Assassin (3 page)

“This is your room. There’s an attached bathroom, rather
small, but you’re a man so it’ll do. The day starts at five in the morning, so set
yer alarm clock on the stand there, and I’ll see you then.”
The fuck it
does!
Troy waits for the old man to leave and closes the door a little too
forcefully. He sits down on the bed with his head in his hands, and tries not to
laugh hysterically. If the crew he hung with could see him now, one of them
might
shoot him just to put him out of his own misery.

He doubts this guy even has television.

At some point during the night, he actually fell asleep with
all his clothes still on and his hands behind his head on the bed. Troy didn’t
bother pulling the covers down, and his flesh is covered in goose bumps since
the temperature dropped low overnight. Therefore, he’s barely sleeping when Mr.
Grant bangs open his door at exactly five minutes after five in the morning
with a passive aggressive vengeance.

“Get up, Troy Red! Or you’ll miss breakfast, and we don’t eat
until noon after breakfast!” The loud bellow has Troy sitting up in bed with
his fists at the ready, but when he spots the old man by the door, he lets out
a loud whoosh of air.

“Are you trying to kill me? Because if you are, then you
might as well just get a gun and do it now. Don’t torture me in the process.” Mr.
Grant crosses his arms over his chest as his eyebrows come down low over his
eyes and furrow at the center. He looks as if he’s studying a sample of some
odd germ under a microscope, and strangely Troy feels violated by the look.

“If I’d want you dead, boy, you’d be dead. Now get out of
bed and come downstairs for breakfast. If you’re not down in another five
minutes, the goat will get it. I’m not making anymore, and neither are you!”
With his point across, the old man’s arms uncross and he closes the door behind
him with as much force as Troy used yesterday.

“Fucking farm boys,” Troy mumbles as he pulls on his boots
that slipped off sometime during the night. He runs a hand over his short, dark
brown hair and rolls his dark eyes up into his head as he stands and stretches.
He drops on the floor like he used to at home, and does thirty before he stands
again. Getting a workout here is going to be difficult without the equipment,
but maybe he needs to think about retiring the guns as well as his job.

The clock reads nine after five when he appears in the
doorway to the kitchen. If it weren’t for the scent of coffee wafting out, he
might not have remembered how to
get
to the kitchen. Last night seems
like a bad dream to him, and pretty blurry at best. There’s an extra coffee cup
sitting beside the tiny coffee maker. It looks like it makes just one cup at a
time.

“My daughter bought it for me for Christmas, one of those
fancy ones that make hundreds of different flavors. I told her I didn’t need
something like that, but she insisted. Told me it would ‘open my horizons’. Why
the hell would I need to do that?”
Because if you had, you’d realize most
people don’t talk this much this early in the morning.
Troy plasters on a
smile, but it falls flat when he sees the homemade hash browns and eggs in the
same pan.

“Get your coffee, sit down at the table, and after we’re
done breakfast I’ll show you around the farm.” Troy can’t help it.

“How? It’s still as black as night out there!” The old man
looks at him with the same frown he had upstairs, and plops a plate onto the
table rather loudly. Trying not to grumble under his breath, Troy fixes his
coffee with two tablespoons of sugar. There’s no creamer on the counter, and
he’s not going to root around this guy’s refrigerator.

“Sugar in your coffee? You know real men drink coffee black,
son. A woman’s not going to respect a pussy.”
I just have to make it until I
can afford to buy a place of my own. Then I get out of here. Just keep your
damned mouth shut, Troy Red. Keep it shut.
But it’s too late.

“A real man has his
woman
make breakfast for him.”
It’s out before he can bite his tongue to keep it in. Shockingly, the old man
throws his head back and laughs raucously with his fork in his hand and his
coffee cup halfway to his lips. Troy shakes his head as he fills his own plate
with the buttery mess.

“Woo! You’re not gonna get a woman with that kinda attitude,
son! Not in these parts. Didn’t your mother teach you to respect women?”
Gritting his teeth, he sits down at the table across from the old man and tries
not to let his bladder get the best of him when the chair creaks. He may not
have believed in God before, but he’s praying that the chair does not break
while he’s eating.

