The Hit-Man: The Protectors Book 2 Read online

  The Hit

  The Protectors Book 2

  By

  Jordan Silver

  Copyright©2015 Alison Jordan

  All Rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

  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

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  DRAKE

  "Fuck-fuck-fuck". I pulled out and stroked my seed into the condom while she clutched her crotch and stared up at me in awe. I hopped off and went into the bathroom to clean up, feeling the bitter taste of disgust in my throat that was always there whenever I defiled myself with her.

  I flushed the rubber and got in the shower to scrub the last hour or so off of me. There was no point in beating myself up over my stupidity, there was a method to this madness, or so I’ve been telling myself for the last ten years. I flicked off the water and stepped out, in my usual hurry to get the hell out.

  She came in behind me while I stood in the mirror and tried wrapping her arms around me, but the feeling was already dead and gone. After I nut I’m pretty much done with the pussy and the body attached to it.

  I shrugged her off of me and pulled on my jeans. I didn’t have to look at her to know that she was scowling. Fuck I care!

  "Why do you pull out if you're wearing a condom anyway? I told you I'm on the pill and I'm clean." Did I really once find that annoying whine cute? Young and dumb as a stump!

  "I don't take chances with my dick, and what's in me is for my future wife." I ignored her indrawn breath and the hurt in her eyes, that shit was way too late to do her shady ass any good. I almost hated her, came closer and closer to outright detesting after each of these little dances we shared.

  I left her after dropping a few rolls of twenties on the side table. She's not a working girl, in fact she was once my high school sweetheart, but she'd fucked up. Now I fucked her because I could and because I knew she would never dare turn me away; and on top of that, she was easy. Besides, I'm fucked up enough to enjoy treating her like shit. It went a long way to making up for what the fuck she'd done to my teenage heart. I stopped thinking about her the minute I cleared the door.

  ***

  My phone rang just as I was about to hop on my bike. It was my private line so I knew it was business and not some other chick on my dick. Whenever I come back from a job I'm bombarded with pussy calls. It's like they have a lookout or some shit that tells them when I cross the county line.

  "Cisco."

  "Yes, you're the man I'm told I need to talk to."

  "Uh huh and just who might you be?"

  "I'd rather not say on the phone if we could just...." I shut the shit off on his ass. Don't have time for games and bullshit. If you don't want me knowing who the fuck you are, then we don't need to be talking to each other. In my line of work that shit'll get you killed.

  I had one more stop to make before heading for home, my favorite girl. I nodded to a few people as I rode through town at a respectable rate of speed. They were all pretty much used to my going and coming by now. Most of them believed that I worked on a rig in Alaska somewhere and that's just what I wanted them to think. The less people who knew what the fuck it was I did the better.

  Pretty soon they’d have to come up with something else to ponder since I will be home more often than not. The reasons for that were already playing through the mirrors of my mind.

  I hate this maudlin shit, but it seems to happen more and more here of late. That noose was tightening around my neck; time was drawing near so to speak. The realization was bittersweet, as I guess was to be expected when you’d worked towards something for so long, and the end was finally in sight.

  I probably had two more jobs in me before I hung up my hat. I had made enough money to do what I needed, even if I did get it by questionable means. My conscience didn’t give a fuck; that shit had a one-track mind. If I ever did develop a give a fuck gene I was up shit creek. The way life has been sticking it to me since I drew my first breath, I had no doubt that I would wake up one day and look in the mirror and see my past staring back at me. But for now I had my blinders on.

  When I was very young, too young to know these things, I discovered that I had the rest of the world beat hands down with a particular skill. It was quite by accident, and not one of those things that there was a huge market for, or so I thought. As it turns out there was more than enough for me to do in this fucked up world, and more than enough money to facilitate my needs.

  There are no medals and promotions in the shit I do, and the world had better never find that shit out. I'm what the media types would call number one with a gun.

  I can shoot faster, farther and harder than anyone on the face of the earth with a ninety-nine point nine-nine percent accuracy rate. I can also break apart and put back together any weapon faster than most. With my particular skills you'd think there was only one place to go. The army. But at the time I realized my potential my head was in a fucked up place. The world had fucked me and I was looking for payback.

  I had the taste of blood in my throat back then, but my hands were tied. Then out of sheer boredom and frustration, I’d gone on line and researched my particular skill and what could be done with it. At the time I still couldn’t see the potential, other than killing my enemies, but even then I knew death was too easy. To my surprise there was a lot I could do with my quick arm, some of it not exactly legal or moral; I gave a fuck.

  In the end there was no contest. I honed my skills daily at the range where I’d learned that I was way better than average. I did my best to play down my skills even as I fielded suggestions from the owner as to what I could do with my particular gift. If only he knew where my mind had already gone. All his suggestions were good, mostly dealing with security for the very wealthy, but none of them would fulfill my purpose. No, I had something way more sinister in mind.

