Honorable Assassin (10 page)

“You’ve ruined my life and killed my family.
I would recognize you in the dark. If you’re a religious man, now
would be the time to pray.” Terry grabbed the spark tool and lit up
the acetylene and then added the oxygen slowly until he had a nice
blue point inside the flame.

“Ok, ok, it was me. You don’t need that.
I’ll tell you anything you want to know but you don’t need that.”
Bradley knew he could not talk his way out of his predicament by
denying all knowledge.

“Why did you do it?”

“If it’s any consolation, it wasn’t
personal. I had nothing against your father; in fact I admired him
greatly. It was simply a job and I don’t know why the job was set.
I was paid to kill your father. I had to kill your mother because
she was a witness. You must know your father did the same thing to
many men and women. We were the same. If he had been paid, he would
have killed me and anyone around me. He was very good. I never
found out why they wanted him dead, just that they did.”

“You are not the same as he was. He was a
good man…”

“He was a good assassin. They never caught
him because he killed every man, woman and child that could
identify him. I can help you. I can help you get to the men who
ordered him killed.”

Terry glanced at Ginger who shook his head.
Terry then took the man’s pocket knife and tried to use it left
handed but could not. He put the live torch on the counter top with
the flame blowing downward toward the floor. Then he cut the suit
off the man in a few places where the tape allowed it to show.

“Oh, for the love of God, no! Please. I’ll
tell you. Don’t use that bloody thing on me. I got my directions
from Sparky Robinson.”

“Who does Sparky work for?”

“I don’t knoooooo.” The flame got closer and
Bradley panicked. “Ok, Ok he works for the Troy Brothers.”

Terry glanced at his uncle again, who nodded
his head this time.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Your father was the best. I
didn’t want to kill him but it was the job. If I didn’t do the job,
somebody would have killed me.”

“Well, somebody is going to kill you now,
but you are going to suffer first.”

Terry pasted the tape back over Bradley’s
mouth and touched the flame to his belly. Bradley could not scream
but he did thrash about wildly. The smell of his own flesh burning
filled his nostrils.

Terry backed off, revolted by the smell and
the cruelty of his own actions. He pulled the tape off once more
and asked, “Who did my father work for?”

Bradley spit on the floor. “Boy, you know I
fucked your mother in the ass?”

“What?”

“That’s right. I fucked her in the ass and
she loved it. She kept begging me for more. Every time she saw me
she got down on her knees and sucked on my cock and begged me to
fuck her in the ass.”

“You…”

“I’d fuck her in the ass and make her suck
the shit off my…” Those were the last words Bradley ever spoke.
Terry grabbed the Glock off the counter and pumped five rounds into
his bound body. Then he took the knife and began to slash and stab
at the corpse, swearing incoherently.

“Oh, shit,” said Ginger. “Stop that, boy.
Put your cap on. Grab the torch. No, shut the bloody thing off.
Leave the gun. And the knife. I got the tool box. Come on, boy.
They’ll be on us now. You’ve had your revenge. Let’s go.”

“There’s money in the floor safe.”

“Forget about it. Leave your gloves on, boy.
Take his keys. You drive his car, slowly, a couple of kilometers
south. Then you get in the van. Go, go, go.”

The two tried to keep their faces covered as
they exited the front door. The silent alarm went off, one minute
later, at the security company. The telephone rang but there was no
answer. The police were notified and some local constables
dispatched. False alarms were common, but this one came in
conjunction with a shots fired call.

Terry tried to keep the speed down but the
Cadillac was quite powerful and handled much differently from what
he was used to. Ginger walked calmly to the van, opened the rear
doors and put the tool box in. Then he calmly reached in and
grabbed a handful of intentionally dirty axle grease and wiped it
on the license plate. He removed his gloves and entered the
vehicle. It started quickly and he pulled out at a reasonable
speed. He did nothing to generate additional interest in himself.
The Cadillac was out of sight before he entered the main road, but
he saw it parked in the entrance of a park. Most of the 250
kilometers of the Yarra River is dedicated to parkland. Bradley had
gotten a really prime piece of property.