“Let’s get one thing straight. You will not talk about my
family. I will not talk about yours. Got it?” His laughter dies off while troy
is speaking, and Mr. Grant looks at him seriously for once. It’s not with lack
of respect or mirth in his eyes, but with understanding.

“I got it, son. I won’t talk about your family. I meant no
disrespect.” The rest of their breakfast is consumed in silence, and Troy
follows the old man’s example when he rinses his dishes and puts them in a
dishwasher. At least there’s one modern appliance here. Well, relatively
modern, it’s probably six or seven years old, maybe more.

After breakfast has been cleaned up, Troy puts on the too
small sweatshirt that the man throws at him and follows him out the front door.
The front yard is covered in a light frost, and the sun’s rays are just
starting to peak over the horizon. It’s six thirty in the morning, and it’s freezing
cold yet. Rubbing his hands together, he follows after the old, crazy man to
the large, red barn.

“Now, I’ll help you today with the stall cleaning. But
tomorrow I have to get back to raking the hay, so you’ll be on your own. Do you
know your way around a horse?”
Son
, it seems to be implied at the end of
the sentence. Troy almost groans aloud at the mention of a horse. Then he really
does let the noise out when he glances around and sees eight stalls. All of
them have a horse inside, and their large, dark eyes are staring at him
expectantly.

“No, I’ve never seen a horse in my life.” The old man looks
shocked by that, but he doesn’t say anything smart-ass about city boys or his mama
being ignorant for not showing him a horse.

“Well, then I guess we’ll start with Lightning. He’s not as
fast as he was when he was two, so there’s no need to be afraid of him.” Troy
snorts, afraid of a horse? He tries to tell himself that he’s not.

The stall the old man walks up to holds a gray horse with exceptionally
light blue eyes. They’re eerie and striking at the same time, and Troy can see
why the horse was gifted the name Lightning. He probably looked like a streak
of one when he ran past. He’s obviously no longer able to do much more than
stumble along at a slow pace anymore.

Mr. Grant opens up the stall and leads the horse out into
the aisle. The knees are knobby, and his mane is brittle, but he looks well
cared for. The thug from Los Angeles wonders if Mr. Grant takes care of this
all himself, or if he has help.
Yeah, he’s got people like me to do the job for
him.

“Now, each morning I let them out before I clean. Sometimes
Cassidy does it for me, but I gave her the morning off. By the way, Cassidy is
my daughter. And my daughter is
off-limits
!” He makes a scissors motion
in front of him with both his hands to reiterate his point while he talks. Troy
nods in understanding because Cassidy is probably as ugly as the piles of shit
in the horse stalls.

“Right, now if you’re not comfortable letting them out into
the pastures, I will do it. While some of them are old and wise, there are
three young ones here that may test your limits. They’re just curious and
ornery, don’t forget that. This is the door that leads to the pastures, please
don’t let them out the one we just came in.” He opens up the barn door to the
outside and Lightning trots out with renewed vigor, if only for a few seconds.
Then he slows and begins to graze out of the path of the other horses.

Mr. Grant goes through each horse and tells Troy all about
them, things he doesn’t actually need to know. Then he points at a small room
that he calls the tack room and Troy opens up the door. It’s not that he’s
afraid of hard work. He’s had to do some hard work in his lifetime, but none of
it involved shoveling up shit and throwing it onto a conveyor belt where it
just piled up outside to be used for manure.

After a few minutes, Troy is left to his own devices with a pitchfork
in hand, a shovel leaning against one wall, and instructions to put new straw
in the bottom of each stall after he’s done cleaning. Oh and the worst part, he
has to use a hose to run the rest of the shit he can’t scrape off down drains
in each stall. He’s going to stink afterwards, and this is just his first chore.

“Please, God, strike me down now.” He looks up at the
ceiling of the barn and waits, but nothing happens. Instead, he starts scraping
and shoveling. It takes him forty five minutes to scrape and shovel the waste
out, and then he has to hose down. After hosing down the stalls, he has to wait
for the floor to dry before he can put fresh hay in.

This means he has to find something else to do while he’s
waiting, and that’s when she walks in. It’s well past nine in the morning when
Cassidy Grant walks through the barn doors with her sneakers on, a pair of
hip-hugger jeans, and a shirt that shows a thin ribbon of skin when she lifts
up her arms. She has her hair cropped in a fancy bob that goes higher as it
travels back with a pink streak running down the front right. She’s blonde, and
she’s a bombshell.

