The Assassin's Prayer (2 page)

A
second later a little girl ran into the room, crying, “Purry!
Purry!!
” She
jumped onto the couch and scrambled toward the other end, calling for her pet. Right
behind her was a woman wearing only a short, filmy nightgown that did nothing
to hide her curvaceous body. She didn’t even look at Kain; just lunged across the
sofa after the little girl. Her short gown slid up over her waist, exposing her
perfectly heart-shaped ass.

It
was almost Kain’s last sight on earth. With images of satin buttocks dancing on
his retinas, he nearly missed the movement on his peripheral. He threw himself
sideways as Johnson spun into the entrance and fired his Glock-17 in one
smooth, well-practiced motion. Kain felt the slug sizzle past his ear and then
he hit the floor, landing hard on his shoulder. Broken glass dug and scraped at
him but the pain barely registered, forced into submission by more pressing
needs such as not having his internal organs scrambled by a bullet.

Still
skidding along the carpet, he triggered the shotgun and took out Johnson’s
legs, churning everything below the knees into chunky pulp. Johnson went down
like a cut-string marionette, screaming out of a face twisted in agony. Huddled
on the couch, the woman pressed the little girl’s face to her chest.

As
he climbed to his feet and stalked toward Johnson, Kain felt the familiar
iciness seeping through him, leaching away concepts like compassion, sympathy,
and mercy. Right now, with the pungency of blood and cordite polluting the air,
there was no room for such emotions. His eyes brimmed with glittering,
wolf-like savagery. The crackle and crunch of glass under his boots sounded
strangely ominous in the unnatural quiet that had settled over the house in the
wake of all this violence. The woman softly whimpered but she was nothing more
than background noise and he ignored her as such. She was scared out of her
mind and way too frightened to try anything, especially with the kid clutched
in her arms.

Despite
the agony of his buckshot amputation, Johnson still made a game attempt to
raise his Glock as Kain approached. Kain kicked it out of his hand, snapping
the black man’s wrist in the process. He could literally smell Johnson’s fear,
a rankness that seeped from his pores. Few men could stare into the Reaper’s
eyes without fear and as it turned out, Johnson was not one of those few. “P-p-please,”
Johnson blubbered. “D-don’t k-k-kill me, m-m-man. I’m b-b-beggin’ y-y-you.”

Kain
had expected better from Johnson. The man had spent the last twenty years
living by the gun and should have known that when you play with guns, you’re eventually
going to eat a bullet. Kain himself suffered from no delusion that he would die
peacefully in his bed of old age; when his time came, he would go down hard and
bloody on the killing field. That’s just the way it was.

Kain’s
cold gaze raked Johnson’s face as if scouring skin from skull. “Suck it up, fella.
It’s your turn to dance with the devil.” He pressed the muzzle of the SPAS-12
right over Johnson’s frantically-beating heart.

Johnson
closed his eyes. “Oh, G-G-God. I don’t w-w-wanna d-d-d-die.”

“Who
does?” Kain said and pulled the trigger. Johnson’s chest came apart like a
blood-stuffed piñata whacked by a professional baseball player. The force of
the point blank impact smashed him flat on his back so that his dead eyes stared
up at the ceiling.

The
threat neutralized, Kain turned toward the woman and child huddled on the sofa,
wondering who they were. They had not been listed on the stats sheet. The young
girl appeared to be five or six, her rumpled My Little Pony pajamas indicating
she had been sleeping. The woman looked to be in her late thirties. Her large,
doe-like eyes gazed at him in shock and fear. By any man’s standards, she was
beautiful, her oval face framed by sleep-tousled dark brown hair. Her negligee
was so scant and filmy that she might as well have been wearing nothing; Kain
could see her every curve, the firm swell of her breasts, the smooth expanse of
her thighs.

For
a flickering instant he felt desire, something he had not experienced since his
wife died. But the moment lasted for no longer than a single heartbeat before
he crushed the emotion as if it were an unwelcome insect that would soil him if
allowed to linger.