Ginger pulled in behind the car and Terry
jumped out with the cutting torch in his hand. He threw open the
van door and all but flew inside. Ginger pulled into the park,
rolling his window down and listening. There was enough vegetation
to keep them hidden from sight. It was not long before the sirens
came screaming down the road. As soon as they had passed, Ginger
pulled out of the park and headed back the way the police had come
from.

The boat and tackle had been returned. They
even caught a couple of fish on the way back. The coveralls had
been sunk in the dark water of the river. The van was wiped clean
and returned. The Holden was jacked up and the spring compressed
when the patrol car pulled up behind it. Ginger explained that they
had come down for some fishing and told the constable what they had
caught. He apologized for doing the work on public land and
explained that they had lost a ball joint and needed to replace it.
The constable knew a little about the workings of the car’s
steering and watched as they popped the ball joint off with the
pickle fork and a hammer. He had a short conversation with them
about the car itself, told them to work and drive safely and left
them to draw the new ball joint into place. They got the work done
and left town, stopping for a front-end alignment along the way.
The receipts for the parts and the alignment as well as the return
of the boat and tackle were kept as proof of where they had been
and what they had done. They had no proof for the previous day but
if the question ever came up, they were fishing. The receipt for
the van was destroyed.

“You know he played you, right?”

“He played me? Yeah, he did, he played me. I
let that son-of-a-bitch get under my skin. He popped me off so bad
I shot him.”

“That’s what he wanted. He didn’t want to
get tortured to death. He knew we were on him hard and there was no
way we could let him live. Wouldn’t have, even if we could have.
His last hope left him and he knew. So he played you.”

“I… I don’t care. He told me what I wanted
to know. And I finally got some of what I wanted.”

“How does it make you feel?”

“I don’t know.”

“The first time is always hard. It’s good
you had reason or you probably couldn’t have done it.”

“It feels kind of hollow. Like… like I did
it, but it wasn’t really me and it didn’t really happen. I shot him
with his own gun and he just sort of exploded. I was so pumped up.
He sort of just exploded. You know what, Uncle, it feels good. That
piece of rat shit. It feels good.”

“Don’t get too attached to that feeling.
That path leads to madness.”

“It didn’t feel good that I had him. It
scared me. I almost threw up when I burned him. But after I shot
him. That’s when it felt good, I guess.”

“Now, tell me, what are the rules?”

“Never leave fingerprints. Never talk about
it. Never work with the constabulary. Never attract attention to
yourself. Never leave witnesses.”

“Now, what rules did we break?”

“We left a witness. The new owner of the
boat.”

“What should we do about it?”

“Kill him?”

“Do you want to?”

“No, not really. I don’t think we need
to.”

“Good. I’ll phone him and tell him that the
registration has been straightened out. Tell him that there is no
more trouble with the insurance and he’ll be happy and hopefully
nobody ever asks him about it. I doubt anyone will. But that’s the
trade-off. The connection is there, but it’s so much less dangerous
to let it lie than to kill another man that we’ll just let it lie.
We’re stopping in Sydney on the way home.”

“Sydney? That’s well out of our way.”

“A man needs to indulge himself
sometimes.”

“I think I already did.”

“This is a different sort of
indulgence.”

Before they reached Sydney, Ginger had dyed
his hair red again. It did not look right because he was actually
beginning to go grey but it made him look younger. He also shaved
off his beard.

In Sydney they went to the Kings Cross area
and, as Ginger had said, they indulged themselves. Terry had never
had a woman before but his paid partner complimented him repeatedly
and it made him feel wonderful. When they drove off, Ginger said,
“A man needs that from time to time, eh, mate?”

