My Heroes Have Always Been Hitmen (Humorous Romantic Shorts) (Greatest Hits Mysteries) (5 page)

We were only about fifty paces apart
, and I could see the hatred burning in his eyes. We were really going to do this. I tried to look menacing, but in all honesty I was very happy. A real cowboy gunfight at high noon! I'd be a legend back home. Well, okay, so my mother and sister would most likely roll their eyes, but still…

I looked around and spotted Penny and Percy standing on the boardwalk outside the hotel. Her face was impassive
, but she held her little brother tightly against her. Jeb was nowhere to be seen, as expected. He had other work to do.

"
When the clock strikes noon, we draw and shoot," Figgins shouted, pointing at an enormous clock on the bank.

I nodded
, suppressing my glee—this was so exciting! We had fifteen seconds to go. The clock's second hand seemed to tick so loudly I felt it in my blood. Ten seconds to go…seven…six…five…four…

The
marshal's eyes narrowed, and I realized he was going to shoot early. Once a cheater…

Three…two…

A bullet whizzed by me, nearly taking my hat off. I whirled to my right and took out two gunmen who were poised to shoot from the alley. I had four shots left. A rifle cracked behind me twice, and I looked up to see Jeb smiling at me from the top of the hotel. Two more men with guns in their hands fell forward from the next alley on my right.

I heard the click of a pistol
's hammer on my left, and I turned and shot one more man who was coming at me from the hotel. Another rifle crack, and one more man at the end of the street fell.

"
Don't move, asshole." I couldn't believe I'd fallen for the distraction—this is a huge Bombay no-no. While I was being shot at (and early, mind you—cheater!) Marshal Figgins had grabbed Penny Philpot from behind and put a gun to her head. I steadied my pistol, but it was difficult to get a clean shot. Penny stood still as the marshal hid behind her, the coward. Percy looked up at his sister in fear.

"
I'll blow her brains out! I will!" the marshal snarled. I looked up at Jeb, but it was clear he couldn't get a good shot either.

"
Let her go!" I shouted. "This is between you and me!" It figured he'd hide behind the woman he'd wanted for so long. The tired, old,
If-I-Can't-Have-Her-No-One-Can
story. There was no style there, just brute idiocy.

"
Drop yer guns!" He motioned with his pistol at Jeb. "Both of them!"

I dropped my gun and nodded to Jeb, who laid his dow
n and held his hands up. My mind began working through alternate plans, but the bastard didn't let Penny go. A real fear started to fill me. This wasn't fun anymore. I couldn't let him kill Penny. But what to do next?

I was just thinking about that when Percy screamed,
"NORBERT!"

What? He knew the name of my horse?
How embarrassing.

A loud whinny filled the air
, and Norbert thundered around the corner. Everyone watched as my horse rose up on two legs and started walking on them! He turned around in a complete circle on only two legs. I was hypnotized and a little mortified. Everyone else was stunned. No one could take their eyes off my horse.

Everyone, except for Percy, who brought
his heel down hard on the marshal's instep, before shoving Penny aside and going right for the Figgin's groin. Percy's foot connected, and the marshal dropped like a sack of flour.

"
You little bastard!" Figgins howled as he pulled his gun and aimed it at Percy.

I fired. The bullet went clean through his forehead, dead center. As his body hit the ground,
I ran to Penny, and she fell into my arms.

"
Are you hurt? Are you okay?" I said over and over until she assured me she was fine. Percy danced around us in the street, and Norbert went back to being his usual, boring self. I ignored the few whispers of,
"Norbert? Really?"
and just continued holding Penny. It was over. It was all over.

Penny, Percy, and I left town a few days later. I'd decided Texas wasn't really the place for us and thought maybe we could settle in Denver. Penny agreed to marry me, and I adopted Percy as my own. Norbert acted like nothing ever happened.

