that,” he said, now unburdened. “It’s true though, I want her dead, I NEED her dead. I can pay you.”
She knew he could, but the dance must take each step through to completion.
“When you reached out online, I was very specific about my modus operandi. Did you read it carefully?”
“I did,” he said, but the flush in his cheeks confirmed her urge to go over the details again.
“Now, John, I am a long range expert. I won’t bore you with my credentials, that would make us a little too familiar with each other, wouldn’t you say? I guarantee elimination on first contact, and I charge a hundred thousand dollars per bullet fired.”
John’s eyes widened. As she thought, he must have skimmed how many zeroes she had put in her brief.
“One hundred thousand? Per bullet?”
“I am very precise. This isn’t a war zone, it’s one and done.”
“But what if you miss?”
Dee leaned back and rearranged herself on the lounge, draping one leg over the other to let the slit of the silk dress fall like a final curtain. She sipped her martini, fingernail keeping the olives away from her lips, and gave him her brightest smile yet.
“Oh, I never miss.”
It took three days, before Dee knew where Abigail Burgess would be meeting her mystery lover.
The invisible eye in the target’s phone had also confirmed that there WAS a lover. A nude photo, captioned with the promise of some enthusiastic acts for someone who was not John Burgess, at a time and place to be finalised for that coming weekend. The confirmation of certainty that Abigail was sleeping with someone else was not a part of the brief and was professionally irrelevant to Dee, it didn’t change the job, but she was disappointed: she had made a bet with herself.
Friday evening arrived and the fixer earned his fee by providing the room number of the Roebuck Hotel that Abigail’s lover had provided for them. It was only generated upon check-in, so Dee had to move fast.
Her wheeled suitcase banged against the one-hundred-and-fiftieth step, and entered the empty office of 806. She heaved the suitcase up onto the wide executive desk, opened the window blinds with a hushed procession of slats, and looked out across the twinkling city. It was good to be home.
The Reilly building was nearly seventy metres higher in elevation than the Roebuck Hotel and only two blocks away, an advantage of the city being built inside a hilled valley, so the Reilly’s eighth floor was exactly level with the hotel’s fourteenth-storey suite, part of a view that also contained the pool deck and the adjacent park. It was a matter of minutes to count the storeys and the windows to find the right room through the high-powered optics.
With the kill zone established, she unloaded her suitcase.
The Krueger M1K was assembled within moments. Upper onto lower, bipod extended and stable, pins assembled and scope in good order, magazine into the receiver. Her baby came together in her hands with every click and clack, almost as eager to get to work as Dee herself was. She ignored her own reflection, nothing more than a pallid abstraction, and plunged down the rabbit hole of the sighting scope. The alpinist’s oxygen bottle sat pretty beside her.
Windows blurred past through the circle, a thousand curtains and a dozen other guests, until she found room 1408.
Once Dee made positive identification, she unlocked her phone.
Time to make contact.
Abigail Burgess missed her babies, one human and three canine, but she needed tonight.
She was too young to have done anything for long enough to be in “a rut”, no matter how many of her friends insisted that was what was afflicting her, but here she was in the Roebuck with her lover.
The Fleur De Lis Suite was exquisite. The bathtub had a view of the parklands, and the bedroom could see the cityscape laid out before them and stretching off toward the river. Only the Reilly building obscured Abigail’s view of her favourite bridge.
Her phone chimed. A fourth message from John.
She told him that she’d be out of town, which was almost true. Once they had a continental breakfast tomorrow morning, she would be driving to the winery to meet up with the girls and celebrate Katrina defending her doctorate thesis — at only 27! — but tonight was for her, and her alone.
Her lover popped the cork on a bottle of champagne, first letting the suds overflow down the neck of the bottle and into the ice bucket, then pouring a good measure for both of them. He was high on guilt, but was right about one thing: nobody loved Abigail the way he did. He told her all the things she needed to hear, he made her feel like a modern-day Aphrodite, and she adored it.
If she had cared even one whit about him, he would have been the happiest man on earth.