Terry looked at him intently. His uncle had
never called him “mate” before. He had the feeling he was no longer
a boy in Ginger’s eyes. In fact he no longer felt like a boy.

~~~

Chapter Five: Inheritance

Terry Kingston was no longer the same after
his little adventure. He said almost nothing to anyone his first
day back at school. He had a nightmare that night about being bound
to a wall and seeing Bradley abusing his mother. He could not help
her and Bradley leered at him when he pulled out his gun and shot
her. He woke up shaking like an impact hammer.

The dreams where he was chained up were over
in a couple of days and replaced by nighttime visions of medieval
battles. Sometimes he was watching from a hilltop like a conquering
hero and sometimes he was in the thick of it with his sword arm
slick with blood and his shield absorbing hammer blows.

After a week, Terry threw himself into his
work. He began to study late into the night, after his chores were
done. He still hunted but his primary focus was no longer shooting
the animals, it was sneaking up on them. He split cord after cord
of wood, until they had enough extra that they began selling it to
the neighbors.

Terry stopped fighting in school. He had
plenty of opportunity, mostly from the older class, but he no
longer felt it worth his while. He studied the upper class and
decided that there was one lad in particular that no one else
wanted to fight. He was not much of a fighter really, but he was
very big. Terry decided that this was the one that he would make an
example of and one day he challenged him to a fight. The
upperclassman would not fight him even though Terry called him some
rather vile names and impugned the honor of his family. Terry had
learned not to turn his back on an enemy but in this case he did it
deliberately. The lad charged at him as soon as his back was
turned.

Terry wheeled around and then sidestepped
the oaf. His opponent was on the ground without his ever throwing a
punch. He was told that the ground was the best place for him to
stay, but the big lad was angry now so there was no stopping him.
Terry played him like a matador playing a bull, presenting a target
for the charge and then moving aside. After doing this four times
he knew his opponent would not fall for it again, so he stood his
ground, braced himself, and caught the charging fool by the waist.
He used the bull’s momentum to pick him up and dropped him on his
head. That was the last fight Terry Kingston ever had to get in,
all the while he went to that school.

Research was easier into the affairs of the
Troy Brothers than it had been into Bradley’s. They were somewhat
notorious, well protected, and deeply feared individuals. They were
the accepted heads of a crime syndicate that spanned all but the
southernmost part of New South Wales. Their reputations were such
that anyone reaching mid-level criminal status was required to pay
a tribute to them. They administered the large shipments of drugs
and other forms of contraband. They had their fingers in the legal
businesses as well. Protection was afforded to those who
contributed to their coffers and accidents occurred when one did
not. The Australian businessmen were a hard-bitten lot but the Troy
Brother’s methods were savage enough to convince even the most hard
core individualist to come around. All the houses of manly pleasure
paid for their protection, and the protection of their ladies. Any
drug dealers above street level needed permission to operate. It
was almost as if they bought a license and renewed it monthly.

There were things the research did not
uncover. Much of the constabulary was making extra money by
ignoring some things, and acting on others that may have been
ignored otherwise. Many of the judges and politicians were on the
Troy payroll. Rumor had it that even Colby Carmichael, the
Commissioner of Australia’s Taxation Office, was a recipient of the
brothers’ largesse.

It would be extremely difficult and
dangerous to even ask too many questions about the brothers’
affairs. To get close enough to ask them the kinds of questions
Terry Kingston wanted answered would be suicide for most men.
Ginger made sure Terry understood that completely.

Time went by, and Rough and Ready got old.
They were the finest of dogs and fantastic with the sheep but they
were reaching the age where they would need to be replaced. Ginger
bought their replacements as puppies, from the same man he had
bought his current canine assistants from. The puppies were
naturals. They needed little training, most of what they learned
was taught to them by their predecessors. Terry was aware that he
was going to need to put the older pair out of their misery soon.
Arthritis had set into the dogs’ hips and they were in constant
pain.

When the day came, Terry took them out into
the fields one at a time and shot them in the heads with his own
.38 revolver. He dug a separate grave for each of them, said a
prayer over each of them and went home to clean his gun. It was
much more difficult for him to dispatch Pincher, the Doberman.
Pincher had been his from the first day they spent together.
Pincher also hated every other man on Earth. He was not so
unfriendly to women, but Terry was the only man the creature loved.
It abided Ginger, but did not like him. It never bit Ginger, but
Ginger never turned his back on Pincher. When the day came for
Terry to pull his best friend out into the field and put one in his
brain he took it very personally. He moped about for days
afterward, but he never cried. He had not cried since he was eight
years old.