The Hitman's Baby - A Bad Boy Secret Baby Romance (With extra added bonus novel for a short time only!) (3 page)

Nick had been to Newark, New Jersey twice before. He didn’t care for it then and didn’t care for it now. In general he wasn’t a city person. He’d grown up rural and still preferred the country to the city. Most people who warranted killing, however, lived in cities. Something about the concentration of wealth and politics, probably, that drew the unsavory types.

Finding Cassandra didn’t take very long. A couple of days studying the picture, reading the files on the memory chip, and he correctly assumed she’d be sticking to a lower income area. The last few places she’d apparently holed up had been practically in the ghettos of Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and a handful of other cities. Supposedly, she’d been spotted at a homeless shelter, so apparently living a life on the run wasn’t agreeing with her.

Picking a time and location to take down a target wasn’t a simple matter, though. It had to be quiet, and late was best. Night was, as it traditionally had been since possibly the dawn of the profession, an assassin’s best friend. Finding just the right place required observation, so that’s what he did when he first spotted the girl. She was older than she had been in the picture, but not by much. It had been taken in Atlanta, the last city she’d hidden in.

The first thing he noticed was that she wasn’t going to the homeless shelter for aid. She was serving food there. She did it about every other day. On the days between, she hauled bags of packaged meals to houses and was greeted by the elderly. She worked at a diner, where she apparently knew her regulars and was beloved by children. In short, she was more or less an angel who spent every spare hour she had and several she didn’t caring for other people.

She was also clever, and watchful. She checked faces all the time, and although they were on a more or less regular rotation she took different routes to get home from work, or to go out when she left. She rarely left.

Nick’s preference was to take out a target at a distance, with a high power, high precision sniper rifle. It was clean, efficient, the target never saw it coming, and it was easy to get out of town after it happened. But he was starting to think that he might have to do this one up close, in her apartment. He tracked her there, but she kept the blinds down over her windows.

It took two weeks to decide on the right place and time. It would be on her way home after a closing shift at the diner she worked at. She left late on those nights, and there were very few people on the streets on her chosen route. At least three or four times on each of the three nights he saw six or seven such opportunities, and while she had different routes she took home she almost always ended up on Pennsylvania. All he had to do was keep an eye on it for a few nights in a row and he’d get his chance.

And yet as that time grew closer, he realized something… odd. Unnerving.

He was having doubts.

Cassandra Gonzales just didn’t seem like a threat to anyone. She was obviously on the run from her father—news hadn’t yet broken that he was dead, but it would—and yet she seemed to be intent on living a life of service instead of simply staying out of sight, which would have been safer. She was loved by the people she came into contact with, as well. She was a creature of grace and light in the world and after Nick had spent so many years picking off the baser, darker creatures… it just didn’t seem right.

He was a bad man. There was no doubt about that. He sacrificed his moral compass at the altar of a higher purpose and for the most part he’d served it. There were few targets he’d been assigned that didn’t have a reason to die. He’d taken down a prominent bishop once, but only after he’d watched the man long enough to see that he was molesting children, embezzling from his diocese, and snorting cocaine off of the youngest male prostitutes he could find.

For this girl, though, he couldn’t find a single reason. She was living in terror of being found but doing good in the world regardless. What was her crime? Where was her darkness? If she had it, she hid it well.

So the day it had to happen, Nick decided to get in close and see for himself.

He went in dressed like a bum, and she served him coffee. Not with a sneer or and hint of condescension. In fact she smiled at him, entirely unaware that he was here to kill her and seemingly happy to see him, along with everyone else.

He took his seat, but only picked at his food to keep up the show as he watched her treat every single person the same. When the supplies dried up, she looked heartbroken.

The crew began to shut everything down, and as they did the small population that hadn’t gotten fed instead turned to their peers for scraps. Nick handed his plate, nearly untouched, to one of them as he rose to leave.

He knew where she would be next, so he left the kitchen, cleaned himself up and changed, but didn’t shave. He bought jeans and a flannel shirt with cash, along with a pair of thick rimmed glasses with plain plastic lenses, and a trucker cap, and then dropped in on her at the diner.

There, he actually spoke to her briefly. After he ordered—just water and a grilled cheese sandwich—he’d pushed her a bit to talk with him by playing on her need to help people.

“You ever been cheated on?” He asked.

Cassandra paused, mouth open a little, her eyebrows pinched with some mix of confusion and sympathy. “Uh, no. I haven’t.” She smiled at him. “I guess I haven’t had much of a chance, though.”

He grunted, and put on a dejected face as he stared at the sandwich she brought him.

After a moment, Cassandra sighed. “Are you okay, sir? I don’t mean to pry, just… you look a little down.”

“Just found out my wife is cheating on me with her therapist,” Nick said. A flat, numb affect wasn’t hard. “That was this morning. Just now, I lost my job. It’s like my whole life is falling apart, you know?”

He coughed, and glanced furtively up at her. “Sorry. I shouldn’t dump my problems on you like that,” he said. “Just don’t have anyone to talk to so… I’ll let you get back to work.”

Instead of leaving, though, she sat down in the booth across from him. “I’ve got just a minute,” she said. She glanced at the long diner bar, and then looked back at him. “I know what it feels like for your whole life to change in a day. For it to all seem like its coming apart. I’m sorry you have to go through that.”

Nick shifted, genuinely uncomfortable and regretting the ruse now. He’d just wanted to engage her briefly, not sit down with her. It had been a bad idea; now he was trapped. “Ah… well… thanks.”

“You know what helps me?” Cassandra asked.

“No,” Nick said. “What?”

