Hitman

“So what does this friend of yours need?” I asked.

Jim glanced quickly around to make sure we weren’t being observed.

“He’s got a daughter who’s living in New York who’s fallen in with a pretty bizarre crowd.”

“City or State” I asked.

Jim looked puzzled.

“Eh?” he said, then his face brightened. “Oh! City.” 

“What kind of bizarre crowd?”

He looked around again, then answered.

“Vampires.” 

I blinked at him.

“Pardon me,” I said. “I thought you said ‘vampires’.”

He nodded.

“I did.”

“So do I need to stock up on wooden stakes and crosses and garlic?” I asked, a wry grin scowling across my face. Jim chuckled and waved a hand idly in the air.

“No, no,” he said. “This is a group of people, most of them in their twenties or early thirties, who practice vampirism. They dress in black and hang out at night in a townhouse—I’ll give you all the information on the address and floorplans and so on—and they either have their teeth capped to make them like fangs, and they get girls to let them bite their necks and drink their blood.”

“So where do I come in?” I asked.

I rested the barrel of the rifle on the hood of the car and peered through the scope, adjusting the focus so I could see everything. The driver’s side door opened, and a man dropped down to the ground. He had a bullet-shaped head, covered with a thick fuzz of dark hair. He was in his mid-thirties, and was definitely not Shaheen. Just a driver.

I moved the scope back to the cab of the truck. As I did, the passenger opened the far door and hopped down. He was shielded from me by the body of the truck, but the quick glimpse I had caught as he climbed out revealed the grizzled pompadour of Henry Shaheen.

A couple of the men who had been milling around on the pier walked over, and Shaheen reached out to shake the hand of the older of the two. A sharklike grin creased his face, and his eyes glinted under his horn-rimmed glasses. I was sure this was Shaheen. There was no point waiting.

I centered the crosshairs on Shaheen’s temple. There was no breeze. I eased off the safety and took in a soft breath. They couldn’t have possibly heard me from this far away, but I was quiet anyway.

“Remember me?” she asked. “Because I sure as shit remember you.”

It didn’t come back to me right away, but her face was familiar. Then it came back to me.

A few months ago, I had been hired to take out a man named Henry Shaheen. He was a human trafficker who provided girls ranging from toddlers to teenagers for the Arabian sex-slave market. The father of one of his victims wanted him taken out, and hired me to do it. I had intercepted him at a container port in Boston as he was preparing to transfer a truckload of girls onto a freighter bound for the Middle East. I had taken out Shaheen at the scene, but the men with him had gotten away with the truck.

I followed them up into southern New Hampshire, where they had driven down a wood road to eliminate the girls. In the back of the truck with the girls was a young woman who had acted as Shaheen’s groomer, luring the girls in and pretending to be one of them in order to keep them calm until the ship left port.

When I killed the men who had been driving the truck, she acted like she was grateful to me for saving her, and had almost convinced me that she would get them to safety. I was almost back on the road when I realized that she had known too much about the truck to not be in on the job, so I had gone back and found her about to kill the girls in the back of the truck. I had shot her in the wrist of her gun hand with a high-explosive round and then run her over with the truck.

I sat down in the driver’s seat and slid the key into the ignition. I left the door open. The man in the store straightened up a little in the doorway. I started the car, pulled my left foot inside the door and floored the accelerator, cranking the wheel as far to the left as it would go, spinning the car around in a sharp left turn, dust and grit spraying out from beneath the sheets. The force of the turn slammed the door shut next to me as I came out of the turn and headed for the highway.

As I ran onto the road and the tires took hold, I shot into the westbound lane, cutting off a stake-bed truck that was coming in from the west. As I squealed tires into my lane and the tires took hold, I could hear a squeal of tires from the truck and a flood of curses from the driver. Straightening out, I caught a glimpse of the man in black standing in the doorway, a machine pistol clutched in his hands. That lasted just a second, as the truck was between me and the front of Drury’s Country Store.

He yelled something in Spanish, and as I came out from behind the truck, I saw him raise the gun and get ready to fire.