The Assassin's Prayer Read online

  Where did I go wrong? How did I end up nothing more than a hired gun blowing fathers away in front of their wives and daughters? Easy question to ask; hard question to answer. And this was not the time or place for soul searching.

  Silas pushed away his plate and reached for his cup of coffee. “The job done?”

  “Wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t,” said Kain.

  “We shouldn’t be here anyway,” Silas griped. “Told you I wanted to meet down in the city this time.”

  “What you want doesn’t matter to me,” Kain said as a tractor trailer rumbled past the diner, heading west toward the interstate. “All that matters to me is what I want, and what I want is my money.”

  Silas’ eyes narrowed. “Watch your tone, Kain. I know you hate my guts and you have that right, but I don’t have to put up with your crap.”

  Kain noticed the cynical, overweight waitress and the young, attractive one huddled together by the milkshake machine. Judging by the way they were nervously eyeing him and Silas, they weren’t discussing the best way to mix malt. The raw hostility between him and Silas crackled through the diner like hot sparks.

  Kain felt anger simmering behind his eyes. “Tell you what, Silas, if you don’t want to put up with my crap, I can just put a bullet between your eyes like I should have done a long time ago.”

  Silas leaned back as if retreating from the molten intensity of Kain’s gaze. “Kain,” he said, “it’s been five years. Five years. How many times do I have to say I’m sorry?”

  “You can say you’re sorry until you’re six feet under and I still won’t let it go,” Kain rasped. “You fucked my wife, you son of a bitch. You were my best friend and you fucked my wife. So don’t sit there and act like you deserve to be forgiven. The only thing you deserve is a knife in the heart, just like the one you stuck in my back.”

  It took a herculean effort to keep his mad-dog rage on a tight leash. He wanted nothing more than to reach across the table and use his bare hands to tear out Silas’ trachea.

  Silas at least had the decency to look pained, as if Kain’s harsh words had struck home and struck hard.

  “I can’t take it back,” he said quietly. “If I could, I would, but I can’t. Nothing can change what happened between me and Karen.” He paused for a moment. “But remember, Kain, it takes two. Karen took me into her bed willingly, but you forgave her, right?”

  Horrible memories gnawed at Kain’s brain. “Yeah,” he said. “I forgave her.”

  “So why her and not me?”

  “I loved her.”

  “What about me? I was your best friend.”

  “Not the same.” Kain clenched his fists to keep from shucking the Colt .45 and emptying the clip across the table until Silas’ lifeblood painted a Picasso on the wall behind him. The resurrected memories tore at him like rabid rats, the images replaying on the movie screen of his mind. He relived that day, walking into his own bedroom and seeing his wife’s legs wrapped around his best friend’s waist.

  Before that moment, Kain would have thought it impossible to survive the kind of pain that ripped at his heart. He stood there, paralyzed, shock and horror nailing his feet to the floor as Silas thrust between her splayed thighs again and again, his grunts echoing off the walls.

  Kain’s eyes sought Karen’s face, wanting—no, needing—some kind of connection. Her eyes were closed, lips parted in a soft moan as her fingers clutched at Silas’ sweat-slick body. Then, perhaps alerted by some sixth sense, she opened her eyes and saw Kain standing there. He watched a rapid-fire series of emotions—shock, horror, grief, sorrow, and yes, love—sweep through her eyes. And then, finally, tears. That was when Kain turned and walked away, the sound of her sobbing chasing him as he fled the scene where love had been betrayed.

  He never fully recovered from that day. He tried, but if there had been an insurance company for relationships, the claims adjuster would have written this one off as totaled beyond repair. He and Karen stayed together and made several stumbling attempts to put things back the way they had been, but their house was no longer a home. It was a corrupted place, stained by betrayal and tainted with sins. Kain had been able to forgive her, but he had never been able to forget.

  “You want to know something, Silas?” Kain said. “I never made love to Karen again. She wanted to and I tried, really I did, because in spite of it all we still loved each other, right up until the very end. But every time I tried, all I could see was your face. Bet you didn’t know that, did you? You were the last person to ever fuck my wife. Now do you really have the balls to sit there and think you have the right to ask for my forgiveness?”

