Old Wounds (Chance Assassin Book 4)

  Old Wounds

  By Nicole Castle

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright: Nicole Castle 2017

  Cover art copyright: Nicole Castle 2017

  For my readers.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  With any war there are casualties. But no amount of crying or throwing of breakables on my part, or simmering insanity on Frank's, could've prepared us for what was waiting on the other side of the Atlantic: a battle that was already over. One that hadn't even begun.

  Roger Foster, former client of Adler and Associates, was arrested for the murders of Gideon Adler and Margaret Evans. The murder weapon, a semi-automatic 9mm, was found wrapped in a blood stained cloth under his porch. He'd been threatening the firm for weeks. It was such a strong case against him, not even Gideon could've gotten him off. Open and shut. Guilty. The end.

  But not for us.

  It should've really been a relief that it wasn't connected to Assassin War and therefore wasn't Frank's fault, but somehow being your average every day double murder actually made it worse. Not only had Maggie and Gideon not been assassinated, their deaths could've easily been prevented if they'd just let us do what we did best.

  And now we were on our way to see the bereaved, to undoubtedly do what we did worst: act like human beings.

  Joe solemnly drove us from the airport back to Casey's apartment after giving us the lowdown on the unfortunately mundane murder situation. Frank said nothing. He hadn't spoken a word in hours. I had a migraine that was quickly growing in severity so any silence was good silence as far as I was concerned, but one glance at him in the rearview mirror proved this silence was far from good.

  Frank could handle guilt. He was used to guilt. After eighteen hours of traveling he'd prepared himself to admit guilt. He'd probably even come to terms with the fact that if Simon had killed them, we would sooner or later have to let Casey know the truth: that this never would've happened if he hadn't ignored Frank's request and drawn everyone's faces in the sketchbook he subsequently misplaced around Malkolm's handler. Frank wouldn't lie to Casey again, not after what happened last time, but saying “I told you so” over the barely cold bodies of your parents would've been far less severe if it could be said while holding the severed head of the man who killed them. Now all that planning and plotting was completely wasted. It wasn't Frank's fault, it wasn't Casey's fault, the man responsible was safely behind bars, and Frank looked bewildered in a way that would've been pitifully adorable if it wasn't so unsettling.

  Tilting the rearview mirror back where it belonged and following my gaze, Joe cautiously asked, “Is he okay?”

  “Can we swing by the jail to kill this guy and a minimum of twenty other people on top of it?”

  “No.”

  “Then no. And when he sees Casey upset he's gonna completely lose it.” He'd already lost it enough not to notice that we were talking about him.

  Joe parked in Maggie's old spot in the underground garage, and because I'm a shitty person I automatically wondered whether I got to claim her 1968 sea green Cadillac convertible. She had been scared of me, but I didn't think I'd be written out of her will. She probably didn't have a will, and that thought more than anything else made me tear up all over again.

  It wasn't fucking fair. They weren't the kind of people who got murdered. I should know, I was intimately acquainted with those people.

  Quickly getting out of the car lest Joe see me cry, I announced that we were gonna take the stairs to the eighth floor since that was kinda Frank's thing. Frank followed me to the stairwell while Joe shuffled his crippled body to the elevator. Frank kept looking around with that same lost, confused expression, like we'd arrived at a hit site and our mark was nowhere to be found. “I know, babe.” I reassuringly squeezed his shoulder and he habitually put his arm around me, but he was so far gone he didn't even question my reference to our lack of murderistic opportunities being basically the same as “Lucy pulling away Charlie Brown's football.”

  Frank paused at the front door of the apartment he'd been paying for since he met them, buying his way into Maggie's trust and the only chance he'd ever get at having a normal life. That unspoken promise he'd take care of Casey in her absence. He heaved a sigh and squeezed his eyes shut in the way that usually ended with his hands around my throat. Then he spat, “Fuck!” and went on in.

  Bella and Sophie Durrant, the au pair, were in matching black dresses. Joe and Miranda sat together on the sofa. Casey and the kid were nowhere to be seen. Frank warily took everything in, on edge like this was a surprise party and he was waiting for someone to jump out at him and try to bring happiness and glee. There sure as hell wasn't any of that to be had around here.

  “He's in the bedroom,” Bella said. She looked hangry, though I could've been projecting. And now there was no one left to bake me peach pie. My migraine got suddenly much worse.

  Frank glanced in that direction with a look of thinly disguised dread like water was about to come flooding out the closed door à la The Shining. A torrent of blood was precisely what we needed right now. I would've settled for a little splash. Or just a sip to take with my pills. Instead I swallowed them dry. It wasn't as if this situation could get any more uncomfortable.

  “Shall we?” I asked.

  Setting his jaw in a way that he probably thought made him look mournful but really just made him look murderous, he lowered his head and led the way.

  I'd only seen Casey cry once before, after Bella spontaneously aborted their kid all over me, and seeing someone fall that far from his normal state of happiness was just as traumatizing as the unborn child gore she'd left on my clothes. But I knew it was even more traumatizing for Frank. Casey was the golden standard of joy for him, a pillar of light untouchable by the demons that haunted Frank. Formerly untouchable.