As
Kain walked over to them, the woman clutched the little girl even closer and
tried to shrink into the sofa as if hoping some magical door would open up and
whisk them away from this nightmare. “Please,” she said as Kain towered over
her, shotgun still in his fist, “don’t hurt us.”

Kain
canted the shotgun over his shoulder, pointed away from the two huddled,
miserable, quivering creatures on the couch. “Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m
Rene Perelli,” the woman said, “and this is my daughter Amy.”

Peter
Perelli’s wife and kid. Why hadn’t they been listed on the stat sheets?

Amy
lifted her cherubic face from her mother’s chest and peeked out at Kain with
frightened eyes. “Are you gonna hurt us, mister?”

Kain
ignored her and looked at Rene. “Where is he?”

“Who?”

“Don’t
even try to play dumb. You know why I’m here.”

Rene
stroked her daughter’s curls comfortingly. “How much are they paying you?
What’s the going rate for a man’s life these days?”

Kain’s
voice was hard as bullets as he rasped, “You don’t tell me where your husband
is, your little girl is going to grow up without a mother.” It was a bluff—Kain
would never harm a woman or child—but Rene didn’t know that. He had demonstrated
his ruthlessness by executing Johnson in cold blood right in front of her eyes;
as far as Rene knew, Kain would not think twice about dropping the hammer on
her with the same dispassion he would use to flush a dead goldfish down the
toilet.

Desperate
tears dripped down Rene’s cheeks. “And if I do tell you, she’ll grow up without
a father.”

“That’s
life, lady. Sometimes children pay for the sins of their fathers.”

“Please,”
Rene pleaded. “Just walk away. Whatever they’re paying you, Peter will double
it.”

Kain
had heard the pitch dozens of times before. He stared at her, stony, stoic,
waiting.

“There
must be something you want!” Rene was on the verge of a total breakdown. “Something
that will make you walk away!” She was holding it together through nothing more
than sheer willpower and that appeared to be fraying fast.

Time
to up the ante on his bluff. Kain whipped the shotgun off his shoulder. Pressed
it under her chin, forcing her head up. “The only thing I want,” Kain snarled,
“is your husband.” He felt like shit, making this innocent woman squirm on the
end of his gun, but it had to be done. Her choked sobs ripped at his conscience
but he forced himself to ignore them. “Where is he?” Kain demanded. “Where’s
your husband?”

“Right
here,” someone said and gunfire filled the room.

Kain
hurled himself backward the instant the first syllable left Peter Perelli’s
lips. By the time the mobster actually fired, Kain no longer occupied the space
where Perelli had aimed. The bullet sailed by Kain’s face, close enough for him
to feel the disruption of air as it passed. He landed on his back and swung the
SPAS-12 toward Perelli, who was frantically trying to reacquire him in the
sights of his pearl-handled .38 revolver.

Kain
triggered the shotgun. Buckshot slammed into the wood molding framing the doorway
in which Perelli stood. Slivers exploded everywhere. Several of them found
Perelli’s flesh, slashing open a dozen small cuts on his face and neck. Perelli
snarled in pain and fired a wild shot. The bullet clipped the corner of the
coffee table and ricocheted into the arm of the sofa, mere inches from where
his wife and daughter cowered. Perelli fired again and again, wild and
reckless, flinging lead with no regard for the innocents in the room,
endangering his own family.

Kain
put an end to the mobster’s panicked spray-and-pray antics with another shotgun
blast, blowing the revolver into scrap metal and tearing his hand to dripping
red tatters.

“DAAADDDYYYY!!!”
Amy pulled away from her mother and
ran to her father. She wrapped her tiny arms around his waist and as Kain
climbed to his feet, he saw blood on her pajamas. This kid was going to need
some serious therapy after tonight. But right now she didn’t seem to care that
her father was bleeding all over her. She looked at Kain with eyes full of tears
and void of understanding. “Don’t hurt my daddy anymore.”

Kain
slung the shotgun over his shoulder, drew his Colt .45, and locked eyes with
Perelli. “Get her out of the way.”

