The Assassin's Prayer (3 page)

CHAPTER 4

It
was a four-mile drive from the diner to Kain’s place on West River Road, a
rural route that wound along the Hudson River for ten miles before breaking
west toward the town of Gansevoort. As his house—a simple two-story box-style
with a garage attached to the northwest side—came into view, the sun peeked
over the slate-colored mountains in the distance.

Kain
steered the Jeep Grand Cherokee into the blacktopped driveway and past the two
L-shaped flower beds bracing both sides of the entrance. He could remember when
Karen’s green thumb had made the beds bloom with vibrant, brilliant bursts of
color. Now the flower beds were as dead as she was.

He
parked in the garage and hit the remote to close the door behind him. The
garage windows, three small squares of glass, were blacked out. Kain valued his
privacy, having about as much use for social interaction as a eunuch has for
Viagra. H
H
is nearest neighbor lived over a
mile down the road. There was a thoroughbred farm nestled behind him about a half-mile,
but a row of hardwood trees and a large gulch separated his land from theirs.
He would have preferred even more isolation—an island in the middle of a lake,
for example—but when they were shopping for a house, Karen had refused to wholeheartedly
embrace the hermit lifestyle. This place had been their compromise and now that
she was gone, he couldn’t bring himself to let it go. She still lived here
through the medium of memories and if he were to move someplace else, Kain knew
he would feel like he was abandoning her. Irrational, sure, but nobody ever said
grief was a logical beast.

Inside,
the house was clean but Spartan. No point in being a slob, but Kain saw no need
to spruce the place up either. Wasn’t like he was going to be entertaining friends
in the near future and after Karen’s death he had decided not to bother with
women anymore. Her loss—not to mention her betrayal—had shattered his soul and
he never wanted to risk that kind of pain ever again.

He
tossed his keys on the kitchen table that squatted under a single bare bulb
like an interrogation table in some old hardboiled detective story. Cracked
linoleum lined the floor, a black-and-green pattern that resembled reptile
scales. It had been ugly the day he installed it and it was even uglier now, but
for some reason Karen had liked it and that fact meant Kain would sooner peel
the flesh from his musculature than tear up the linoleum. Like everything else
in this house, it was a reminder of her, back when this had been a real home brimming
with life and love and laughter. Now Kain couldn’t even remember the last time
he had laughed. It had been so long that the sound would probably feel like a
foreign object in his throat. Not that it mattered; wasn’t like he had anything
to laugh about these days anyway.

He
retrieved the Jack Daniels from the cupboard. He didn’t bother with the
niceties of glass and ice, just slugged it straight from the bottle. Seeing
Silas again, reliving the betrayal and Karen’s suicide, killing a man in front
of his wife and kid … it was all too much to take at once. He took another hit,
feeling the whiskey sear its way down his throat. Maybe it would go all the way
to his soul and numb the pain that nested there like a clump of thorns. Sometimes
a little alcoholic amnesia does a man good.

He
took the bottle over to the table, got out his gun-cleaning kit, and began to
clean the Colt .45. The motions were automatic from years of repetition,
allowing his mind to stray. How many men had he killed with this gun? Thirty?
Forty? Fifty? He struggled to recall. He remembered his first kill as if he had
pulled the trigger only yesterday. He had drilled a .45 round right through the
bridge of the target’s nose and the internal pressure of the bullet burrowing
through his brain had caused the guy’s eyeballs to pop out of their sockets. But
for the most part the faces all ran together in meaningless, featureless blobs.
Maybe that was a good thing.

He
reassembled the Colt, then turned his attention to the SPAS-12. Manufactured by
Franchi, the Special Purpose Assault Shotgun was one of his favorite weapons, capable
of semi-auto as well as pump-action. When loaded with nine rounds of
double-ought buckshot, it was a formidable close-quarters weapon, more than
capable of blowing a man in half. Kain had removed the folding stock, preferring
to use just the pistol grip. Easier to conceal under his duster that way too.

