Endings by Linda Richards (portable ebook reader .TXT) 📗

think there was anyone in the building, but I knew that a “silenced” gun was anything but silent. I eased the slide back to ensure there was a round in the chamber, then checked the magazine even though I knew I’d filled it before I left the house. I took off the safety and put my hand on the door before I could change my mind.

He stirred when I reentered the room, the gun in my hand. I stopped and stood perfectly still, another piece of art in the room. In the silence, he settled back into slumber. I was glad. I didn’t want him to be awake. Before I could change my mind or he could fully wake, I cocked the Bersa and plugged three rounds into him—two into his chest, one into his temple—to be sure the job was done.

In the bathroom, afterwards, I washed my hands in the sink. I could see a drop of his blood on my upper lip. I licked it away.

CHAPTER FIVE

THERE ARE TIMES, in all of our lives, when everything is very difficult. The paths we take, the jobs we do, the choices we make, all result in difficulties. It is as though we are constantly swimming upstream.

At other times, we take a corner, make a choice, and everything falls into place—bing, bing, bing—like dominoes, falling into each other in an orderly fashion. After my time of swimming upstream, after I killed Max, my life was like that. Everything fell into place. Dominoes. Black and white. All fitting together as they should.

My husband died. Let’s leave it at that. There was the fire. Then there was a lot of suffering. And then there was none.

My husband died quietly. In his sleep. I was there.

Afterwards, I bent my head to his chest and wept. The tears came from deep inside me. I didn’t see it coming, that grief. The sobs ripped from my chest with a violent intensity. It was a primal thing. Primitive. There was nothing of control about it. I cried for the life we had built together, in ashes now. I cried for the splendid young man I had met and later married. I cried, of course, for the child we made together and whom I had buried alone. And then I cried for nothing at all beyond the vast whiteness of feeling that overcame me, enveloped me. I sobbed beyond the point when my body had anything at all to give.

Nurses came. Pulled me from him gently. Said words of comfort and made me drink something. Patted my back. Held me.

None of it healed me, of course. It wasn’t meant to. But after a while, the crying stopped and, after a while longer, my hands stopped shaking and the shuddering breaths settled into something more like normal breathing. Later still, I walked into sunshine, amazed to feel my skin react to warmth from the sun and the scent of flowers on the air. Astonished to still feel good to be alive. Astonished and questioning. It didn’t seem right, somehow.

How could it be right?

But for a while, after my husband died, it was the last difficult thing. Then the falling into place began. I didn’t even see it coming until it was all there, ordered neatly around me.

Dominoes.

I arranged for an agency to represent me.

Those words simplify a lengthy process. Lengthy but not difficult. I just had to think it through. In the job I had in my previous life, I had provided a service, but someone else had done the marketing. It is important in life, I think, to know your strengths, understand your limitations.

So now, again, I had a need: a livelihood. The ability to keep a roof over my head, even though I was now alone in the world and so didn’t need much of a roof. And I now had a previously undiscovered skill. I just had to work out how to put those things together: the need and the skill.

I knew that the likelihood of overhearing another conversation as I had in the hospital room Julian the artist and my late husband had shared was unlikely, if not impossible. But what could duplicate that circumstance? Where could I be or go to find someone who might be looking for my particular talent?

The Internet, at first, didn’t provide an answer. It produced spoofs and jokes and even video games along with loads of links to film and fictional hit men. It became clear to me that no hard and fast advice that was found there could be taken with anything but a lot of salt. I was coming up dry when an oblique reference to something in an article related to assassination triggered an idea. “The subject said he had found a hit man advertising in a mercenary magazine.” I knew I didn’t want to start advertising in magazines, but it made me think; maybe others did.

I drove to the one store in my city that still sold a deep selection of magazines and looked for the mercenary section. It wasn’t difficult: hunting, fishing, killing. There proved to be not one but six different magazines that I thought might contain what I was looking for. I took a deep breath and waded in, buying all six, then heading home with the idea of continuing my research.

It was clear from that first reading that I was not the intended demographic of the magazines I brought home and then spread out on my bed. Large-breasted women posed in ads for shotguns and off-road vehicles. “In-depth” pieces brayed lustily about traveling across the world to work for Saudi princes and Russian mobsters, but I wasn’t here for the articles. I kept skimming, hoping I’d know what I was looking for if I saw it. After a while, I was pretty sure I’d come up empty again and started preparing to make a new plan. Then I turned a page, and something clicked.

At first, I wasn’t entirely sure what