Four messages with no reply made him feel like an idiot.
Their daughter Mia was asleep, so John stood at the back door and watched their twin shepherds sniff around for the perfect patch of lawn on which to relieve themselves. Back and forth, judging identical blades of grass inadequate for the business of being pissed on, tails wagging. His beer was sweating a circle on the glass coffee table, and it wasn’t his first of the evening.
Abby was out of town on a girls weekend. Four messages was already too many. The latest was asking her to let him know when she’d arrived safely, a gesture that he realised — with a discomfort that felt like remorse — was out of character for him.
He’d seen the travel plans, saw the booking confirmation of the winery, but still his instinct told him that he was betrayed. The parting smile from her had been flat, the messages lifeless and supported by punctuation that they hadn’t shown before. He had no logical reason to worry, but still his instinct raved and rattled.
When John’s phone rang in his hand, he nearly screamed. It was not a text but a call, and from a contact identified only by the letter D. This was the second-most nervous that John had ever felt. First place was tied between the day he proposed to Abigail and his first company’s IPO.
“Hello?”
“Okay, John, there’s news. I have positive contact.”
He stepped inside, closing the glass sliding door for silence and taking hold of the back of the couch for balance.
“Where?”
“Check the credit card activity, confirm it for me.”
John released his grip on the leather and nearly tripped on the way around the couch. He had left the laptop on the cushion next to him in case of emergency while he tried to lose himself in video games. His heart was fluttering, a pitter-patter he felt himself sailing atop as the clouds gathered.
“Okay. Okay. Grabbing it now.”
One-handed, he fumbled the clamshell hinge open. The bank site was still open from when he had last checked it twenty minutes ago, so he refreshed it and logged back in.
“Nothing. She could have filled up the car by now, but the mileage is great in the Subaru and she won’t need to fill up until–“
“I don’t miss, and that includes mistaken identity. Check the OTHER credit card.”
“What are you talking about?” John felt himself grinning, already high on relief. It was all a mistake, Abby wasn’t cheating on him. “She doesn’t have the business card, I have it in my wallet.”
“I’m sure you do,” she replied, voice a silk scarf wrapping around his neck. “Please check the executive expense account anyway. National, right? You can request an updated statement twenty-four-seven. All automated. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. I want you to be a hundred percent sure before I pull the trigger, but I have to warn you that I charge a 35% cancellation fee.”
John swallowed bile. Dee again knew far too much about him and his life for his comfort.
He put the phone down while he checked the business account, not wanting to hear the silence on the other end. It took less than a minute to hit his email.
Latest transaction was a security deposit at the Roebuck Hotel, twenty minutes ago.
John crossed the room to grab his wallet and flipped it open. The black card was there, wedged between his driver’s license and a family photo. He could hear his heart beating in his ears.
“It can’t be. I didn’t book that.”
Only one other person on earth had access to that account, and it sure as hell wasn’t Daniel the personal trainer.
Dee saw Abigail Burgess and Liam Tuohey clear as crystal as she squinted her eye, then saw them warp and shift as she winced at the crashing sounds from the other end of the phone call.
The heartbreak was just discernible underneath the rage. A smash that could have been a shoe going through a glass coffee table was drowned out by a string of inarticulate swearing. John returned to the phone.
“You see them? You actually see them both? Show me!”
His tone was becoming far too demanding for Dee’s tastes, so hers came out cool.
“I am not doing that. The angle of the photo will show my vantage point, and the picture message will embed my position. I know both of their faces from my research, and I can confirm that she is in the room with him. Do you want to proceed?”
“Shit,” he said from the phone’s speaker on her thigh. She could not put it on the desk, as even the vibration could affect her accuracy.
John’s quick breaths crumbled into sobs, but Dee did not move. A long-range shooter needs patience above all else. His misery was moving, and she truly could weep for him, only she’d just applied her expensive eyedrops and wouldn’t want to waste them.
“This arsehole is fucking my wife? She’s fucking my business partner? You’re goddamn right I want to proceed. Yes.”
There we go, she thought, money in the bank.
