The Assassin Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Praise

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Deep Cover by Rachel Butler

  Deep Cover - On sale in Fall 2005

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  “The Assassin delivers the goods:

  . . . fast action, surprise twists, and a heroine who’s positively killer with a gun!”

  —Lisa Gardner, New York Times bestselling author of Alone

  “Wow! fast-paced, sexy suspense: The Assassin is a thrill ride I didn’t want to end.”

  —Karen Robards, New York Times bestselling author of Bait

  “Gritty and sexually charged. The cop and the killer are a dynamite duo.”

  —Andrea Kane, New York Times bestselling author of I’ll Be Watching You

  “Selena McCaffrey is the coolest, sexiest, most compelling heroine to come along since Buffy, Xena , and Alias set the standards for kick-ass female suspense/adventure. Combine Selena with a villain who will raise your goose bumps, a sexy cop who will raise your temperature, and a secondary cast that definitely raises the bar for excellence, and what you have is a must-read new suspense series that will keep you turning pages all night long. I can’t wait for the next dose of Rachel Butler!”

  —Lynda Sandoval, former cop and award-winning author of Unsettling

  “Taut, fast-paced suspense with a twist at every turn, The Assassin delivers one surprise after another all the way to the explosive ending— great characters, great fun, and a great read.”

  —Tara Janzen, author of Crazy Hot

  Prologue

  The attack came from behind, a muscular forearm across her throat, diminishing the oxygen supply to her lungs. Before Selena McCaffrey could react, she was lifted from her feet, then slammed to the ground. What little air she’d had left rushed out in a grunt as pain vibrated through her midsection. She pushed it out of her mind, though, and let instinct take over. As her attacker’s weight came down on her, she slashed at his face with her nails and was rewarded with a sound that was half groan, half growl. He eased his hold for one instant, all she needed to arch her back and throw him off balance. With another heave, she was free of him.

  As she scrambled to her feet, his fingers wrapped around her right ankle in a grip so brutal her vision turned shadowy. Clamping her jaw tight, she shifted her weight and kicked him with her left foot, a sharp jab to the ribs. He swore, yanked her leg out from under her, then rolled on top of her the instant she landed.

  His face inches from hers, he laughed. “What are you gonna do, sweet pea? Huh? I’m on top. I can do whatever I want, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me. You’re all out of tricks, aren’t you?”

  Adrenaline pumped through her, along with fear and excitement. Her chest heaving, she stared at him, locking gazes. As the muscles in her right arm flexed, she eased her left hand toward the waistband of her shorts, her fingers closing around the handle of the knife tucked there. Without breaking eye contact, she raised her right hand as if to claw at his face. Laughing, he caught her wrist and forced it to the ground at her side. But before he could get out the first word about such a predictable response, she whipped the knife up in her free hand and pressed the razor-sharp blade to his throat.

  He froze. Barely breathing, he murmured, “Fuck me.”

  “Get off me.”

  He hesitated. She pressed just hard enough to pierce his skin with the knife point, bringing a drop of crimson blood to the surface. His curse was vicious, but he backed away carefully.

  Once he was out of her space, she easily got to her feet, folded the knife, and returned it to her waistband.

  Jimmy Montoya clamped his fingers to his throat, then stared at the blood smeared across them. “You could have hurt me!”

  “I could have killed you.”

  “Bitch.”

  “Loser.” She removed the band that held back her hair—at least, what hadn’t fallen loose in their struggle— then gathered the long thick curls and corralled them with the elastic once more.

  “Weapons aren’t fair.”

  “You weigh fifty pounds more than me. I’m just evening the odds.”

  “What would you have done without the knife?”

  She picked up a water bottle from the nearby patio table and took a long drink. “I wouldn’t be without it.”

  “Humor me. Assume you were. What would you have done in that situation if you hadn’t had the knife?”

  Gazing out over the ocean, she considered it a moment before replying. “I suppose I would have broken your neck.”

  He grinned, but the amusement didn’t reach his eyes. He didn’t know whether she was teasing . . . or meant every word.

  Fair enough. Neither did she.

  “See you next time.”

  Leaning one hip against the table, Selena watched as Montoya walked inside. Through tall arched windows, she saw him stop to correct a student’s posture in the ongoing yoga class, then offer encouragement to another struggling on a weight bench.

  For two years she’d been coming to his gym. The word hardly did justice to the structure, or to the elaborate grounds surrounding it. Self-defense, yoga, and tai chi were taught on the lush lawn, and a jogging trail wound along the perimeter of the property. She ran five miles there every day, lifted weights three times a week, and took tae kwon do, kickboxing, and aikido classes regularly. She held a first-degree black belt in tae kwon do and could break any bone in the human body with one kick. She could have broken Montoya’s ribs, and if he were an attacker, she would have.

  And if that failed to get her out of the jam, well, there was always the knife.

  Her own ribs ached when she pushed away from the table. She would be bruised and stiff the next day, but she’d suffered worse and survived. She was tough. She would always survive.

  Instead of showering in the locker room, she grabbed her backpack and started walking the three blocks home. She should have been gone hours ago, but she’d needed one last workout with Montoya for good luck . . . or was it confidence?

