Just before losing consciousness I heard Curly ask Callie, “You ever thought about doing it with a guy? ‘Cause if you have, I’m available.”
Chapter 39
I came to after hearing my voice say, “I’m okay, it’s all psychosomatic.”
I opened my eyes, looking for Callie, but received the shock of my life when the person who came into view was a total stranger in a nurse’s outfit.
“Oh, my God!” she screamed, and pressed the button hanging on the side rail of the hospital bed I was laying in.
Hospital bed?
The nurse raced out of the room, leaving me to wonder what the hell was going on. I tried to figure out what happened. I remembered Callie shooting Tara, and then the pain came. I know why Callie shot her. Tara wasn’t the type to let things go. If we turned her loose she might track Eva down and kill her out of spite. At the very least she’d tell Darwin, and he’d have Eva killed. So Callie’s actions made sense.
But I should have seen it coming.
I looked around the stark room, trying to get my bearings. I may have been in a hospital bed, but I wasn’t in an actual hospital. I was in one of the hospital rooms at my headquarters at Sensory Resources. I wanted to think about how I got here, and if someone had contacted Kathleen yet. I wanted to think about Addie, wanted to worry if she was scared. The poor kid couldn’t afford to lose someone else in her life. I wanted to think about settling down and becoming a family. I wanted to think about all those things, but they’d have to wait because all I could really focus on was what Darwin might do to Callie.
You just don’t go around killing Darwin’s people without repercussions. I had to find Callie and get her somewhere safe. I had to speak to Darwin, had to work this out. I tried to sit up, but found I was hooked up to a battery of machines.
That couldn’t be good.
I reached my hands around my body, searching for my cell phone. Surely Callie had put it within arm’s reach. No, I thought, she wouldn’t have come here with me. She was probably in hiding, waiting for me to find a way to call her, so we could put together a plan to deal with Darwin. Or maybe she rushed back to Vegas to protect Eva.
Wait.
Tara Siegel had been in the room, dead, strapped to a chair when I went down with the chest pains. Callie couldn’t have been there when the paramedics arrived. She and Curly would have had to clean the scene as best they could, and then run.
If that’s the case, Darwin has every reason to believe I killed Tara.
Thinking about it now, I realized what caused the crushing pain in my chest was the same thing that caused it at the Peterson sisters’ trailer, and the same thing that made me question my motives for killing all the Rumplestilskin Loan candidates before them. It’s the same thing that made me put off killing Rob and Trish in Nashville, and the same thing that bothered me about every other person I’d killed for Victor going all the way back to my first job for him, when he hired me to kill Monica Childers last Valentine’s Day. As it turned out, Monica didn’t die by my hand, but Callie and I had done all we could to carry out the hit.
They were people who didn’t deserve to die. I’m not saying they were innocent. When someone has a contract on his or her head, there’s always a reason. They’ve been found guilty of something and sentenced to die by whoever employs me.
But that doesn’t mean the punishment fits the crime.
In all the years I’d killed people before meeting Victor, I knew the world would be a better place without those people. Whether I was killing terrorists or spies for the government, or wise guys for Sal Bonadello, I never lost a moment of sleep over my job.
But then, less than a year ago, Victor came into my life.
My first contract for Victor was Monica Childers. I killed her the day after I met Kathleen. Victor had given me some story about how we all have at least two people in our lives that deserved to die because of the terrible things they did to us. That was easy for me to relate to, since I’d had a number of these types of people in my life and I’d done something about it.
Monica Childers may have done something bad enough to make one person wish her dead, but in the court of humanity and justice, she didn’t deserve to die. I think I knew it at the time, but I was running on auto pilot. I’d sold myself on the idea that a hit man shouldn’t ask questions. I believed a hit man’s job was to carry out executions, not weigh the merits of them.
But my conscience obviously felt different.
The reasons for Monica’s execution didn’t stand up. When she turned up alive, I felt relief. Then to learn she’d been raped to death by the terrorists I’d been hunting—it hit me hard.
The Rumplestilskin Loan recipients had certainly done a monstrous thing, allowing someone to die in exchange for receiving a loan, but they’d been told it was an unpunished murderer. I knew in my heart it was a major stretch to kill them for allowing other people to die. By the time I got to the Peterson sisters, my body decided to rebel.
So Victor’s victims were responsible for my heart issue. That