As soon as she sees Troy, her complacent faces turns to
disgusted as she looks him from head to toe.

“You wreak,” she says with a strong voice, but it’s still
feminine. That voice could do wonders in the bedroom.

“I’m shoveling horse shit, what do you expect?” Troy leans
on the shovel and tries not to look her up and down a second time. He’s already
made it clear he’s interested by lingering his sight over her hips and her rack.

“No, you stink like a city boy. You smell like that cheap
cologne they all wear. I wouldn’t be surprised if the horses trampled you so
they could smell the stench of rotting flesh and not that crap.”
She has one
hell of a mouth on her.
Her statement seems to have knocked him right out
of his admiration stage to pissed off.

“Is that so?” He asks with his deadly calm voice, but she
doesn’t know him. Cassidy plants one hand on her hip and cocks it as she
studies him further.

“That’s so. Now, when you’re finished here, please haul your
ass back to whatever hellhole you came from and leave my father alone. He
doesn’t need pigs like you hanging around. We prefer the kind that we can butcher
and turn into bacon.” There’s a first time for everything. Troy’s mouth hangs
agape far enough that flies could fly in as she turns on her pretty sneaker
heel and marches from the barn with her ass swaying back and forth.

She hates his guts, that’s obvious, but he still can’t stop
drooling over her like a moron. Confused and angry, Troy lets the shovel fall
to the ground and stomps up onto the loft so that he can push hay down. He
mumbles under his breath as he works, and kicks around a few bales just to get
out his frustration. If he were home, he’d have a few solid rounds with some of
the members in the opposite gang and bash their skulls against the ground. But
the only two people who are here is Cassidy Grant and her father. And neither
one of them would be a fair fight.

About an hour before noon, Mr. Grant returns to find that
Troy is not as incapable as he previously thought. The stalls are spotless, and
none of the horses are dead. They’re all still grazing happily in their
pasture, and Cassidy is in one of the practice rings with a young mustang. She
still can’t mount the chestnut horse, but she’s getting close.

“You hungry?” Troy is sitting on one of the benches in the
aisle with his head in his hands. He’s covered from head to toe with a powdery
dust and muck on his boots, and the old man wants to know if he’s hungry. Why
would he want to eat when he smells like he just rolled in manure?

Because his stomach is going to jump out and start eating
the feed in the troughs waiting for the horses, that’s why.

“I could eat.” He stands wearily and trudges across the
gravel driveway up to the farmhouse. Mr. Grant takes off his shoes and waits
for Troy to do the same. They’re just going to leave them on the porch?

“Go shower. There are pants and shirts in the dresser that
should fit you. They gave me your size when they called two days ago, and I
managed to find a few things at the local Wal-Mart.” Grudgingly, Troy heads up
the flight of narrow stairs to the second floor and peels off his clothes as he
goes. He dumps them in a hamper, in the bathroom, and hops into the shower.

Surprisingly, the chilly water feels right on his skin as he
cleans up. Flashes of Cassidy’s face and her hips intrude upon his thoughts,
and he scrubs at his short hair with frustration as he tries to forget about
their encounter. He feels like a fool for not coming up with something to say
back to her, but it wasn’t
fair
that she turned around! How is a man
supposed to
think
with a woman like her walking away? He doesn’t.

The evidence of how much her backside affected him is obvious
when he gets out of the shower. Troy sits down on the toilet with the seat down,
and a towel wrapped around his waist as he tries to forget about her pretty
lips and her blonde, funky hair. It turns out if he thinks about the words that
actually came out of those pretty lips his erection goes flaccid pretty fast.

He continues to think about that while he brushes his teeth
and puts on a particular brand of deodorant he’s never heard of. Reluctantly,
he roots through the clothes and finds a pair of black jeans and a white
t-shirt that fit well. He smells like a different person and looks different,
too. It seems that the old him has died on the way here, and now he’s a city
boy who is trying to fit into the country side.

“This is never going to work,” Troy mutters to himself as he
leans against the bureau with a mirror above it. He doesn’t see Cassidy in his
doorway, leaning against the frame with her arms crossed over her chest and a
frown on her face because his eyes are closed.