  The June sun was warm, the air heavy with the scents of the sea and the flowers that bloomed in profusion along the sidewalk—bougainvillea, jasmine, plumeria. Selena made a conscious effort not to think as she walked—to simply breathe and relax while remaining aware of her surroundings. It didn’t pay to let your guard down—ever. That had been a painful lesson to learn.

  Her house was on the ocean side of the street, though she lacked Montoya’s gorgeous view except from the second floor. The structure was more than a hundred years old and had survived tropical storms, hurricane-force winds, and decades of neglect. The white paint on the boards and the dark green on the shutters had been her spring project. The new shingles on the roof, completed over the winter. The small green lawn, bordered on all sides by a cutting garden gone wild, cultivated over the past eighteen months. The picket fence that circled the lot, repaired and whitewashed last summer. The handpainted sign swinging from a post near the gate, last week’s accomplishment. Island Dreams Art Gallery.

  She had moved into the house the day she’d signed the papers, and she loved everything about it. The high ceilings, tall windows, and oversized rooms. The wide veranda wrapping around three sides, the stairs climbing straight and true to the second floor, the butler’s pantry, t
he louvered shutters, and the dusty chandeliers. The cypress floors, the porcelain sinks, the claw-foot tub, the marble fireplaces. The age. The history. The welcome. The security.

  And the fact that it was hers. The only home she’d ever had. The only thing of value she’d ever possessed. One of only two things she could not afford to lose. Her home. Her freedom. Everything she was, everything she might ever be, depended on those two things. Protecting them protected her.

  An older couple, white-haired and tanned, was coming down the steps as she approached. She greeted them, then opened the screen door with a creak. What had originally been the formal living and dining rooms was now home to her gallery. The library had become the gallery office, leaving only the kitchen and pantry to their original purposes. A mere half dozen of her own paintings were currently exhibited, along with bins of signed and numbered prints. Of all the artists represented in Island Dreams, her own work was most popular with her clientele. But that stood to reason. If they didn’t like Selena McCaffrey’s paintings, they wouldn’t shop at Selena McCaffrey’s gallery.

  Asha Beauregard, her only employee, was chatting with another customer. She gave Selena a wave behind the man’s back. Asha liked to say that she couldn’t draw a straight line to save her life, but she knew talent when she saw it. The gallery was in good hands.

  Selena detoured through the kitchen to get another bottle of water, then took the back stairs to her bedroom. Originally there had been four rooms and a bath upstairs. Now there were two—a large living room at the front of the house, with enough space for a workout when Montoya’s seemed too far to go, and an airy bed/bath combination. She’d lived too much of her life in cramped, dark places. Now she liked large spaces, lots of glass, a sense of openness.

  After showering, she dressed in a silk outfit, the top crimson and fitted, the color repeated in the tropical print of the skirt. The hem fluttered around her ankles except on the left side, where it was slit halfway up her thigh. Her suitcases were already packed, with just one bag left. She laid it open on the plantation-style bed, unlocked the small safe in the back of the closet, then began transferring the necessary items.

  A Smith & Wesson .40 caliber pistol, illegally modified to fully automatic.

  A compact Beretta .22 automatic, small enough to fit in her pocket or her smallest handbag.

  A dagger, sheathed to protect the double-edged blade. The switchblade she carried had been chosen as much for concealability as function. The dagger had been chosen strictly for function.

  She added extra clips for each of the guns, a change of IDs, and a stash of cash. It wasn’t a lot, but in an emergency, she didn’t need a lot.

  Not that she was planning on having any emergencies.

  She closed and locked the bag, then slid it inside the suitcase she’d left half empty for just that purpose. After securing the key on the chain around her neck so that it rested out of sight between her breasts, she picked up the suitcases and started for the stairs. She probably looked like any young woman setting off on vacation.

  In fact, she was going to kill a man.

  1

  A triple homicide was a hell of a way to start a Monday morning, Tony Ceola thought as he eased his Chevy Impala to the side of the street. A patrol unit was parked in front of the house, blocking the driveway. The officer who’d caught the call leaned against the back fender, yellow-and-black crime-scene tape fluttering in the light breeze, his face mottled shades of green.

  Fat leather attaché slung over one shoulder, Tony greeted him with a nod. He glanced at the Cadillac in the driveway, then checked out the piss-yellow Ford across the street. It belonged to Frank Simmons, fellow detective and general goofball, but not a bad guy. There were worse guys to work a triple homicide with.

  As he started up the driveway, Simmons stepped out onto the porch and took a deep breath. “You know, Chee, there oughta be a law against killing people in the middle of a heat wave.”

  “There’s laws against a lot of shit. Some people just don’t obey them.”

  “Imagine that.” Simmons gestured toward the Caddy. “Look familiar?”

  “Make my day and tell me it belongs to Mykle Moore.”

  “Who else you know drives a fuckin’ tank like gas ain’t nearly two bucks a gallon? He’s inside, and his partners in crime are with him. I already got a call in to the M.E. and the crime-scene unit.”

  “Banks and Washington? They just got arrested the other day. I thought they were in jail awaiting trial.”