  Silas’ face was a mask of misery. “No,” he said quietly, “I don’t think I have the right. I just don’t understand why you can forgive Karen but not me.”

  “Maybe it’s just easier to forgive the dead.”

  Silas leaned forward. “That’s not fair,” he protested. “You can’t put that on me. I didn’t kill Karen. She took her own life.”

  “So go slit your wrists like she did,” Kain rasped, “and maybe I’ll think about throwing some forgiveness your way too.”

  Silas slid his hands across the table, palms up, exposing his wrists. Kain could see the faint tracery of veins pulsing just beneath the surface of the skin. “Go ahead,” Silas said. “Do it. Take out that pig-sticker of yours and slit my wrists if that’s what it takes to make things right between us. But I want you to swear that while I sit here and bleed out, you’ll forgive me for what I did to you.” He stared at Kain, eyes burning intensely. “What do you say, huh? Will you do it? Cut me open, bleed me dry … and then forgive me.”

  Kain stared at the blue network of veins for a few seconds. He imagined plunging his knife into Silas’ wrist and slicing them open. Someday, maybe … but not today.

  He looked Silas in the eye and growled, “No way. You live with it, you son of a bitch.” He tried to stay stoic, but he could feel the acid of tears stinging his eyes. “We’re done talking about this.”

  Silas pulled his hands back. “Kain, I really think we should—”

  Kain cut him off. “This subject is closed. Bring it up again and I’ll blow your teeth out the back of your skull. Got it?”

  Silas nodded. “Yeah, I got it.”

  “Good,” Kain said. “Now where’s my money?”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “Then who does?”

  “Frank. He wants me to bring you back to the city to discuss another job.”

  “No more jobs until I’m paid for the last one.”

  “Frank is going to pay you,” Silas said, “so chill out. He just wants to discuss this new job with you personally, face to face. Since you would rather stick your dick in a meat grinder than go near the city, he figured the best way to get you down there was to hold your money until you came for it.”

  Kain was pissed. Part of him wanted to tell Silas—and by extension, Frank Giadello—that he was not a puppet who would dance at someone else’s whim. But that was just anger barking in his ear; the more rational part of him knew there was nothing he could do about it unless he was willing to say screw the cash. Which he wasn’t. “Fine,” he said. “Tomorrow. Tell Frank to have my money ready.”

  Silas groaned. “Why not today? It’s not even dawn yet. If we left now we could be...” His voice trailed off as he looked at Kain and realized he was wasting his breath. He might as well have been begging a sphinx to crack a smile. “All right,” he said resignedly. “I’ll find a motel and we can leave tomorrow morning.”

  Kain stood up. “By the way, in case you didn’t know, breakfast is on you.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Silas reached for his wallet.

  As Kain drove home, he thought about the bottle of Jack Daniels in the cupboard above the refrigerator. Hopefully there was enough left to silence the ghosts Silas had resurrected.

  CHAPTER 4

  It was a four-mile drive from the diner to Kain’s place on West Riv
er Road, a rural route that wound along the Hudson River for ten miles before breaking west toward the town of Gansevoort. As his house—a simple two-story box-style with a garage attached to the northwest side—came into view, the sun peeked over the slate-colored mountains in the distance.

  Kain steered the Jeep Grand Cherokee into the blacktopped driveway and past the two L-shaped flower beds bracing both sides of the entrance. He could remember when Karen’s green thumb had made the beds bloom with vibrant, brilliant bursts of color. Now the flower beds were as dead as she was.

