AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The cat—he didn’t know his name so he was just “the cat”—was his only real friend these days, with the one possible exception of Courtland Gentry, and at this late point in his life, Don Fitzroy endeavored to treat his friends well.
TWENTY-FOUR
The Jensen Estates Condominiums sit on Jensen Road in the usually quiet neighborhood of Watertown, Massachusetts. The four-story brick-and-white-painted-wood structure had most definitely seen better days, but it was a nice-enough-looking building, constructed in the 1990s in a Colonial style that was in keeping with the architecture of the greater Boston area.
With eighteen units on three floors, it wasn’t a large place, but at ten thirty p.m., all the spots in the small lot out back were filled with cars, the occupants home and locked in, because this was a working-class residence with a few retirees mixed in, so most people here were either elderly or had to be up early in the morning.
But not all people here. The man who lived in unit 301 worked an unpredictable schedule, both days and nights, and the lady downstairs occasionally heard him coming and going at strange hours, his door slamming above her and then his GMC Sierra work truck firing up below her.
Marge Hamm was eighty-one years old, and her hearing wasn’t so good, so she never noticed his footsteps above her, only the shutting of his front door, the firing of the eight-cylinder engine, and the running water from his shower as it drained down a pipe inside her living room wall.
Until tonight.
Right at ten thirty, just as she changed channels on her TV, a new noise came from above. The sound of breaking wood.
Marge Hamm muted her TV just as it switched to a commercial about funeral insurance, and she listened carefully for any hint as to what she’d just heard. She knew the young man above, Andrew something, but not well. She saw him coming and going occasionally, always dressed in his work uniform, but she’d never engaged in much more than a wave because his face was always buried in his cell phone when he passed her in the hall or the lot outside.
Still, he always looked up from his phone long enough to smile and wave back. He seemed like a nice enough young man, and he never had loud parties or late-night guests.
A second noise, more muted than the first but unmistakable, came from somewhere above her thirty seconds later. This was more of a pop, and she was unable to figure out what could have caused it.
The woman stood, walked to her back window, and looked out over the parking lot. A dog barked in the distance. She saw Andrew’s big gray GMC in the lot, so she knew he was home, and she wondered what was happening.
She sat back down, unsure, listened as carefully as her poor hearing would allow for further indications of any other disturbances in her building, and for over a minute she heard absolutely nothing more than the distant dog whose barks had already begun trailing off.
And then Marge’s weak ears registered a new noise; it was soft but nonetheless recognizable because she heard it all the time.
The shower in the unit upstairs had turned on, sending water through the pipe in her wall not five feet from her head.
With this, Marge Hamm halted her vigilance. Andrew was knocking stuff around apparently, but now he was in the shower, so presumably he was just fine.
NCIS came on the TV; she turned the volume back up and told herself she’d watch till the next commercial break, then head in to clean her kitchen because tomorrow was trash pickup day.
•••
American assassin Scott Kincaid, code-named Lancer, stood in the warm bathroom, a towel around his waist, rubbing his ruddy cheeks with his rough hands. It felt strange to do so, because he hadn’t touched bare skin there in many years.
The bathroom mirror remained fogged after his long shower, but he dragged a forearm across it and then looked at his face more closely.
He’d just shaved his bushy beard into a trim goatee. He’d done it in the shower without a mirror, so now he grabbed the foamy razor and made a few touch-ups, nicking the skin just under his right ear in the process, since it had been so long since he’d shaved that he was out of practice.
He searched around the bathroom for any tissue to stop the trickle of blood before it dripped on the floor or the sink in front of him, started to go for the toilet to get some paper, but then an idea occurred to him. He wondered if there was a styptic pencil, used for stopping shaving cuts, in the cabinet behind the mirror.
He wondered, he did not know, because this was not his bathroom.
Scott Kincaid began to open the mirror, then stopped when it was at a forty-five-degree angle as the reflection caught something he wanted to look at more than he wanted to stanch the few drops of blood on his neck. With the mirror in this position it gave him a view out the door to his right and into the bedroom of the apartment, and through the reflection he now gazed at the body of a man lying face up on his bed, arms out to the side, a bullet hole through his forehead.
There would be blood on the bed under the body; it would be all over the place, but Kincaid couldn’t see it because there was only a single bedside lamp on, and the majority of the dead man and his bed remained in darkness.
But he did see the face. A twenty-six-year-old white male with a goatee and dark hair. A bullet wound through the forehead, fired from a suppressed 10-millimeter pistol, though since Kincaid had already retrieved the shell casing, it would take time for forensics to work that out.
The man was just a nobody, Kincaid thought as he closed the mirror again, removing his view of the corpse.
Not a nobody, he corrected himself after a moment’s contemplation. The twenty-six-year-old had a uniform and badges and a marked pickup truck, and the assassin called Lancer needed all of these items tonight.
His French female controller at Operations Center Gama had given him the address and identity of the man, and she told him that out of all seventy-two security officers who worked for Massachusetts Automation Endeavors, Inc., a gargantuan robotics firm with home offices here in Boston, Andrew Danvers was the closest in appearance to the race, height, and weight information Kincaid had submitted.
Lancer was bald, but once he’d closed the mirror and used a torn piece of toilet paper to stop the little cut on his neck, he lifted a black wig out of his backpack. He placed it on his head, adjusting it a bit, then styling it as closely to the hair of the dead man in the next room as he could.