“Please,”
Perelli said, blood streaming from his mangled hand. “I have a family.”

“Yeah,
I saw how much you care about your family when you were chucking bullets all
over the place a minute ago. Won’t tell you again, Perelli—get your kid out of
the way.”

Perelli
searched Kain’s eyes, but whatever he sought—mercy, hope, salvation—he
apparently didn’t find, for he looked down at his daughter and said, “Go to
Mommy, honey.” He sounded resigned, broken.

Amy
balked, hugging him tighter. “No! I don’t want to! I want to stay with you!”

“You
can’t, honey, not right now. Go to Mommy.”

Kain
glanced at Rene. She hadn’t moved from her position on the couch. Tears spilled
down her face as she looked at her husband with anguished eyes.

Amy
reluctantly peeled herself away from her father and returned to her mother. The
look she gave Kain was that of a little kid who has not gotten her way. Were
the tears dappling her dimpled cheeks tantrum-tears or grief-tears? Did she
grasp the severity of the situation? Did she understand she was about to lose
her father forever?

Kain
wanted out of here. He kept his gaze fixed on Perelli, but he could feel Rene
and Amy’s accusing eyes on him. The sensation made his flesh crawl. He felt
like they had x-ray vision, could somehow stare through his flesh and bones and
see the aching, blood-drenched hollow that was his soul.
Enough of this existential
crap,
he thought.
Time to finish the game.

He
pressed the end of the .45’s suppressor against Perelli’s forehead. It would be
quick and clean. Well, maybe not clean. Little hard to be clean with a .45 at
point blank range.

“Please.”
Perelli’s voice trembled. “You don’t have to do this. Let me set things right.
Tell Giadello I’ll make it up to him.”

“Little
late for that.”

“What
about my little girl? She’ll grow up without a father.”

“Should
have thought about that before you pissed off Frank.”

“You’re
one cold-hearted son of a bitch.”

Kain
didn’t bother with a reply. Just pulled the trigger.

The
suppressor reduced the shot to a muffled cough, but Amy and Rene jumped as if
the Colt had fired at full roar. Rene let out a horrible cry and hid Amy’s face
against her breast.

The
bullet blew through Perelli’s skull and slammed his body backward. He hung
there for a moment, crucified to the wall, then slumped to the floor in a
sitting position at Kain’s feet, head hanging with chin on chest. Blood
dribbled into his lap.

“You
bastard!” Rene sobbed. She looked as if she had aged twenty years in the last
five minutes. “How could you?”

Good
question
, Kain thought. He didn’t
know how he could do what he did, how he could spend his life trading carnage
for cash. He just did it and then did his best to ignore the questions that
seemed to be forever circling inside him. And when those questions got too loud
to ignore, a bottle of Jack Daniels had a way of shutting them up, at least for
a little while.

He
reached into his pocket and took out a white rose. The petals were crumpled,
but still glistened like silk. He dropped it onto Perelli’s body, watching as
it tumbled through the air like a feather from an angel’s wing. In Kain’s mind,
he was not seeing Perelli, he was seeing his wife floating in clear, cool
water, her eyes closed forever. At his feet, the white petals turned red as
Perelli’s blood slowly seeped into the rose; in Kain’s mind, the water in which
his wife lay began to turn blood-red as well.

Then,
as if some internal switch had been flicked, he abruptly pulled himself back to
the present and walked away without a backward glance. He didn’t want to see
the grieving face of the woman he had just widowed. He did not want to look
into the helpless eyes of the little girl he had just left fatherless. All he
wanted to do was get away from here, away from the lives that were now broken
and mangled because of him.

Outside
the night closed around him in a cool, velvet embrace that offered no comfort. He
walked through the darkness that was silent save for the soft sobbing of a
heartbroken child. As he hiked back down the hill to his Jeep, he told himself
that the tears in his eyes were from the wind, nothing more.

He
had never been able to lie to himself worth a damn.

CHAPTER 3

Kain
rendezvoused with Silas at Ardee’s Diner and Truck Stop two days later. As before,
he set the meet for pre-dawn when the shadows still clutched the sky.