  You guessed it; I sold my arm to the highest fucking bidder and haven't looked back since. The army pays peanuts compared to what I make, and I needed money, lots of it, for the fight ahead. I had one goal in life from then until now, to avenge a horrible wrong. And it didn’t matter to me how I achieved it, or what I had to do to get there, all that mattered was seeing the destruction of the men I had come to hate with a perpetual hatred.

  In the beginning, as a green boy who’d never left our little town, I didn't ask too many questions. I took a job and asked for a couple thousand. There wasn’t exactly a menu with a price list attached. That was then; now these many years later, I command upwards to a million for a hit, and you'd be amazed at how many people are willing to pay that to get rid of someone. These days I do more research on my target though, whereas in the beginning, I didn't give a fuck and had no interest in knowing who the fuck they were. I had to change up that shit when I came to realize that people would off their neighbor for letting their dog shit in their yard once too often. True story.

  Most of my kills lately have been some dictator or state head in little out of the way places that no one knew shit about, but Uncle Sam had some need of either their land or their people. With the money I’ve made in the last year alone, I could retire ten times over, but I still have a lot of anger to work off.

  My conscience is practically nonexistent when I look through the scope of my piece. It hadn’t always been that way, but life has a strange way of changing your direction and someti
mes making you into something you otherwise might not have aspired to be. Today when I look in the mirror, it’s getting harder and harder to see any remnant of the carefree boy who once believed the world was his for the taking.

  I’d shed him on that now long ago day, never to be seen again. Even now I wondered that those around me hadn’t seen the change for what it was. But the cover of mourning had made it easy to slip from one guise to the next, to shed one skin to don another. I’d gone into this for the money plain and simple. If there was one thing I’d learned from this experience, it was that money was always the deciding factor. More so than color lines or anything else, green was the color that ran this machine called life and I wanted to get my hands on as much of it as possible.

  With all that I had done so far, there was still a part of me that knew this wasn’t who I was, who I was meant to be. And that even the one I sought to avenge might not agree with the road I’d taken, but I’d learned to shut that off, there was no place for guilt or recriminations here, that shit was dead. Lately though I’ve been feeling the change. I’d always thought that as long as the murdering fucks in the government had a hit list a mile long, I was their guy. But I was losing my taste for it time to get out.

  Chapter 2

  I pulled into mom’s driveway on my hog and revved it up a bit; she likes that shit. It’s like a little secret code between us. I saw the fluttering of the curtains and her sweet little face peeping out at me with that infectious smile of hers. She never ceased to smooth out my rough edges.

  Seeing her was always a conundrum. I didn’t love anyone or anything on this earth as much as I did her, but the guilt I carried for my part in the loss of her husband, my dad, always left me feeling like the lowest filth when she looked at me with all that love.

  I pulled my saddlebag and retrieved the gift I’d picked up for her in Central America. I never came home without some little token for her, even though she always made a fuss about me wasting money. She was the only person in the world who knew what I did, the only one I trusted. And it always baffled me that she’d never once tried to talk me out of it.

  I knew the fire of vengeance burned in her chest as well, that she, without uttering the words, needed this as much as I did. Some may not understand, sometimes even I didn’t, but the truth is, I no longer saw faces when I pulled the trigger, I just saw one more step closer to achieving what it was that I had my heart set on doing. Besides, except for a few false starts in the beginning, I kept my kills to the dregs of society; at least mom appreciated that.

  It seemed strange now that I had opened up to her about it, but it was after one particularly hard hit and I’d needed to share with someone or go mad. It had been in the very beginning of my new life and I still had that know-it-all attitude going. My vision had changed but not the scope, I still saw only black and white, no grey.

  It wasn’t the hit itself that had thrown me off, by then I had somewhat conditioned myself to it. It was the fact that I’d almost offed the double agent in front of his kid. I wouldn’t wish that hell on my worse enemy. To this day I still get the chills whenever I think of it, how close I’d come to inflicting my own personal torment on another innocent.

  I’d been gone in my head when I got back and she’d sensed it and dragged the truth out of me. The two of us had been through some shit together in this fucked up town, things that had changed our lives in a horrific way. Maybe that’s why it had been so easy for her to accept what her son had become.

  That day, after I’d told her, she’d just studied me for the longest while before nodding her head once as if coming to some conclusion, before going back to what she’d been doing. She was no longer the vibrant woman that I’d always known and loved from childhood. I saw it plainly each time I went away and came back. The fact that I bore part of the responsibility for that was a cross I will have to bear forever.

  I pushed the familiar pain of remembrance aside, not wishing for her to see anything in me. I never wanted her to revisit those days and did everything I could to keep them at bay. Though I was sure that the very sight of me probably brought it all rushing back. There was nothing I could do about that, we were the other had. My hope was that after I’d wreaked vengeance on the guilty, it would bring back some of the light that had been dimmed in her eyes, and go a long way to assuaging my guilt.

