One Rough Man - Brad Taylor [16]
It was already past one, and she still hadn’t picked up Angie’s birthday cake at the supermarket. Before she did, though, she needed to go to Tim’s to pick up the piñata. She had asked him to help with the birthday party when she found out Pike wouldn’t be home, and he’d readily agreed. She had an ulterior motive for the favor: She intended to convince Tim to put some pressure on Pike to retire. Or at least find a less dangerous job. She wasn’t even sure what it was that Pike did, but it had to be worse than the SMU, and that was bad enough. While not best friends, Pike and Tim got along well, and Tim was the only one with any experiences like Pike’s. The only one Pike would listen to. In her heart, she secretly hoped Tim would offer him a job at his consulting company.
She hadn’t told Angie about the piñata, but like children everywhere, Angie had picked up that there were secrets afoot and was sitting expectantly in the backseat. She rounded the corner to Tim’s house and parked on the street. She recognized Tim’s Blazer in the driveway, but not the two unfamiliar sedans behind it.
Angie asked, “Whose cars are those?”
Heather had no idea, and hoped she wasn’t interrupting a meeting Tim had scheduled.
“I don’t know. Probably salespeople.”
Before Heather could stop her, Angie jumped out, racing to the back door, shouting, “Maybe it’s Daddy!’
“Angie! Wait!”
Heather felt a pang of guilt. In keeping the piñata secret she had hoped to lesson the blow of her father’s absence. Now it appeared she had only exacerbated it, as Angie had surmised her father was the surprise. Rehearsing what she would say as she walked up the driveway, she saw that the back door was open, with shards of glass on the ground. She heard Angie shriek and felt adrenaline fire into her body.
Heather’s eyes dilated and her muscles became engorged with blood in a fight-or-flight response. She chose to fight, running into the kitchen through the back door. She saw a large man holding Angie by the hair twenty feet away.
Without conscious thought, Heather snatched a paring knife from a block on the counter and charged the man with a primal scream. She registered him flinging Angie away like a rag doll as he prepared to defend himself. Before she reached him she was knocked to the ground from behind, disarmed, and jerked to her feet. She noticed blood all over the room. Great washes of it, as if someone had slopped a bucket haphazardly about. Looking for the source, she saw Tim lying on the floor, wicked gashes all over his body, his intestines slopping out from a hole in his stomach. She felt faint, unable to assimilate the slaughter.
The man holding her said, “What the fuck are we going to do now?”
“Well, we can’t take them with us.”
She faced the voice and saw a handsome blond-haired man, his hands covered in blood up to his elbows. His eyes were purple and flat. Dead. Unbidden, a memory of her childhood dog came to mind—a large husky that had been hit and killed by a car. When Heather had found him, his lifeless eyes looked like those of the man in front of her.
The man restraining her said, “Whoa, Lucas, I didn’t sign on for killing a woman and a kid. They’re not on the target list.”
Lucas said, “No shit. I fucking get that, but we need to get out clean. I didn’t ask them to come here. Look at the bright side: It’ll help confuse the authorities. It’ll play right into our cover of random violence. They’ll have so many threads to run down, it’ll cover our tracks.”
Another man Heather hadn’t noticed, now holding Angie, said, “I ain’t doing that. No way. No amount of money’s worth this.”
Lucas snarled, “The mission takes priority. Don’t go soft on me. I’ll do the work. Just hold them still.”
Heather spoke for the first time. “Please. We won’t say anything. Please don’t hurt my baby girl.”
Lucas looked