They
had the place to themselves this time, but they still sat in the same rear
booth. Steam drifted up from a cup of coffee in front of Silas who busily
worked his way through a plate of fried eggs and sausage with ferocity akin to
Godzilla tearing through downtown Tokyo. He reached for the pepper and in a
rare moment of clumsiness knocked over the shaker. It fell with a soft clunk,
spilling a few black grains that lay on the table like ashes. Silas idly
brushed them away with the back of his hand and for some reason Kain heard the
sound of little Amy Perelli sobbing again. A cold fist clenched his whiskey-soured
guts as that ruthless voice inside reminded him that he himself brushed away
human lives as easily as Silas swept away spilled pepper.

Where
did I go wrong? How did I end up nothing more than a hired gun blowing fathers
away in front of their wives and daughters?
Easy question to ask; hard question to answer. And this was not the
time or place for soul searching.

Silas
pushed away his plate and reached for his cup of coffee. “The job done?”

“Wouldn’t
be here if it wasn’t,” said Kain.

“We
shouldn’t be here anyway,” Silas griped. “Told you I wanted to meet down in the
city this time.”

“What
you want doesn’t matter to me,” Kain said as a tractor trailer rumbled past the
diner, heading west toward the interstate. “All that matters to me is what I
want, and what I want is my money.”

Silas’
eyes narrowed. “Watch your tone, Kain. I know you hate my guts and you have
that right, but I don’t have to put up with your crap.”

Kain
noticed the cynical, overweight waitress and the young, attractive one huddled
together by the milkshake machine. Judging by the way they were nervously
eyeing him and Silas, they weren’t discussing the best way to mix malt. The raw
hostility between him and Silas crackled through the diner like hot sparks.

Kain
felt anger simmering behind his eyes. “Tell you what, Silas, if you don’t want
to put up with my crap, I can just put a bullet between your eyes like I should
have done a long time ago.”

Silas
leaned back as if retreating from the molten intensity of Kain’s gaze. “Kain,”
he said, “it’s been five years.
Five years.
How many times do I have to
say I’m sorry?”

“You
can say you’re sorry until you’re six feet under and I still won’t let it go,”
Kain rasped. “You fucked my wife, you son of a bitch. You were my best friend
and you
fucked my wife
. So don’t sit there and act like you deserve to
be forgiven. The only thing you deserve is a knife in the heart, just like the
one you stuck in my back.”

It
took a herculean effort to keep his mad-dog rage on a tight leash. He wanted
nothing more than to reach across the table and use his bare hands to tear out
Silas’ trachea.

Silas
at least had the decency to look pained, as if Kain’s harsh words had struck
home and struck hard.

“I
can’t take it back,” he said quietly. “If I could, I would, but I can’t. Nothing
can change what happened between me and Karen.” He paused for a moment. “But
remember, Kain, it takes two. Karen took me into her bed willingly, but you
forgave her, right?”

Horrible
memories gnawed at Kain’s brain. “Yeah,” he said. “I forgave her.”

“So
why her and not me?”

“I
loved her.”

“What
about me? I was your best friend.”

“Not
the same.” Kain clenched his fists to keep from shucking the Colt .45 and
emptying the clip across the table until Silas’ lifeblood painted a Picasso on
the wall behind him. The resurrected memories tore at him like rabid rats, the
images replaying on the movie screen of his mind. He relived that day, walking
into his own bedroom and seeing his wife’s legs wrapped around his best
friend’s waist.

Before
that moment, Kain would have thought it impossible to survive the kind of pain
that ripped at his heart. He stood there, paralyzed, shock and horror nailing
his feet to the floor as Silas thrust between her splayed thighs again and
again, his grunts echoing off the walls.

Kain’s
eyes sought Karen’s face, wanting—no,
needing
—some kind of connection.
Her eyes were closed, lips parted in a soft moan as her fingers clutched at
Silas’ sweat-slick body. Then, perhaps alerted by some sixth sense, she opened
her eyes and saw Kain standing there. He watched a rapid-fire series of emotions—shock,
horror, grief, sorrow, and yes, love—sweep through her eyes. And then, finally,
tears. That was when Kain turned and walked away, the sound of her sobbing
chasing him as he fled the scene where love had been betrayed.

