Chapter 10
Days Later
Somewhere in Bolivia
The idleness of inevitable waiting is the part I hate most about contracts. I’m always on the move because free time leaves room for thoughts I don’t want to have.
I walk over to the window of the cheap hotel and look out at the small town in the Bolivian countryside. It’s already past midnight, and the streets look sleepy. Occasionally, the stillness of the dark is broken by a passerby or the sound of a beat-up car dragging itself down the road.
I’m bored, and at the same time, trying to fill my head with anything that isn’t her, Jackie, because I know that if I let the thoughts of what happened in her apartment a few nights ago sneak in, they’ll spread through every empty space inside me, and I’ve got plenty of emptiness waiting to be filled.
There are still four hours until I carry out my mission, a basically bureaucratic job with zero emotion involved: eliminate a low-level Bolivian drug dealer who’s been messing with the big cartels’ business.
This contract isn’t personal. It’s just about the money. I couldn’t care less about the death of drug dealers. Honestly, I even hope the guy who hired me to take out his competitor ends up meeting his own end at the hands of someone like me.
I don’t have a God complex, deciding who lives or dies. I’m the cleaner, the guy who helps make the world a little less fucked up. To me, drug dealers and pedophiles fall into nearly the same category on the evolutionary scale, they don’t deserve to share the air with the rest of the population.
This will be the last job of the semester. I’m at a point in my life where I can afford to take just four jobs a year, and maybe soon, I’ll stop altogether.
I don’t kill for pleasure. Death is my business, the same way fashion is for a designer.
Today’s mission will be clean and fast. No traces. In less than twelve hours, I’ll be gone from this godforsaken place.
I should disappear for a few months. Keep my distance from everything.
Jackie has her life back on track, finding her balance again after the scare she had with her friend’s kidnapping.
She doesn’t work at that damn bar anymore like she did two years ago.
Now she does volunteer work and moved into a new apartment.
When I bought her old place and made her think it was Martin who did it, I paid the condo fees and everything else upfront until she turned twenty-five. Not because the date means anything to me, but because I like round numbers.
I planned to extend the condo payments for another five years, but then she started looking for new places and I figured maybe that apartment was too big for one person.
She was probably planning to use the leftover money from selling the old place and buying a cheaper one to start some kind of savings.
I could’ve handled it all. Kept her in the old place and given her enough cash to build a good nest egg and invest in a few stocks, but she’s too proud. She never would’ve accepted my help.
So, I made sure she got a great deal. I bought the place Jackie wanted, without her knowing, and resold it to her for forty percent less than it was worth.
Now she can afford to go back to school if she wants to, and spend some time doing what she loves: helping those in need, without risking herself in that hellhole she used to work in at night.
The sale happened during the first year Taylor was missing.
I know everything about Jackie’s life, but not much about the people around her. I’m not that interested in humans in general—unless they have a connection to me.
And then, about twelve months ago, one of my men told me—while I was out of the country—that Jackie had been going to hospitals and morgues once a week, and joining support groups for missing persons in Manhattan.
That sparked my curiosity, and I did something I hadn’t done since Martin died: I called her.
At first, she didn’t want to talk. She kept her distance, stayed cold. But soon, she confessed about her friend. It didn’t take me long to track down the redhead on some island in Asia, but unlike Jackie, I wasn’t so sure she’d actually been kidnapped.
What can I say? I’m a skeptic when it comes to human nature. In the end, Jackie was right and I was wrong. The girl had been taken against her will, and I’m still following the trail of what really happened.
They reunited over eight months ago, though for a while, Taylor was kept away, trying to get her life—and especially her mind—back in order, since she lost her memory.
They’re finally in the same city again. Jackie has someone real close by.
Someone besides a vigilante hitman with obsessive tendencies to look out for her.
I close my eyes for a second and remember the look on her face when she came in my arms. I’ve never felt connected to a woman when it comes to sex. I see sex as a physical need, like eating or sleeping. There’s no affection, no feelings, no emotions involved beyond the pleasure of orgasm.
When I went after her at the club, I wasn’t prepared to come face-to-face with the grown-up version of Jackie. In my arrogance, I thought I was just going to look out for her again on a special night when she needed company.
No, that’s not true. Ever since I talked to her on the phone over a year ago, when I went looking for her redheaded friend, this need for contact started brewing inside me.
I fought the urge for months, and then, on the anniversary of Martin’s death, I had the perfect excuse and went to see her.
I push away the memory of the taste of her tongue. Of how passionate and willing she is. And most of all, what I read in her journal.
Jackie is my weakness—she always has been—because I care about her. And right before a mission, that’s the worst kind of thought I could be having.