Dylan (Bowen Boys, #3)
Kathi S. Barton
Chapter One
The house sat empty for the better part of the early afternoon, but now there was enough activity going on inside of it that she wished she’d remembered to bring an extra cell phone with her. Hers was being used for something far more important than recording the idiots in front of her. She didn’t move from where she was hidden. If she did, any one of them could find and kill her. Jack Crosby wasn’t going to die today if she could help it.
Glancing at her watch, she knew it was time to move. Pulling out her modified cell phone, she punched in the code to activate the small chip that hung around her neck. It had been in her head until recently, and she’d not been made aware of it until she’d gone to a friend of hers. They’d been afraid that whoever had put it there would know that it had been found and removed, but apparently not. Now she was doing her last job for these people.
Dropping to the ground from the tree she’d been in for over six hours, she stretched a little. Practice had made her able to stand the lack of movement, but she was still stiff. Moving along to the alley a street down from the target house, she moved in from the rear. The house was now as silent as a mouse.
Waiting until the last light was turned out, she thought about the chip again. Twice now in the past two weeks someone had set up an appointment for her to come into what they’d all called the shop and get a physical. The first time she’d missed it, she’d been in another country. She’d told them that she’d gotten food poisoning and couldn’t make it back. The next time she had simply told them she was too busy. She had been, too. She was packing for her move out of the country again…this one permanent. Casey Snow, a veterinarian by trade and a good friend, had told her that she’d live longer if she left.
“Whoever put that sucker in you wanted to know where you were at all times. And now that I’ve removed it, they’re going to want to put it back. Or maybe decide that you’re too much of a risk now that you know and put some other piece of steel in you.” She’d laughed, but Casey hadn’t. “Do you know when they put that in there?”
“I’m thinking when I went to work for them or shortly thereafter. I had to go in for a physical, and I got my ass handed to me by one of the big boys when I was told to take him down. Of course, he was the third one they’d sent to me to show them what I had, but I was out and woke up in a hospital. The company hospital, not the normal kind.”
Now it had been a few short weeks since she’d had Casey remove it, and she had been pulled from an assignment in Germany to come back and take care of a man she knew nothing about. And she was going in blind. Her assignment had one line and a single picture.
Kill the male and leave the others. Other what? His wife? Children? For as long as she’d done this work, she’d only killed one female, and that was because she’d been about to kill her and never any children. She had refused that from the very beginning. When the small device in her ear sounded, she made her way through the yard.
The light had gone off nearly twenty minutes ago. She knew that she was walking into a trap and hoped to Christ that they didn’t have any idea that she was aware of them. She moved along the fence line and around the large pool. Jack knelt down in front of the security system and took care if it with a short break in the line. Moving to the door, she had it unlocked in less than four seconds. Opening it carefully, she moved into the house.
The kitchen had a jar of mayo setting out on the countertop, so Jack reached out and touched it and signaled to her that it was cold. Moving through the room, she saw that a set of stairs moved up from the back of the room. Ignoring them, she went through the dining room and into the living room. There was another set of stairs moving upward which she took, careful to hang to the outer part of them so that if they were squeaky she would more than likely miss them. But halfway up, she stopped.
She saw a spot of blood…not a great deal of it, but enough to let her know that she wasn’t the only one in the house with her target. It smeared when she touched it with her gloved hand…it was fresh. Standing there, trying to decide if she’d had enough, she looked up and saw a shadow pass by what she thought was a window.
Moving up the stairs quickly now, she shot at the movement to her left as she dropped and rolled. The bullet that tore through her left forearm had her turning and firing to her right and dropping that person as well.
Jack moved to the open door, knowing that if there were indeed any more people there, they’d have to come from that room. The door behind her exploded when a shot was fired at what would have been her chest had she been standing. Crawling into the room in front of her, she left the door opened and moved quickly to the other open door. But she rolled under the bed when someone came through the door after her.
“Jack, my girl, you might as well come out. We’ve got the house surrounded.” She didn’t move when she heard the voice of her boss, Kirby Mann. “I want you to know it’s all your fault that this is going down this way. You should have left well enough alone and kept to the program. What did you think when you found that little piece of hardware in your head?”
Another voice mumbled, and Kirby laughed. “And so you know, we found your little vet. Too bad about that vicious attack from that cat she was caring for at the zoo. Tore her up something horrible. I’m sorry to say she didn’t make it, either.”