  He was lying in bed, curled up with his sleeping daughter, twirling his fingers in her hair. The glow from behind us in the hallway and a purple dinosaur nightlight plugged into the wall gave just enough illumination to show that it was even worse than I'd imagined. He looked like he'd been crying for weeks, not just hours. It looked like he hadn't smiled in even longer. And never would again.

  “Hey,” Casey said quietly, his voice as hoarse as Frank's had been when he broke the news to me, and I realized we'd been standing there staring at each other for awhile. Or at least, he and Frank were staring at each other. Frank hadn't moved, not even a nod in Casey's direction. And just like that, Frank had turned a brand new shade of crazy.

  There was the calculating murderer Frank that I knew and loved, and the out of his mind tearing his thumb off to protect me Frank that I liked even more, but this was animalistic and desperate, chew his foot off to get out of the trap unreasonable. And he genuinely looked trapped.

  “So,” I started, glancing at Frank in a silent plea to stop me from saying something I shouldn't as the tension increased in the room. He didn't. “At least it's not your fault.”

  Casey's eyes drifted towards me and they were all swollen and bloodshot and my idiot inner voice decided that the only logical course of action would be to give him advice on being an orphan since I had way more experience in that matter.

  “This sucks. A lot. Trust me, everything in your life is going to change. Everything. I mean, your dad died already but that's not really the same. Plus he was kind of an asshole. Being an orphan is like, serious abandonment. But look on the bright side you'
ve totally got the jump on me with the whole assassin ward thing, with Frank and with Bella, so it's not like you're going to have to go out and suck cock—” By the grace of god I stopped myself, but god's grace was momentary and not very thorough since I only gave pause long enough to confirm, “she is asleep, right?”

  Leaning over her to check as if he wasn't fully aware of the possibility of having to explain to a little girl why anyone would suck on a rooster, he slumped back to the damp pillow. “Yeah. She's asleep. Maybe you should go to bed too. You look tired.” It was the nicest way I'd ever been told to shut the fuck up.

  “I have a headache,” I said, an excuse for my failed attempt at a Hallmark Card sympathy speech while not actually apologizing directly. I didn't want to say I was sorry. I kept thinking about the dream I'd had about them, about Maggie calling me a killer. If we'd done what we were supposed to, what was in our nature, we would've killed Roger Foster and Maggie and Gideon would still be alive. Casey wouldn't be crying and Frank wouldn't be...going and lying down with Casey and staring helplessly into space the way Hugo did when I was sick and he couldn't comprehend with his doggy brain what to do to make me feel better, but every ounce of his oversized being needed to fix me.

  But Frank spooning him just made Casey break down and sob, and even if I could handle watching Casey do that while my head pounded there was no way I could handle seeing Frank's reaction to it as his eyes got more and more distant.

  “Well goodnight,” I muttered, swallowing another handful of pills as I shut the door behind me.

  Joe was leaning against the wall, not close enough to eavesdrop but close enough to be the first thing I saw when I left the room. “I've got this. You go to bed.”

  He didn't have to tell me twice.

  Chapter Two

  Frank focused on the light until all he could see was purple, then it faded into darkness as lights were prone to do. It had been hours, lying there as the rest of the apartment grew silent. Only when he was certain that everyone was asleep did he get out of bed, standing over Casey and Sylvia, the girl sucking her thumb. There was one single way he could end it, stop Casey's suffering completely. It would be quick, and quiet. Painless for Casey. Agony for everyone who loved him. Unbearable for Frank.

  Gently prying the nightlight out of the wall and engulfing the room in the true darkness he'd been merely imagining, Frank unscrewed the bulb and slipped it into his pocket. He removed his wallet but kept the cash, setting it on the nightstand beside the plastic dinosaur. He placed a cigarette between his lips as he left the room, closing the door behind him.

  He was nearly to the front door when he heard Sophie call out to him from the sofa. “Où vas-tu?”

  “I'm going out,” he responded sharply, not giving her the opportunity to ask if she could accompany him.

  Frank could feel her watching him as he left, locking the door and sliding the key underneath it. He hadn't actually decided where he was going, apart from out, but somehow he knew exactly how to get there, and as he sidled up to the bar he pointedly looked at a man on the other end and set about ruining the guy's evening.

  The man had the rough, haggard look of someone who's done time. Dark eyes searching for a fight, scarred knuckles. A confederate flag tattoo on a bare, meaty bicep. A heart tattoo with Mom in the center on the other. A face only a mother could love. Frank would like the man's face a lot more when it was filled with glass.

  “Bourbon,” Frank said although he didn't care for the drink. It was Maggie's favorite. “Keep it coming.”

  By the third round he was more than ready to finish off the bottle by breaking it over the man's head, but he requested one more and immediately regretted it.

  “Make it two,” Joe said, sitting down beside him.

  Downing his drink and feeling adequately annoyed enough to complete his act of violence, with potentially a new target, Frank grumbled, “You don't drink.”