We built a large house in a nice neighborhood of
Denver. Penny started a school, and Percy attended. Mother started that foundation for war widows and orphans. She hired widows of men from my old unit to run the foundation. I liked that.

Jebediah Smith was named the next
marshal of Felony, Texas. And since Figgins was dead and had no kin, the town gave Jeb the marshal's big house.

I gave Jeb my stack of western novels.
I didn't need them anymore, and he had a lot to learn about how things were supposed to be done in the West. Funny how he never thanked me for that.

With his new job and house
and future, I was happy that Jeb had finally found his calling.

And in Miss Penny Philpot and her brother Percy,
I'd found mine.

Rome—44 A.D.

He'd really done it this time. Gaul Bombay had gone rogue. And I had to hunt him down and kill him. And he was my brother. Scratch that. My
idiot
brother.

I stood before the Elders, itchy in my new wool toga.
While I love a new toga as much as the next girl, I took little pleasure in this one now. What was going on? No one had ever gotten another Bombay as an assignment before. This was unreal. Or rather, it
was
real, and as Gaul's sister, I'd have to deal with it.

"
There's no point in arguing with us, Caspian," my grandmother intoned from the dais. Tall and thin with a long nose, I always thought she looked a bit like a regal stork of sorts. Well, one who wore too much makeup and had the power to decide who lives or dies, that is.

"
We've made up our mind and cannot be moved." That was the truth. No one argued with my grandmother. She was notorious for cutting you down and making you feel like an infant. But that never stopped me before. I was a bit of an idiot myself.

I stared at the parchment in my hand.
"But we've never killed one of our own before!" I protested. The Bombays were an ancient family—we'd been around
forever
. You couldn't just make up new rules after all these centuries of tradition, right?

Grandmother shook her head
. "I know that. But we cannot have your brother going around killing people who aren't on their assignment list. The poet Cinna was the third and last straw. We have no choice."

The other Elders nodded in agreement.
There would be no more discussion, mainly because I believed they were all a little afraid of Grandmother too. In frustration, I stuffed the parchment into my toga and left.

Back at home,
Father turned the document over in his hands, as if it didn't really exist. I couldn't blame him. It was quite a shock. Technically, Bombays aren't supposed to tell other family members who their targets are—it made
plausible deniability
a bit easier. But this was new, so I decided there wasn't precedence for it. Of course, the Council might just decide to hunt me down too, but that was a risk I was willing to take.

"
But why?" he said as he held it up to me, as if I hadn't gone over it again and again with him.

"
He's an example," I said quietly. "This is a new rule, starting now. If any Bombay runs renegade and starts killing people outside the Council's orders, the penalty is death."

I
n a weird way, part of me totally got that. The Bombays hadn't gotten as far as we had in this business by straying from the assignments. Gaul was an ass who always did what he wanted. And recently he'd killed whomever he wanted. He thought being an assassin allowed him to kill with impunity—but he knew the rules didn't run that way. And now, they were making up new rules because of him.

He was like that as a child with
small animals. Our parents never knew what to do with him. They maintained his training and hoped it would make him a good assassin. It did, I suppose, if your victims are starlings or fish.

Father dropped into a chair and buried his face in his hand
s. Of course he was upset. His only daughter had to kill his only son. But he was a Bombay. I was certain his feelings were at war with logic here. Thank the gods Mother was dead. I don't think she could've handled it.

Not that she ever handled it well. Marrying into the Bombays was not easy. You had to agree
to raise your children to be paid killers. Still, there were benefits. We were very wealthy, and Mother'd had a serious sandal habit.

But you never had to worry about money or security when you were married to a
Bombay. Bombays were politically connected and protected. Still, Mother'd always had a fragile mind—the wrong flowers in a vase would set her off, and there was that one time when a lizard looked at her funny. We'd had to replace half the staff that day when all was said and done. When the fever took her a few years ago, I suspect we were all a little relieved in a sad way.

"
I should talk to them…" Father said quietly.

I shook my head.
"I tried. Your own mother gave the orders. Their minds are set."

