2

2

HAVE YOU EVER woken up some morning with a burning, insatiable desire to go out and kill someone? No? Huh. Guess I’m weird, then.

Anyway, this morning I wake up with such a craving. As usual, the craving has been preceded by a dream—well, a flashback to be exact. It’s always the same memory, and if you think I’m going to tell you anymore than that, you really do need to go back and read the first book, because you clearly have not yet learned I am the kind of person who will break the fourth wall a couple times every other page, but you will have to torture me (and not the fun kind of torture) before I talk about personal, psycho, feelings shit.

Thanks to my contract with T.H.E.M., I can’t exactly just go out and find myself an unsuspecting tourist on Hollywood Blvd. to lure back to a hotel room where I can de-spleen the poor bastard. However, Zeke is generally pretty flexible about finding us short projects whenever we need a quickie.

Technically, one-off jobs (where we only kill one person) are reserved for assassins, since P.S.K.’s focus more on multiple killings and assassins are better suited for ‘quick and easy’ projects. However from time-to-time Zeke will let the P.S.K.’s take on an easy one-off he doesn’t have an assassin immediately available for.

“We all go a little mad sometimes, Marion,” Zeke says in an annoying Anthony Perkins impersonation when he answers my phone call. Have I mentioned Zeke likes to creep people out by impersonating famous movie serial killers? Have I mentioned I hate my boss, sometimes? I mean, sure everyone says at some point or another they hate their boss, but when I say it I actually mean I would love nothing more than to take a knife and plunge it deep into his substantial gut. The only things keeping me from acting on it are that I don’t want to break my contract with T.H.E.M. and the thought of having to dig through all that blubber in order to actually get at any vital organs is repulsive even to me.

Anyway, I bite back the bile building in the back of my throat and respond, “Good morning, Zeke. I’m in serious need of a quickie.”

“Sarah, I’m flattered, but you know I don’t consort with my agents,” Zeke’s slippery voice slithers over the phone line. I can feel my nether region shriveling up and sealing itself shut forever in sheer disgust at the thought of Zeke’s insinuation.

“You know what I mean, you fuck-monkey,” I snap. For all my complaints about Zeke, I at least have to give him credit for not minding back-talk. I am well aware most bosses would not put up with their employees directly calling them a fuck-monkey.

Zeke lets out an exaggerated sigh, then continues, “Fine, fine. Let me see . . . ”

He spends a few seconds pretending to look through his planner, but I know for a fact he has every client and prospective job memorized in that seriously disturbed brain of his. Zeke really is nothing if not an over-dramatic showman. He probably would’ve gone into Hollywood had he not decided killing people was more fun.

“Let’s see, let’s see, oh here we go!” The act is enough to make me want to scream, but I bite my tongue, because I really want to kill someone today and I don’t want to give Zeke a reason to deny my request. “I’ve got a senator—Senator Gene Keeley. He has a political rival who wants him offed in a thoroughly humiliating way. Those are your favorites, aren’t they?”

I hate to admit to Zeke being right about anything, but yes; taking a skeeze ball politician and publicly revealing him to be the dirt bag he really is, and getting to kill him in the process, definitely falls into the category of my favorite pastimes.

“Gimme the stats,” I respond, refusing to give him the satisfaction of confirming he was right.

“Senator Keeley is home from D.C. for the week—arrived this morning. He’ll be at City Hall for meetings for most of the day, and if he continues his usual routine—just about the only thing a politician can be counted on—he will be calling his regular . . . ahem . . . ‘agency’ for some off-the-books entertainment before going home to his wife. If you want the job, I will arrange to have his smart phone hacked and that call will be routed to us.”

Before you even get it in your head, let me clear this up: no, I will not be sleeping with the skuzbasket. I will only be posing as an escort to get the bastard alone so I can slice and dice. To be fair, there’s nothing in my contract that says I can’t sleep with him before doing the deed—all T.H.E.M. cares about is the mark gets killed. What we do with him beforehand is just ‘playing with the food,’ so to speak. But especially for these jobs where a politician is the mark, I’d prefer not risk contracting every STD known to man, thank you very much.

“I’ll take it,” I say, probably a tad too-eagerly, but I really need to kill someone—especially a man –before I go over the deeper end.

“Fine. Get here to HQ as soon as possible so the Makeover Specialists can give you a basic treatment. Oh, and Sarah . . . ”

“Yes . . . ?” the tone of his voice makes it abundantly clear I am not going to like what’s coming next . . .

“You’ll be taking Misk with you.”

Fuck. Misk, by the way, is Mary Sue’s T.H.E.M. code name.

“Seriously, Easy?” I snap (‘Easy’ is my nickname for Zeke, it’s about the only thing I can do that irritates him as much as he irritates me). “This is a stupid one-off job, I don’t need a baby sitter.”

“You know the rules, Sarah,” Zeke admonishes. “Ever since your incident last fall, no one—especially you—goes on assignment alone.”

I say this several times a day, but if I ever run into Nick Jin again, I am going to murder him. Nice and slow. Preferably with a wiffle bat so it will take extra long to get the job done.

“If you’d prefer someone else,” Zeke slithers, “I could always have Ja–”

“Fine,” I grumble into the phone cutting him off abruptly. I’d prefer to spend one stupid quickie project working with Mary Sue than even have to hear Jason’s name again. Jason is my ex—an assassin who I dated until he cheated on me. Bastard.

“Good girl. Just tell Keeley you’re training a newb, so he gets two for the price of one. One last thing, Sarah. Remember that a girl’s best friend is her mother.”

And the line goes dead. Porcupines, I hate that man. Paraphrasing a quote from one of the best horror films of all time to remind me about my mother—that is a shot way below the belt.

Fuck, I guess this means I need to tell you about my mother now. For the love of Captain Hammer’s nipples, I really hate Zeke sometimes.

Alright. Long story short, when I was sixteen my mother killed my deadbeat father for beating the two of us up on a regular basis. Instead of getting a Mother of the Year Medal, she got thrown in jail and I became a child of the state. To this day, she resides in Los Angeles County Prison, and she does not—nor will she ever—know I work as a serial killer for hire. As far as she knows, I work as an office assistant for a high-profile law firm that has offices across the country and frequently sends me out-of-state to other branches for special cases.

Zeke knows all of this and uses it as leverage against me—if I ever step out of line on an assignment, he just reminds me that he will tell my mother what I do, and the thought of her broken heart is enough to force me to stay in line.

Zeke’s prodding elicits the usual rage-induced response in me: I calmly go to my second walk-in closet, which is stocked floor-to-ceiling with cute, fluffy, stuffed animals, and pick out a particularly fluffy bunny with annoyingly big blue eyes that would put Frank Sinatra to shame. I calmly return to my bedroom and tape a picture of Zeke onto the face of the unsuspecting thumper. I calmly lift up a corner of my mattress and take out my favorite knife—the same knife I made my first kill with all those years ago. Finally abandoning all pretense of calmness, I unleash my rage on the cutesy cottontail.

Fluff and fabric swirl around me in a hurricane of flurry, but in my mind’s eye it is not stuffing and fake fur, but blood and guts that pollute my surroundings.

Also, even though it is Zeke’s face taped to the coney, it is not his face I see. As always, it is another, and as always my rage is only left half-quenched by the time I am spent.