He
never fully recovered from that day. He tried, but if there had been an insurance
company for relationships, the claims adjuster would have written this one off
as totaled beyond repair. He and Karen stayed together and made several
stumbling attempts to put things back the way they had been, but their house
was no longer a home. It was a corrupted place, stained by betrayal and tainted
with sins. Kain had been able to forgive her, but he had never been able to
forget.

“You
want to know something, Silas?” Kain said. “I never made love to Karen again.
She wanted to and I tried, really I did, because in spite of it all we still
loved each other, right up until the very end. But every time I tried, all I could
see was your face. Bet you didn’t know that, did you? You were the last person
to ever fuck my wife. Now do you really have the balls to sit there and think
you have the right to ask for my forgiveness?”

Silas’
face was a mask of misery. “No,” he said quietly, “I don’t think I have the
right. I just don’t understand why you can forgive Karen but not me.”

“Maybe
it’s just easier to forgive the dead.”

Silas
leaned forward. “That’s not fair,” he protested. “You can’t put that on me. I
didn’t kill Karen. She took her own life.”

“So
go slit your wrists like she did,” Kain rasped, “and maybe I’ll think about
throwing some forgiveness your way too.”

Silas
slid his hands across the table, palms up, exposing his wrists. Kain could see
the faint tracery of veins pulsing just beneath the surface of the skin. “Go
ahead,” Silas said. “Do it. Take out that pig-sticker of yours and slit my
wrists if that’s what it takes to make things right between us. But I want you
to swear that while I sit here and bleed out, you’ll forgive me for what I did
to you.” He stared at Kain, eyes burning intensely. “What do you say, huh? Will
you do it? Cut me open, bleed me dry … and then forgive me.”

Kain
stared at the blue network of veins for a few seconds. He imagined plunging his
knife into Silas’ wrist and slicing them open. Someday, maybe … but not today.

He
looked Silas in the eye and growled, “No way. You live with it, you son of a
bitch.” He tried to stay stoic, but he could feel the acid of tears stinging
his eyes. “We’re done talking about this.”

Silas
pulled his hands back. “Kain, I really think we should—”

Kain
cut him off. “This subject is closed. Bring it up again and I’ll blow your
teeth out the back of your skull. Got it?”

Silas
nodded. “Yeah, I got it.”

“Good,”
Kain said. “Now where’s my money?”

“I
don’t have it.”

“Then
who does?”

“Frank.
He wants me to bring you back to the city to discuss another job.”

“No
more jobs until I’m paid for the last one.”

“Frank
is going to pay you,” Silas said, “so chill out. He just wants to discuss this
new job with you personally, face to face. Since you would rather stick your
dick in a meat grinder than go near the city, he figured the best way to get
you down there was to hold your money until you came for it.”

Kain
was pissed. Part of him wanted to tell Silas—and by extension, Frank
Giadello—that he was not a puppet who would dance at someone else’s whim. But that
was just anger barking in his ear; the more rational part of him knew there was
nothing he could do about it unless he was willing to say screw the cash. Which
he wasn’t. “Fine,” he said. “Tomorrow. Tell Frank to have my money ready.”

Silas
groaned. “Why not today? It’s not even dawn yet. If we left now we could be...”
His voice trailed off as he looked at Kain and realized he was wasting his
breath. He might as well have been begging a sphinx to crack a smile. “All
right,” he said resignedly. “I’ll find a motel and we can leave tomorrow
morning.”

Kain
stood up. “By the way, in case you didn’t know, breakfast is on you.”

“Yeah,
yeah, yeah.” Silas reached for his wallet.

As
Kain drove home, he thought about the bottle of Jack Daniels in the cupboard
above the refrigerator. Hopefully there was enough left to silence the ghosts
Silas had resurrected.