I waited for him to collect his thoughts. Who could blame him? No
Bombay had ever dealt with something like this before. Well, okay, there was that one time, a century ago, when Mykonos Bombay went a little berserk and killed a bunch of politicians using nothing but a pair of pliers—but people were kind of forgiving about that for some reason.

"
Father," I said softly, hating the words I knew I had to say. "This has to be done. You know it does. Maybe we've always known it. Gaul has been…difficult…most of his life."

After a few moments, he stood u
p and nodded. Then he left me. Knowing Father, he'd lose himself in his miniatures hobby. At present, he was recreating the Battle of Troy, complete with a tiny Achilles and blood-soaked Hector. I used to point out that he was stretching history a bit whenever he'd throw in a herd of rabid badgers or giant, carnivorous plants—but that always fell on deaf ears. He'd be in his workshop for days. It was time to prepare.

Gaul
hadn't lived with us for over a year. He'd moved out, and we rarely saw him except at holidays (He always turned up for a gift, the bastard.) or family get-togethers—only because they were mandatory. But over the past year, we'd heard about his exploits.

There were men who beat on the door in the middle of the night, demanding we pay for his gambling debts
. (And a few who didn't survive the booby traps we had there—it had taken me a week to disable them all.) Common prostitutes would approach us in the market and show us bruises Gaul had given them. (FYI, be careful how you approach a Bombay on the street—that woman had a hard time accepting my apology through a broken nose.) And then, the murders had started.

The first was a criminal
—someone we would normally kill on contract anyway. The man had hustled Gaul, cheating him out of his money and a large quantity of wine. (The money was meaningless to Gaul, but I heard it was some really choice wine.) Gaul beat him to death in a public bath house. There were many witnesses. The authorities decided to look the other way. Father had hoped this would be a one-time thing.

It wasn
't.

The Elders called us to meet with them after Gaul
's second victim—a young peasant girl who had wandered into town and into Gaul's clutches. She was found with her throat slit in our back yard holding one of Gaul's prized diadems. There were no witnesses, and Gaul was actually at the meeting, insisting he was innocent. That's when the doubt began to settle in the Council's mind.

Now, he
'd had the poet Cinna murdered by a mob at Caesar's funeral. It had looked like an accident. After all, a totally different man named Cinna was one of the conspirators in Caesar's assassination. But the crowd turned on the wrong guy.

Several people remembered
Gaul inciting it, insisting it was the conspirator Cinna and whipping the mourning mob into a murderous frenzy. The poor man was torn apart. Two people said they saw Gaul on the edges, laughing. I'd wondered what he'd had against the poet.

Cinna was a bit of a perverse freak
—his poems were about incest between fathers and daughters, but he didn't deserve to die like that. Some of the witnesses swore that Gaul appeared all over the place, disguising his voice each time to make it sound like a lot of people were calling for Cinna's death.

People really are stupid
, and it doesn't take much to get them whipped up into a murderous rage. It was, as mentioned, at Caesar's funeral and all, and folks were still a bit touchy about his assassination. It would be irresponsible for me to fail to mention we had nothing to do with Julius Caesar's assassination. A public scene with senators going all stabby? Too stupid for words.

Anyway, after Cinna
's death-by-mob, there was nothing else for the Elders to do. They had to set Gaul up. We would lose all credibility if our employers thought we would just kill whomever we wanted. And I was the Bombay assigned to do it. Why? Because Gaul wouldn't see it coming.

I was surprised to discover my feelings were vague on doing this. He was my brother, after all. Shouldn
't I be more upset? Then again, he always bullied me—tormented me. And I really believed that he had killed that peasant girl.

Besides,
who didn't want to kill off their brother now and then? The only difference was most people saw reason and didn't follow through with it. I, on the other hand, had been ordered by my family to strike the deciding blow.

