Part 3

It was 3 a.m. and if I kept to the speed limit, I could be home by 6 a.m. I could clean the guns, shower and eat breakfast at my favorite diner. It was the only diner in town but that was neither here nor there, the food was good and the owner intrigued me.

“Jericho,” Nataly said as I got on my bike. She was five foot six inches with dirty blonde hair and brown eyes, avering a weight of one hundred and forty-three pounds.

I looked at the hand she had on my arm. “What?” There were no emotions left for her anymore. I didn’t hate her and I was sure now that I had never really loved her. She was comfortable and our life had been comfortable too.

“Can we talk, please?” Her eyes were once again pleading with mine and it was the same look she’d given me six months earlier in our apartment. It hadn’t moved me then and it certainly didn’t now.

“There’s nothing to talk about. Say hi to Gerald for me.” Gerald Cooke was the man she had cheated with. I didn’t know if he was still in her life or not and I didn’t care to know.

“Blake, please. I miss you. I still love you and I still think we can salvage what we had. If you’d only–”

I started the bike, which was one of the great loves of my life other than my guns and my two dogs. My bike weighed just over five hundred pounds and it pushed out about three hundred horsepower. It had a top speed of two hundred and forty miles per hour, although I hadn’t pushed it that hard yet.

I drove out of the basement parking lot thinking that at some point I probably had to talk to her, clear the air or something. We had been together for three years and I hadn’t spoken to her in six months. She was part of my team and for the past week I’d only spoken to her when it was work-related.

We all lived normal lives outside of work. We owned homes, had friends, we socialized, took vacations and paid our taxes, like normal citizens. We all ‘worked’ for an import and export company, which allowed for keeping odd hours, traveling and our spouses rarely knew what we really did.

The import and export company really existed and we had offices on the 1st to 5th floors of our building. If anyone stopped by or made enquiries, we would head down to our designated offices and pretend like we were trained to.

I opened the throttle of the bike once I was on the highway and mazed through the cars. I had Andy modify the bike slightly and they now sported two extra compartments that blended in with the original fairings of the bike. The compartments housed two Jerichos with their silencers on in packed foam.

I never went anywhere without at least two Jerichos and a karambit in the compartments of either my bike or truck. By the time I parked the bike in my garage, the adrenaline from the shooting had worn off and I felt relaxed.

The dogs came bounding from the back of the house as I closed the garage door and walked towards the wrap-around porch and unlocked the kitchen door. I fed the two dogs, Koira and Kelev. They were odd names for Rottweilers, but I liked the irony that both of their names meant dog. I checked the answering machine and Nataly’s voice filtered through the speaker.

“Can you please just call me so we can talk?”

I deleted the message and sat down at the kitchen table. I took my time cleaning the two guns. I had worked about fifty rounds through each of them on Thursday afternoon at the firing range. My mind kept going back to Lynda’s words while I worked. A slight tremor in my hand at the last moment. I hated it when she got into my head like this. I was sure there had been no tremor. It had been a perfect shot at one thousand yards, an easy shot.

I closed my eyes as I continued to assemble the Jerichos and replayed it over in my mind. I always did that after an assignment. I could see everything I had done, step by step, although sometimes I hated the fact that I could remember everything. Even now when I closed my eyes and thought back to that day, I could still see Nataly’s clothes on the floor and Gerald’s one shoe as it lay on its side, half hidden behind the curtain. 

I finished with the guns and loaded the magazines and cocked them. I went upstairs and slid one of the Jerichos into the holster behind my bedside table and went to the bathroom to shower. I never shaved and I kept a two-day stubble in check with a trimmer.

I parked my truck, a Chevrolet Silverado, at the curb and walked to the diner. I smiled at the old couple walking hand-in-hand past me. Mr. and Mrs. Huffley were married for close to fifty years and they were probably the oldest couple in Epworth. I let them walk into the diner first and sat down at my regular table.

I’d been eating breakfast at the diner for six months, every day of the week when I wasn’t on assignment. My table had become my regular table because I could survey the street and the sidewalk and my back was against a wall.

I’d slowly integrated myself into this town’s society and I was accepted easily. Nobody bothered me and my life was exactly as I preferred it. I had privacy and solitude, two things I highly valued. I was a different person in Epworth than I was in Chicago. My team also knew a part of me that other people didn’t but nobody knew me like Jack did. I’d never let anyone else close enough and that was also why I’d moved on from Nataly so easily. I was emotionally stunted and intelligent enough to know I was.