“And Dane?”
“He tracked me down. I’d been surviving on my savings, barely scraping by, when he offered me this job.”
Emma understood what barely making it felt like. With CropForward firing her after she blew the whistle on their experimental modified seeds, and Congress subpoenaing her to testify, she’d been a pariah. Whistleblowers weren’t part of the popular crowd. “I take it no one wanted to hire you?”
He shook his head. “After being admin processed out? Not a chance. We all got disability, of course.” A bitter laugh cut his explanation short. “One appointment with the VA shrink a week and a prescription for pills to dull everything. It wasn’t living.”
He turned halfway, face shadowed by the trees. “Harry didn’t make it more than a month before he stuck a 9mm in his mouth. Dave OD’ed. Someone found him a week later, decomposing in some crack shack in Philly.” John shook his head in disgust. “We were all in rough shape.”
“Sounds like Dane saved you.”
“He did. I owe him for that.”
Emma pressed. “You didn’t owe him enough to become a hired killer.”
“Honestly?” John shrugged. “At the time, I’d have done anything he said. Anything to regain that sense of purpose and belonging.”
Emma thought it over. If she didn’t have the lab job at Fielding, would she feel the same? Adrift and purposeless with no friends and no one to talk to? Would the hopelessness of it all drive her to drink, take pills, or worse? She had no family in town, no one to connect with apart from Gloria and Zach. Without them—she shuddered as memories of Zach’s murder filled her mind. “Tell me about the organization.”
“What do you want to know?”
“How big is it? How many people—” She paused, searching for the right word.
“How many assassins are there?”
She nodded as the reality of the situation sank in.
“I don’t exactly know, to tell the truth.” John scratched behind his ear. “Dane kept a tight leash on his operatives, only providing us the information we needed. I know two or three of the guys from the unit still work for him.”
Emma swallowed down the desire to ask about Zach, but it snuck back up her throat like pepperoni pizza by the slice. “What about the guy who killed Zach? Do you know him?”
John pressed his lips together before answering. “Possibly.”
“Who is he? Someone from your unit?”
“He’s not someone I associate with. Some of the crap he—” John cut off his explanation mid-sentence with a shake of his head and a deepening crease between his brows.
Emma began to protest, but one look at his face and she let it go. Pushing now would achieve nothing except hard feelings. Until John neutralized the threat, she needed him. She held up the revolver. “So how do I reload this thing?”
John’s shoulders sagged in relief and he stepped forward, taking the unloaded weapon from her and flipping open the chamber. “Six rounds all slip in here. Easy to load, easy to see how many you have left.” He handed it back. “The downside to a weapon like this, is the kick. It can be pretty brutal for someone not accustomed to it. Now if someone allowed us to practice—”
Emma glanced at the cabin. Gloria and her husband, Raymond, begrudgingly allowed John to stay on the condition he surrendered his weapons. Although Emma convinced Raymond learning how to shoot was necessary, her request for live rounds fell on deaf ears. Not that she completely disagreed with Ray.
Trusting John with a gun might be foolish. He may have saved her life, but he’d been hired to take it. Forgetting the truth helped no one.
Over the next hour, John taught Emma everything he knew about how to shoot, draw, reload, even break down and clean the weapon. When they finished, Emma flopped into an Adirondack chair. John eased into one beside her, still favoring his side.
As they sat in companionable silence, Tank tore around the corner of the cabin with Pringles hot on his heels, barking and yipping. The two dogs bounded and played with each other, the little Chihuahua giving the German shepherd every bit as much as he got.
Emma laughed. “What is it about little dogs? They always seem to have the most fight.”
John remained silent.
Whatever connection built between them while he taught her weapon basics was gone. Emma watched him from the corner of her eye. He was more than a hired killer, more than the snap judgment she’d levied after stumbling upon the truth. But the reality of his life and struggles failed to negate the horror of his actions. He killed people—some likely innocent, some not—for money.
As she thought over his actions, from helping her escape the elevator, to saving her from the family in the woods, to bringing her Tank, Emma came no closer to figuring him out.
The front door to the cabin swung open and Raymond stepped out. He caught sight of Emma and John and closed the distance between them. “It’s looking like we need to hit the town, gather supplies before things get crazy.”
“If they aren’t already,” John offered.
Raymond narrowed his eyes. “I was going to ask if you would come.”
“Can I have my gun?”
Anger flashed across Raymond’s face.
“He could carry unloaded,” Emma interjected, before the situation devolved. “A show of force, even if no bullets backed him up.”
John leaned forward, about to argue, but Emma caught his eye. She shook her head once to ward off his complaint, and after a tense moment John slumped back in the chair. “If that’s the best I can do, it’s better than nothing.”
Emma turned back to Raymond, hands gripping the arms of the chair in expectation.
Raymond exhaled. “I suppose that’s sensible. But the first sign of—”
John waved him off as he stood up. “I won’t be the source of any trouble.”
“We’ll see.” Raymond turned toward the cabin without another word