  “And you don't do stupid shit, yet here we are.” Joe tapped his fingertips on the bar next to the bourbon he hadn't touched. “Let me tell you how this is going to go.”

  Frank forced a smile and condescendingly batted his eyelashes at Vincent's increasingly irritating handler. “Enlighten me.”

  “What you think is going to happen, is you're going to walk over there and bust that guy's head open for no reason. But because the guy has about fifty pounds on you and looks like he's been through this dog and pony show before, he ain't gonna press charges so you're just gonna get booked on a drunken disorderly when the bartender calls the cops. Then, since you don't have any ID on you, they'll maybe let you sleep it off in the drunk tank and send your ass home in the morning. No harm done, except to someone else currently at the county jail, who's not going to wake up at all. Sound about right?”

  With a disgruntled sneer, Frank reached for Joe's untouched drink and promptly got his hand smacked away.

  “What is actually going to happen, is you're gonna get in your little fight, get a bit scraped up, spend the night and likely several days in jail, go that much crazier, and scare your friends and family half to death in the process.”

  The part of Frank's brain that wasn't intoxicated could understand the reasonableness of Joe's version of events, but it wasn't until Joe looked straight at him, picked up the shot, and drank the first drop of alcohol he'd had in twenty-five years that he fully had Frank's attention.

  “I've been in enough drunk tanks in my life to tell you that you won't get anywhere near him. Not even you, at your very best, which I will remind you is better than pretty much anyone out there, could pull this off. So, Frank, I'm going to be honest with you and come right out and say this, you have been watching too much fucking television.”

  Raising his eyebrows in astonishment, all Frank could think to say was, “How'd that taste?”

  “Maggie was a good woman, but that was awful.”

  Frank put the last of his cash on the bar. She was a good woman. Gideon was a good man. And Casey was ruined. “When's the funeral?”

  “Couple days.”

  “And the trial?”

  “If there were any possibility of getting our hands on him that didn't involve something out of a soap opera or a summer blockbuster, don't you think I would've enlightened you by now?”

  “So we just let him get away with it?” he seethed.

  “You've been incarcerated, did that feel like getting away with it to you?”

  With a defeated sigh, Frank admitted that it did not. In hindsight, getting arrested was in fact a worse idea than euthanizing Casey, but he was still very much inclined to crack the drunk man's skull. And potentially Joe's. “I don't know what to say to him.”

  “I think we've all known you long enough not to expect you to talk at all, Frank.” Joe stood up and patted him on the back. “Just put on a suit, don't attack anybody, and try not to panic at the sight of tears.”

  It hadn't even been the tears that got to Frank. It was the way Casey looked at him, like he was sorry he was broken, sorry Frank couldn't make him whole again. Sorry they'd both failed, and the light had gone out.

  Frank let Joe stand there expectantly for awhile, waiting for him to get up so they could go home. But Frank just sat there staring at the empty glass like he'd stared at the purple nightlight, until he saw movement in his peripheral vision. He reached over and took the glass off the bar, the bartender too preoccupied with a game on the worn old TV in the corner, and Joe stepped aside to let Frank through.

  “We're really going to do this?” Joe asked in that overly tired tone that he usually reserved for Vincent.

  “I'm not attacking anybody,” Frank said, following as the man from the other end of the bar led the procession out onto the street. With Joe's arrival, and Frank finding someone new to glower at, the prospect of a fight had diminished. But it had been there, the man willing if not as eager as Frank to cause some trouble, and it would only take a few words to instigate. “Oi!” he called out.

  The
man stopped, halfway through unlocking a car that looked like it wasn't the first time it had been driven under the influence. He nodded challengingly in Frank's direction. “The fuck you want?”

  Having grown up imagining people as characters in the book of his life, Frank had no trouble reading him. But it did take some effort to muster such a banal insult, so instead he put it on Joe. “My friend here...he wants your mother's number.”

  Joe shook his head as the man started towards them. “Jesus Christ, really? Your mother?”

  Frank shrugged, flipping the glass in his hand so he held the base and smashing it into the side of the Oedipal cretin's head. As if Frank needed anything further to be depressed about, one hit was all it took to bring him down.

  “This really isn't your night,” Joe said.

  Picking the broken glass out of his hand, Frank shook his head. “Are you going to tell my husband about this?”

  “No.” Joe picked up the man's car keys and tossed them down the nearest sewer drain. “You are.”

  Chapter Three

  It took a lot to leave me speechless. A task normally close to impossible without the insertion of a certain appendage. But low and behold, here it was, my terrified-of-incarceration husband's confession that his best course of action for the previous evening was to get himself arrested so he could get at Gideon's murderer and enact some sweet, sweet revenge.

  I gaped at him, then at Joe, and finally got my senses back as Frank's Wile E. Coyote worthy plan reached its pinnacle. “Your mother?”

  Frank shrugged. His gaze had remained downcast as he told his story, partly out of shame but I imagined mostly from disappointment over not only the fight itself, but over the lame insult he'd had to wield to instigate it.

  “Who the fuck takes offense to that?” I balked. Not even Casey would take offense to that and his mother was just uninspiringly murdered.