  She was at the door to meet me with open arms. I could smell the aroma of my favorite pepper steak coming from the kitchen, as well as the fragrant scent of apple pie. “Hi mama.” I wrapped her much smaller frame up in my arms and inhaled that scent that I remember from childhood. The killer was always humbled by the familiar scent of his mama.

  “How’ve you been son?” She went through her usual routine of testing for broken bones and any other infirmities I might’ve suffered since the last time I saw her. “I’m good ma stop fussing, now let me take a look at you.” She would never say it to me, but I knew there were still some in this town that gave her a hard time. Of course they would never try that shit while I was around, but I had people on the lookout, who kept me up to date on what went on while I was away.

  Those assholes usually paid for that shit as soon as possible, but I always carried out my vengeance under cover of darkness so that that shit never came back on her. I didn’t want to show my hand too soon, didn’t want anyone knowing what I was before the time was right. I’ve burnt out more businesses in the last few years than a Watts rioter. I’m pretty sure mama had her suspicions but she never brought it up to me, for which I was forever grateful. She might not bat a lash at my new profession, but I wasn’t too sure how she’d feel about having that shit in her own backyard.

  She didn’t look any worse for wear under my very close inspection and her doctor, the last time we spoke, assured me that she was in good health. It had taken her a long time to get back to herself after what had happened to my dad almost ten years ago. She’d regained her waning health and was coming out of the shell she’d crawled into to protect herself from the loss, but I don’t think she’d ever truly get over him.

  That was another thing I tried not to think too hard about, because there was nothing I could do to bring him back. It still left a bad taste in my mouth, and the old feeling of helplessness and frustration only served as a hindrance. The anger was never too far behind though, it’s what kept me going, what made me climb out of bed day after day and put one foot before the other.

  “You went to see that girl again didn’t you Drake?”

  Oh hell, I’m so not looking forward to having this argument for the one hundredth time, but I make it a point not to lie to her ever and I’m not about to start now. A son could wish his mama wasn’t so damn opinionated though damn.

  “Ma leave it alone, I told you, you have nothing to worry about on that front.”

  “But after what that family has done to ours I don’t see how my own son could even stand to look at her.” That shit makes my gut churn every time she says it, and she might be right, but there’s something perverse in me that gets a kick out of defiling Trish every chance I get. That too was part of my revenge. A necessity, that no matter how distasteful, was part and parcel of the whole.

  The same thing my mom is afraid of, is the head thing I use to avenge the shit that had gone down. It’s not like I could explain to my own mother that putting my dick in the daughter of the man who destroyed my family was my way of getting my pound of flesh though.

  She wasn’t too happy and she has her ways of letting her displeasure be known, but that didn’t last too long, it never did. She fussed over me for the rest of the day, making sure that I had enough to eat, and that my head was straight after this last job. She was getting more and more worried since I no longer had nightmares after a hit. I think she was afraid that I was losing my humanity; she might have a point. She was the only beam of light in my otherwise dark world; everything else had long faded to black.

  It was only here, for the few days I gave myself in between
jobs that I could truly relax and let my guard down. It was only with her that I felt like someone else had my back. I sometimes wonder if I will ever have any peace again in this life. If after all is said and done, and I’d exacted my vengeance, would I go back to being that same free spirit I’d been born to be.

  ***

  I made the rounds on the grounds of the property that sat on the outskirts of town, that I had bought for her a few years earlier. The property had been the first volley I’d shot at the fuckers who had secretly scorned us. She now lived in the biggest house, which sat on a hill looking down on the rest of the town. I did that shit by design to prove a point to all those who had ran their mouths when that shit had gone down with my dad all those years ago.

  Though she hated to make waves, she was now the proud owner of a complete closet full of designer shit. Her car was the latest model in one of the best-known luxury lines, and there was nothing she could ever want or need that I hadn’t made provisions for. She no longer had to hang her head when she walked down Main, but she had enough fortitude to know that those who hadn’t been her friends before couldn’t be trusted now. Only those few who had stuck by us through our darkest hour were allowed anywhere near her. Anyone else tried getting too close I nipped that shit in the bud.

  My phone went off again as my walk through was coming to an end, and I knew without looking that it was the same ass from before. “What?”

  “Uh, yes, I spoke to you earlier but there was a little mix up. I’m interested in hiring your services, I’ll need you as soon as possible.” He rattled off some shit like he was nervous and I rolled my eyes and ran my hand across the back of my neck. By the end of his spiel I knew all I needed to know about the job on the table. It sounded pretty cut and dry and I wondered at my lack of feeling as I listened to him.

  There was still some research to be done on my part, because like I said, some people are fucked in the head, but he didn’t need to know that shit. He went on and on without saying much, and I realized he was not a novice. There was something about his pattern of speech that told me he was not new to the game of high crime. So it was left to be discovered, just what he wanted with me.