  He parked in the garage and hit the remote to close the door behind him. The garage windows, three small squares of glass, were blacked out. Kain valued his privacy, having about as much use for social interaction as a eunuch has for Viagra. His nearest neighbor lived over a mile down the road. There was a thoroughbred farm nestled behind him about a half-mile, but a row of hardwood trees and a large gulch separated his land from theirs. He would have preferred even more isolation—an island in the middle of a lake, for example—but when they were shopping for a house, Karen had refused to wholeheartedly embrace the hermit lifestyle. This place had been their compromise and now that she was gone, he couldn’t bring himself to let it go. She still lived here through the medium of memories and if he were to move someplace else, Kain knew he would feel like he was abandoning her. Irrational, sure, but nobody ever said grief was a logical beast.

  Inside, the house was clean but Spartan. No point in being a slob, but Kain saw no need to spruce the place up either. Wasn’t like he was going to be entertaining friends in the near future and after Karen’s death he had decided not to bother with women anymore. Her loss—not to mention her betrayal—had shattered his soul and he never wanted to risk that kind of pain ever again.

  He tossed his keys on the kitchen table that squatted under a single bare bulb like an interrogation table in some old hardboiled detective story. Cracked linoleum lined the floor, a black-and-green pattern that resembled reptile scales. It had been ugly the day he installed it and it was even uglier now, but for some reason Karen had liked it and that fact meant Kain would sooner peel the flesh from his musculature than tear up the linoleum. Like everything else in this house, it was a reminder of her, back when this had been a real home brimming with life and love and laughter. Now Kain couldn’t even remember the last time he had laughed. It had been so long that the sound would probably feel like a foreign object in his throat. Not that it mattered; wasn’t like he had anything to laugh about these days anyway.

  He retrieved the Jack Daniels from the cupboard. He didn’t bother with the niceties of glass and ice, just slugged it straight from the bottle. Seeing Silas again, reliving the betrayal and Karen’s suicide, killing a man in front of his wife and kid … it was all too much to take at once. He took another hit, feeling the whiskey sear its way down his throat. Maybe it would go all the way to his soul and numb the pain that nested there like a clump of thorns. Sometimes a little alcoholic amnesia does a man good.

  He took the bottle over to the table, got out his gun-cleaning kit, and began to clean the Colt .45. The motions were automatic from years of repetition, allowing his mind to stray. How many men had he killed with this gun? Thirty? Forty? Fifty? He struggled to recall. He remembered his first kill as if he had pulled the trigger only yesterday. He had drilled a .45 round right through the bridge of the target’s nose and the internal pressure of the bullet burrowing through his brain had caused the guy’s eyeballs to pop out of their sockets. But for the most part the faces all ran together in meaningless, featureless blobs. Maybe that was a good thing.

  He reassembled the Colt, then turned his attention to the SPAS-12. Manufactured by Franchi, the Special Purpose Assault Shotgun was one of his favorite weapons, capable of semi-auto as well as pump-action. When loaded with nine rounds of double-ought buckshot, it was a formidable close-quarters weapon, more than capable of blowing a man in half. Kain had removed the folding stock, preferring to use just the pistol grip. Easier to conceal under his duster that way too.

  Few assassins opted for such heavy firepower. Most hitters preferred .22s, preferably to the back of the head. The diminutive round made a small entry hole and lacked the power to exit the opposite side. Neat, tidy, unspectacular. The mere thought of a shotgun and .45 would probably make traditional assassins cringe, but Kain could not have cared less about tradition.

  Every time he went on a strike, his life was on the line. One mistake, one little lapse in concentration, and the target would put one in Kain’s heart instead of vice versa. He used this acute awareness of his own mortality to hone his combat instincts, to keep himself sharp, focused, and alive. Sure, his life was a pile of shit big enough to give a bevy of psychologists nightmares, but what waited on the other side was probably worse, especially when you factored in that he had spent his life violating the Sixth Commandment. Somehow he seriously doubted the angels enjoyed rubbing shoulders with blood-spillers. So, with his ass—and possibly his soul—on the line when he went out on a hit, Kain wanted all the firepower he could muster.

  He took another drink from the bottle, dry-fired the SPAS-12 to test the trigger action, loaded it with shells, and racked one into the chamber. He kept every gun in the house topped off. Never knew when enemies might come calling and he was a strict adherent to the creed that it was better to have a loaded gun and never need it than to need a loaded gun and not have one.