Few
assassins opted for such heavy firepower. Most hitters preferred .22s,
preferably to the back of the head. The diminutive round made a small entry hole
and lacked the power to exit the opposite side. Neat, tidy, unspectacular. The
mere thought of a shotgun and .45 would probably make traditional assassins
cringe, but Kain could not have cared less about tradition.

Every
time he went on a strike, his life was on the line. One mistake, one little
lapse in concentration, and the target would put one in Kain’s heart instead of
vice versa. He used this acute awareness of his own mortality to hone his
combat instincts, to keep himself sharp, focused, and alive. Sure, his life was
a pile of shit big enough to give a bevy of psychologists nightmares, but what
waited on the other side was probably worse, especially when you factored in
that he had spent his life violating the Sixth Commandment. Somehow he
seriously doubted the angels enjoyed rubbing shoulders with blood-spillers. So,
with his ass—and possibly his soul—on the line when he went out on a hit, Kain
wanted all the firepower he could muster.

He
took another drink from the bottle, dry-fired the SPAS-12 to test the trigger
action, loaded it with shells, and racked one into the chamber. He kept every
gun in the house topped off. Never knew when enemies might come calling and he
was a strict adherent to the creed that it was better to have a loaded gun and
never need it than to need a loaded gun and not have one.

He
set the shotgun down on the table and made his way to the bathroom. The coffee
he had drunk at the diner was knocking on his bladder.

Standing
in front of the toilet, Kain felt a chill slither down his spine like an
ice-cold maggot. The sensation was familiar and expected; he felt the chill
every time he came in here because the bathroom was haunted. This was where
Karen died.

Kain
still remembered everything as if it had happened five minutes ago instead of
five years. As a cold lump of ice embedded itself in his heart, Kain remembered
coming home and seeing the water seeping out from underneath the bathroom door.
He remembered kicking the door open and seeing Karen in the overflowing tub, her
long hair billowing in the water, red on red, her arms floating limply,
offering only mercifully brief glimpses of the bone-deep gashes carved in her
wrists, the straight razor she had used lying beside the tub. She had been
staring straight ahead and Kain remembered thinking there was something
horrible about the way she didn’t blink when the bloody water lapped across her
wide-open eyes.

Kain
realized he was done urinating. He could feel Karen’s ghost in the air. He
zipped up and hurried from the room, eager to be away from this haunted place.

He
returned to the kitchen table, raised the whiskey bottle to his lips, and
sucked it down. Not much left, but hopefully enough to knock him out. Because the
last thing he wanted to do was stay awake all day reliving his wife’s suicide.

He
picked up his dagger and began working it with a whetstone. As the harsh rasp
of steel on stone filled the kitchen, he wondered if it would have been easier
to accept Karen’s death if she had left a note explaining why she had chosen to
take her life. But absent an explanation, he blamed Silas, believing that guilt
over their affair had driven her to put a blade to her veins.

Kain’s
hands began to shake, the knife clinking against the whetstone. Time for
another shot to steady the nerves and silence the memories. He reached for the Jack
Daniels and brought it to his lips.

The
bullet came out of nowhere, punching through the glass patio doors and then
shattering the bottle in Kain’s hand. He threw himself sideways out of the
chair as a hail of bullets followed the first. He hit the floor hard on his
shoulder, feeling the impact ripple through his muscles as the effects of the
whiskey evaporated. Nothing like almost catching a bullet in the teeth to sober
you up right quick. His face was covered with Jack Daniels and his eyes burned
from the alcohol.

Kain
couldn’t even hear the shots. Which meant the gunner was using a suppressor.
Which meant a pro. Your average garden variety burglar could rarely afford a
silencer … or an assault weapon for that matter.

More
slugs slammed into the table. Kain frantically rubbed at his stinging eyes. He
needed to see to survive. Through a blur of tears, he saw the auto-fire
fusillade hammer the SPAS-12 into a wreckage of mangled metal. The stream of
hot lead tracked toward him, digging holes in the linoleum as Kain rolled,
seeking cover. He felt something hot burn across his calf and then he was
behind the island in the center of the kitchen.