“Understood. I’ll keep you on the phone so that you can hear the shot. That will be the only proof of kill that I will provide.”
“Fine! Yes, do it. That bitch lied to me, she LIED about this trip and she lied in our marriage vows. Wants to lie through her teeth? I want you to shoot her right in her mouth!”
Dee blinked.
“I can’t guarantee that would be fatal, John.”
“I don’t give a shit,” he hissed, sounding through the phone’s speaker like he was at the end of a dark corridor. “I’m paying you!”
Down the street, high up and safe in their suite, Abigail was reclined on the bamboo-silk sheets while Liam removed her heels with his teeth. At this angle, the shot would disintegrate Abigail’s jaw and punch through the bathroom door behind her.
“Dealer’s choice. It’s going to give your business partner one hell of a scare.”
“Oh, HIM! I want you to kill him too, that fucking snake!”
Dee opened her other eye, looking through the scope at the lovers tryst on one side and the glittering city in the other.
“The gentleman too? That will–“
“I know. Another hundred grand.”
“You’re good for it, John, I trust that. But I don’t do refunds. Are you sure about this?”
“Yes, to hell with them both. I’ve got the money, and god knows I’ll save more than two hundred large in the divorce. Shoot her in her lying mouth, and — and — and shoot his cock off!”
Dee placed the oxygen bottle’s breather over her mouth and nose, took three huffs, and returned to the optical scope. It would take no more than ten seconds for the high to clear, and she’d need to hold her breath to get the perfect shot.
“Understood.”
She re-opened her other eye and noted the limp flag outside the hotel. Steam from a restaurant’s kitchen vent barely moved eastward as it rose. Calm wind.
John’s breath came ragged through the phone’s speaker, punctuated with sobs and curses.
She adjusted for gravity, dragging the scope’s distance marker across their naked bodies. Abigail’s hair was already tousled, and Liam was doing a poor job of smoothing it as she kissed down his abdomen.
Rendered tinny and high, the phone on Dee’s thigh played the sounds of John rummaging through the desk drawers in his office, the gasp of relief at finding his secret packet of cigarettes, and even the click of the lighter. If John thought that the nicotine would blow out the raging fire in his chest, he was wrong. After only three puffs, he spoke in a tremulous voice.
“Are you there?”
He got no reply. His hand shook so violently that his wedding ring rattled against the glass side of his phone, but Dee ignored even this. As far as she was concerned, there was no phone and she had no thigh. Her perception had narrowed to a spot 7.62 millimetres wide, hundreds of metres away, and her focus poured into it like a gravity well.
“Is it done?” John asked, knowing full well that it was not. “Hello?”
The silence was killing him, as sure and lethal as a bullet. He swallowed with a click, already hearing the hesitation in his own voice, when the air exploded with a high-calibre gunshot.
To John, it sounded like the world on the other end of the phone had been cracked in half.
The cigarette between his fingers smouldered, but he dare not move. Only a second after the shot, the call had ended. Had she been interrupted? Caught? When the phone rang in his hand for the second time that night, he again expected to see Abigail’s angelic smile in the contact photo, but was met with the finality of the letter D, the beginning of death and the end of the end.
His thumb left a rainbow outline of sweat droplets on the screen when he pressed “Accept” and placed the speaker to his ear.
“It’s done.”
John leaned against the window, resting his head on the cool glass. The ash built up on the end of his cigarette fell to the office carpet.
It was done, by his order if not his hand. Two people had been slaughtered, and he was out two hundred grand. Oh god, he thought, what have I done?
“What– what happened?”
“Exactly what you asked for,” Dee said, and it sounded like she was walking briskly down the street. “You can transfer my money now, the remaining ninety.”
“Ninety?” John asked, though numb lips.
“I told you: I never miss. Both requests fulfilled, with just the one bullet. Her mouth, his penis.”
John sank to his knees.
He looked at the phone, and almost didn’t catch the rest of what Dee had to say.
“You should be thanking me, John. I just saved you a hundred thousand dollars.”
END.
Matthew J Hampton 