She sighed, and touched her shirt. “I try to believe that there’s a plan.”

“I’m not really religious,” he said.

“You don’t have to be,” she said, and winked. “Maybe there’s a deep part of you, something you don’t always hear, that knows where you’re supposed to go, what you’re supposed to do. Your purpose. And it could be that when you aren’t hearing it, it makes itself heard. Doesn’t have to be God.”

She reached across, and touched his hand. “Could just be your heart. I was raised Catholic. But… sometimes,” she whispered conspiratorially, “I think it’s the same thing.”

She withdrew her hand, and Nick’s skin was still warm where she’d touched it.

“Uh… thanks,” he said. “For… for the advice.”

“All the bad stuff,” she said seriously, “is just clouds in the sky. They pass. The sun comes back, one way or another.”

Nick almost said that once you were dead and underground, the weather didn’t matter that much. But he held his tongue out of both a desire to keep up his character, as well as some degree of shame for having even thought it.

She smiled at him as she got out of the booth, and pointed at his sandwich. “That’s on me. Pay it forward, okay?”

“Uh… I will,” Nick said as Cassandra left him.

He took a bite out of it, intending to at least eat it and make a show of being there for a reason, but it wasn’t very good. More than that, if he was a praying man he’d have believed that just then there were angels with fiery swords watching him very, very carefully.
This one
, they would have said,
gets a pass, monster.

He fished a twenty out of his pocket, along with the few bucks for the sandwich, tossed the lot on the table and left.

The day slid into evening, and evening finally darkened to night. Leonard’s closed at two in the morning—way too late for a young woman like Cassandra to be walking through her own neighborhood alone—and she had to be up at seven to deliver breakfasts to her elderly neighbors.

Nick perched atop a building on Pennsylvania, with a clear view up and down both directions and over Gillette place, one of the five cross streets she took, and the one she’d taken the least in the last two weeks.

He leaned against the roof, binoculars in hand, clad in black. His trusty AR-31 rifle rested on its legs next to him. Lester had checked in and demanded he get to it. It had only taken him a week to take out her father; what was the problem?

He’d told Lester that the problem was that Emilio Gonzales lived in a compound surrounded by his own men, but the chink in his routine had been obvious. He’d had a routine to begin with.

Cassandra was either less ordered, or more intelligent and paranoid. One or the other. But he’d get it done, and deliver confirmation tomorrow.

He spotted her coming down Gillette. There were some potential onlookers, though; a group of kids being assholes at two in the morning and wasting their lives on a street corner.

Cassandra crossed the street well before she reached them. Good girl. Smart. Also, it was an opportunity. That side of the street was dark. He put the binoculars away, and leaned into his scope instead. After a second he found her, and rested his finger on the trigger.

She looked up, suddenly, almost as if she’d sensed him but… no, she was looking at the kids ahead of her. One hand disappeared into her purse. Well, well. She had bite when she needed it, didn’t she?

It became clear very quickly that they had designs on her. He watched through the scope, tracking all five of the young men along with Cassandra, as they waved their arms and made noises at her like apes. He couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying, but from the way the group reacted to one kid in particular, it was probably lewd.

He’d have expected a girl Cassandra’s size, even with some hidden bite to her, to run at that point, and look for the nearest officer—which she wouldn’t find, as they rarely patrolled this corner. Instead, though, she straightened her shoulders and seemed to take a stance. She stared down these five young men who could easily take her if they wanted to. Her arm stiffened when one of them stood out from the rest of the crowd and said something to her while grabbing his crotch.

One of the boys in the back nudged his friend, and pulled something out of his pocket. A blade flashed open.

If he let it happen, he might not have to pull the trigger.

If he let these kids beat, rape, and kill her.

At least his way was faster.

Except…

It was a split second decision. Not a rational, carefully thought out one. The kind that meant trouble. The white kid with the sagging pants moved forward, aggressive, and started to reach for her.

Nick put a round through his temple, and he dropped. In the time it took for the rest of the group to realize it had happened, he put down two more of them. He’d have gotten the other two, but they bolted and were out of sight before he could get his sights trained.

He turned the cross hairs back to Cassandra. She was staring at the bodies. It took her a moment and then… there, it all hit her. She raised one hand briefly to her mouth, staggered back, and glanced at the rooftops, and then turned and sprinted up Pennsylvania.

He still could have taken the shot, but he didn’t.

“Shit,” he muttered, and began packing up his rifle and gear.

If he thought about it too much, he would realize it was a bad idea. So, he didn’t.

Nick paid cash for an hourly motel a few blocks from Cassandra’s place. If she was smart, she had a go bag and a plan, a little extra cash, and a destination. He didn’t know where she’d go but he had a good idea of how she’d get there.

Unlike him, she didn’t have a tracker embedded in her body.

He gritted his teeth in the filthy bathroom of the crummy motel, as he dug into his wrist with a razor, being careful—so, so careful—not to cut the vein. Between the tendons was a tiny chip, powered by his own body heat and the electricity from the nerve it was deposited against. Removing it was excruciating and left his middle and ring finger both half numbed and tingling. Nothing that wouldn’t heal.

The place had wifi, at least, and so he opened his laptop, accessed the remote server and uploaded a data packet. Nothing unusual about that, except this one was loaded with a worm. It would use his credentials to eat away everything Lester’s organization had on him.

He’d had it made for him three years ago, after Lester had assigned him a target he didn’t particularly want to take down. It turned out the guy wasn’t all that virtuous to begin with—it was hard to get on anyone’s list without being an asshole of some kind—but it had gotten Nick thinking, and planning. Just in case.