His
heart raced, pumping with adrenalin. His vision had almost returned to normal. Drops
of whiskey dripped from his cheeks. There was a fiery pain just below his right
eye where a piece of glass had cut him. Not much worse than a shaving nick, but
the alcohol made it sting like hell. Somehow through all the diving, rolling,
and scurrying he had managed to hold onto the dagger. Of course, all that meant
was that he had brought a knife to a gunfight.

He
heard footsteps coming up the basement stairs and cursed. There were
two
hitters,
closing in from opposite angles in a classic pincher ploy. If they caught him
in a crossfire he would be ventilated with more holes than a colander
collection.

The
second hitter kicked in the basement door. Screws screeched in piercing protest
as one of the hinges tore loose from the frame. The black-garbed gunman burst
into the room in a combat crouch, his Heckler & Koch MP5/10 submachine gun swiveling
toward Kain, seeking target acquisition.

A
dagger is not designed to be a throwing knife, but Kain practiced with it
constantly, the distance was short, and he had no other options. With a flick
of his wrist he sent the blade zipping across the room and sank the dagger into
the gunner’s left eye. The man went down instantly, cold steel impaling his
brain, the handle jutting from his socket like some obscene growth. The MP5/10 tumbled
from his lifeless fingers.

Kain
eyed the MP5/10 and the distance that separated him from it. He wanted that
gun. He
needed
that gun. There was still another hitter out there, closing
in fast, and the MP5/10 might mean the difference between breathing oxygen and
sucking dirt. It was only about ten feet to the gun. A relatively short gap, but
in order to cross it Kain would have to briefly expose himself to the second
hitter.

No
time for hesitation. His chances of survival slimmed with each second he
wasted.

He
gathered his legs under him and lunged into the open, his adrenalized muscles
hurling him across the ugly linoleum like a human cannonball. Bullets plucked
at his clothes but missed his skin; he was moving too fast to make an easy
target. He snatched up the MP5/10 as momentum carried him through a full roll.
He rose up on his knees, facing the shattered patio doors, just as the second
gunner stormed into the room. Both men fired simultaneously.

The
gunner had expected Kain to rise to his feet, not his knees, so he fired too
high. Kain heard the hum of bullets zipping over his head followed by the
thwack-thwack-thwack
sound of those same bullets burying themselves in the wall behind him.

Kain
aimed lower.
Much
lower. The 10mm salvo chopped into the target’s shins
and then tracked upward, blowing apart his thighs. The thick bones ruptured
like hammered ice. He toppled onto his back, the air exploding from his lungs
in a whoosh as he hit the floor.

Kain
scrambled over and kicked the gun out of the hitter’s hands. He thought he
heard the man’s wrist snap in the process but wasn’t sure. He didn’t care
either. This son of a bitch had tried to kill him.

The
gunner tried to sit up. “Stay down,” Kain growled, pinning the guy’s throat
beneath his boot with enough force to keep him prone but not hard enough to
crush his larynx. He didn’t want the man dead … yet. Not until he had a chance
to have a little chat.

Kain
fixed his cold gaze on the man. He didn’t recognize the guy, but that didn’t
mean anything. He touched the hot barrel of the H&K to the tip of the man’s
nose. “Answer my questions,” Kain said, “and you’ll live. Refuse and I’ll kill
you. Simple as that. You’re a professional, so I’m sure you understand that if
you make me put you down, I’ll put you down hard. So save yourself the pain, do
us both a favor, and talk to me.”

It
was a good speech, but it didn’t work. The gunner kept his mouth closed so
tight you would have thought his jaw was wired shut. He stared up at Kain with
flat, emotionless eyes that revealed nothing. In fact, those eyes were barely
even registering
pain
.

Maybe
this guy was Black Talon. Kain had heard rumors that Talon underwent extreme
pain-tolerance training. But c’mon, the guy’s legs were nothing but hamburger. He
had to be feeling
something
.