No, the Council was right.
Gaul was a danger and embarrassment to the Bombays. He was an error in the fabric spun by the gods, and he had to be unraveled and corrected. I steeled myself for this job and decided that the less Father knew about it, the better. I made a note to try to find him a bunch of miniature meerkats for his diorama. That might cheer him up.

Later that night, after packing a bag with a few things, I left the house and made my way into the streets of
Rome. I slipped quietly through the crowds, unnoticed, working my way toward the red light district. That would be where I'd find my brother. The sooner I got this over with, the faster Father could recover. At least, that's what I'd hoped.

The streets of
Rome at this late hour were filled with beggars, prostitutes, politicians, and thieves—all basically the same thing in my opinion. No one wanted to be "seen" here, so no one saw me.

I liked to divide my assignments
into small, achievable goals. Unlike other members of my family, I tended to get overwhelmed easily. This was a problem when I was younger, resulting in some very botched assignments. I would like to point out that I completed each and every one of them—the Council, on the other hand, would probably say that I "lacked focus." I don't truly understand that because, regardless of the fact that the target may have ended up in two to four pieces, or maybe died a little bit too publicly, or the poison maybe ended up melting the victim's face off accidentally, there
was
a body in the end, and it was most assuredly dead. Anything else is just nitpicky, really.

It was my father who came up with the idea of piecing out each assignment into smaller, easier to digest chunks. Take it one step at a time…don
't think about the next step—just do the first thing on your list. Once that's complete, move on to the next, and so on.
The gladiator in the arena can only kill one lion at a time. So take it lion by lion,
he liked to say. It worked out pretty well for me, and my assignments—now with my new and improved
To Do
lists—worked out easier.

Gaul
loved to exploit this weakness of mine. He'd tease and cajole until I was so freaked out I couldn't see straight. Then I'd figured how to deal with Gaul using the same idea. Gaul had a terror of mice. I'd put a live mouse in his bed every night he tormented me. If he didn't stop, the mouse got larger and more vicious until it was a very bitey rat gnawing him awake. See? Lion by lion! Works every time.

I never had to go beyond the rat, and I
'm not sure what I would've used if I had…an irritated mongoose with an unfortunate skin rash maybe? Well, it didn't matter anyway because this twenty-four-year-old woman had finally convinced her asshole big brother to leave her the hell alone.

My goal for tonight was t
o find an inn and bed down. This would be my headquarters from where I would run my surveillances. I kept the picture of a small, quiet room in my head until I found the perfect spot.

The Odalisque Inn
was on a side street and catered to a more discreet clientele. Mainly it seemed that these were senators who wanted to conduct business that would upset Mrs. Senator. The rooms were tiny but clean, and the dining room was full of dark, private corners.
Perfect
.

I unpacked my things and lay down on my bed to think. Here was where I
'd come up with the next step in my plan—find Gaul. Finding him and killing him outright wasn't totally out of the question. When you're a Bombay, you take every opportunity you can. But opportunity was a fickle mistress, and I'd say that ninety-nine percent of the time planning was called for.

Tomorrow, I
'd start figuring out exactly where I was in relation to my brother. By afternoon, I'd start nosing around the kinds of places my brother would frequent. I didn't think I'd find him that soon and factored that into my plan. The key was to accomplish each step until I reached my goal. I really wished we could use papyrus—I'd feel so much better with a large chart I could spread out. Unfortunately, that sort of evidence would be dangerous lying around, and the Bombay Council forbids it. They had a weird distrust of the stuff.

I committed the next step to memory.
Satisfied that I was set for the next day, I drifted off to sleep.

I waited until mid-morning to emerge from my room and had a simple yet satisfying breakfast at the inn. I
'd disguised myself as a young man, which was fairly easy to do. Roman clothes weren't much different for men and women except in color. My flat chest and, let's face it, dull features made it fairly easy to pull this off. I had a very expensive wig made years ago that allowed me to stuff my hair under it. Unlike other Roman women, I was not blessed with thick hair.