  He set the shotgun down on the table and made his way to the bathroom. The coffee he had drunk at the diner was knocking on his bladder.

  Standing in front of the toilet, Kain felt a chill slither down his spine like an ice-cold maggot. The sensation was familiar and expected; he felt the chill every time he came in here because the bathroom was haunted. This was where Karen died.

  Kain still remembered everything as if it had happened five minutes ago instead of five years. As a cold lump of ice embedded itself in his heart, Kain remembered coming home and seeing the water seeping out from underneath the bathroom door. He remembered kicking the door open and seeing Karen in the overflowing tub, her long hair billowing in the water, red on red, her arms floating limply, offering only mercifully brief glimpses of the bone-deep gashes carved in her wrists, the straight razor she had used lying beside the tub. She had been staring straight ahead and Kain remembered thinking there was something horrible about the way she didn’t blink when the bloody water lapped across her wide-open eyes.

  Kain realized he was done urinating. He could feel Karen’s ghost in the air. He zipped up and hurried from the room, eager to be away from this haunted place.

  He returned to the kitchen table, raised the whiskey bottle to his lips, and sucked it down. Not much left, but hopefully enough to knock him out. Because the last thing he wanted to do was stay awake all day reliving his wife’s suicide.

  He picked up his dagger and began working it with a whetstone. As the harsh rasp of steel on stone filled the kitchen, he wondered if it would have been easier to accept Karen’s death if she had left a note explaining why she had chosen to take her life. But absent an explanation, he blamed Silas, believing that guilt over their affair had driven her to put a blade to her veins.

  Kain’s hands began to shake, the knife clinking against the whetstone. Time for another shot to steady the nerves and silence the memories. He reached for the Jack Daniels and brought it to his lips.

  The bullet came out of nowhere, punching through the glass patio doors and then shattering the bottle in Kain’s hand. He threw himself sideways out of the chair as a hail of bullets followed the first. He hit the floor hard on his shoulder, feeling the impact ripple through his muscles as the effects of the whiskey evaporated. Nothing like almost catching a bullet in the teeth to sober you up right quick. His face was covered with Jack Daniels and his eyes burned from the alcohol.

  Kain couldn’t even hear the shots. Which meant the gunner was using a suppressor. Which meant a pro. Your average garden variety burglar
could rarely afford a silencer … or an assault weapon for that matter.

  More slugs slammed into the table. Kain frantically rubbed at his stinging eyes. He needed to see to survive. Through a blur of tears, he saw the auto-fire fusillade hammer the SPAS-12 into a wreckage of mangled metal. The stream of hot lead tracked toward him, digging holes in the linoleum as Kain rolled, seeking cover. He felt something hot burn across his calf and then he was behind the island in the center of the kitchen.

  His heart raced, pumping with adrenalin. His vision had almost returned to normal. Drops of whiskey dripped from his cheeks. There was a fiery pain just below his right eye where a piece of glass had cut him. Not much worse than a shaving nick, but the alcohol made it sting like hell. Somehow through all the diving, rolling, and scurrying he had managed to hold onto the dagger. Of course, all that meant was that he had brought a knife to a gunfight.

  He heard footsteps coming up the basement stairs and cursed. There were two hitters, closing in from opposite angles in a classic pincher ploy. If they caught him in a crossfire he would be ventilated with more holes than a colander collection.

  The second hitter kicked in the basement door. Screws screeched in piercing protest as one of the hinges tore loose from the frame. The black-garbed gunman burst into the room in a combat crouch, his Heckler & Koch MP5/10 submachine gun swiveling toward Kain, seeking target acquisition.

  A dagger is not designed to be a throwing knife, but Kain practiced with it constantly, the distance was short, and he had no other options. With a flick of his wrist he sent the blade zipping across the room and sank the dagger into the gunner’s left eye. The man went down instantly, cold steel impaling his brain, the handle jutting from his socket like some obscene growth. The MP5/10 tumbled from his lifeless fingers.