  “Ain’t you heard?” Simmons snorted. “The district attorney installed revolving doors down there to speed up the process of getting these poor misguided souls back out on the street. Let’s get started, son. They’re already swellin’ and smellin’, and it ain’t gonna get any better.”

  Taking one last deep clean breath, Tony followed Simmons inside. The stench of death was strong, but not yet overpowering. Grover Washington, lucky to have lived long enough to see thirty-two, five-feet-nine-inches tall and about that across, sporting a shiny gold ring in his left ear and a shinier gold tooth, lay sprawled in the middle of the floor, looking for all the world like a rag doll tossed aside, except for the large-caliber holes in his chest and the blood pooled around his torso.

  The second corpse was Walter Banks, twenty-seven, guilty of at least four murders, but too slick to get convicted even once. He was seated on a ratty old couch, his head tilted back. He could have been asleep if not for the fact that he was wearing most of his blood on his clothes.

  The third victim, on the floor in front of the side window, was the youngest at eighteen. Mykle Moore had been lean and wiry, with a baby face that couldn’t even sprout a decent mustache, but he’d beaten his sister to death with a baseball bat for doing the nasty with one of his competitors. Now that face bore a gunshot wound in the forehead, and an exit wound from a second shot dead center in the chest.

  Next to each body was a calling card with a one-word message: Repent. They would bag them, of course, but Tony already knew what the lab would find—standard playing-card size, printed on common index cards by the bestselling brand of printer in America. No fingerprints, no smudges, no clues.

  “Maybe somebody should explain to this guy that it’s real hard to repent with a bullet in your brain.”

  Simmons snorted again. “I hope not. He might stop putting those bullets there, and then where would we be?”

  “Not so bogged down in cases is where,” Tony retorted.

  “Hey, you and me, we do our best to take this scum off the streets, and the justice system”—Simmons said it as an epitaph—“puts ’em right back out there. Our vigilante is taking ’em off the street permanently. Any way you look at it, that’s justice.”

  “Any way you look at it, that’s murder.” Tony set his bag down on the floor, pulled on a pair of powder-free latex gloves, then took out a camera. CSU would photograph everything, but he liked taking his own pictures, as well, to ensure he got every shot he wanted, at the angles he wanted. He snapped off long shots of the room and close-ups of the bodies, the windowsill, and the calling cards, then crouched near Washington’s body.

  Considering all the misery Grover had caused—the drugs he’d dealt, the people he’d killed, the assaults and intimidation and rapes—lying dead on the floor of an abandoned house was as much justice as anyone could hope for. Too easy a death, some would say, but in the end, dead was dead.

  A card lay faceup on the torn linoleum, its top edge just touching the pool of congealed blood. Repent. Had he? Had he known what was coming and had time to say a prayer?

  Tony doubted it. The only way to take out these guys was by surprise. They were always armed—MasterGun, Grover had frequently joked. Never leave home without it. No weapons were visible on any of the bodies, but no doubt they would turn up once the M.E.’s guy was ready to tag ’em and bag ’em.

  “What do you say, man?” Simmons looked up from his own examination of Walter Banks. “Let’s call it �
�death due to natural causes’ and go get some breakfast.”

  It didn’t get much more natural for people like these, Tony thought. Those who lived by the sword died by it.

  “Looks like a .45, maybe a .357,” he remarked as he stood up.

  “I’m surprised the guy didn’t need an elephant gun to bring down ol’ Grover here. He’s a big mamou.” Simmons grimaced. “You know we’re gonna have to help load him up.”

  Tony straightened. His muscles were already protesting in anticipation as he backtracked to the door.

  Presumably, the killer had been standing in the vicinity of the doorway when he’d opened fire. None of the victims had expected trouble, or they would have had their weapons drawn, and surely one of them would have gotten off at least one shot. Had the shooter walked in on them without warning? Or had they been expecting him, if not the gunshots? Banks hadn’t had time or, just guessing, reason to rise from the couch, and Grover had been on his feet, facing the door. Looking at someone who had just come in?

  “What about the brass?” he asked, turning his gaze to the floor in search of shell casings. “You see any?”

  “Not a one. But a .357 wouldn’t eject ’em, and a .45 . . . a pro would take ’em.”

  “Anyone who watches C.S.I. would take ’em.” TV had taught people more than they needed to know about criminal investigations. Fortunately, crooks didn’t tend to be quick learners.

  Switching the camera to his left hand, Tony flipped on a flashlight and played the beam over the floor to his right. Rubbish was piled against the wall—beer cans, fast-food wrappers, used rubbers, a couple hypodermic needles. Punks came here to get drunk, get laid, and get high in relative comfort.

  He’d never been that horny or that desperate in his life.

  Before he faced the task of sorting through the trash, he turned a hundred and eighty degrees, then crouched, lighting up the floor in the opposite corner. The angled beam highlighted a half-dozen faint shoeprints in the dust. Maybe their shooter hadn’t walked in on his victims, but had been here waiting for them. Standing in the corner of the darkened room, a person could go unobserved by anyone who entered. Then it would have been a simple matter of stepping out, gun in hand, and blowing the bastards away.