Dead to Me Read online

  Not a spot of anything could have survived in this kitchen. She had even opened every door and make sure nothing had dripped down onto a hinge or in a crack. She had sanitized every tiny inch with bleach.

  She had put nothing down any sink, but instead used a plastic bucket for the cleaning water. Then outside in the fenced backyard she had washed the bucket out completely in the gravel at the back end of the path to the yard.

  Then she had put the bucket in the ground in a new flowerbed she had planted last week. She had punched some holes in the bottom of the bucket, put a new plant in the bucket, and filled the bucket up with dirt completely.

  The bucket was covered completely. It was gone.

  Then she had turned on the sprinklers that watered the lawn, including the area of the path where she had poured the cleaning water.

  She was very good at this sort of thing.

  Mary Jo never expected anything to lead back to her and this house, but it made no sense to take any chance when just a little bit of work would solve any problem.

  Then she had gone into the guest room, put her blouse, bra, underwear, jeans, shoes and socks in a black trash bag along with all the cloths she had used for the cleaning and set the bag near the back door.

  Then she had gone to her own bedroom upstairs in the four-bedroom, two-bath suburban home, taken a shower, making sure she was clean.

  Extra sure. Especially her short brown hair.

  She had liked this house in the year since she and Bob had gotten married. It kind of fit a part of her that she didn’t often get to enjoy. And she could play the perfect housewife role to a science. She was only five-five, had short brown hair that made her look more like a pixie than anything else, and a body style with narrow hips and a small chest that didn’t show any of her strength.

  She was a member of an ancient order of assassins. She had lived for thousands of years, as everyone in her order tended to do. And she had never grown tired of her job. Ever. In fact, the job had gotten more challenging as technology improved.

  She liked that and the money it supplied her to live a lavish lifestyle.

  After her shower, she had dressed in a similar white blouse that she had had on earlier, same style of jeans, underwear, everything, including a second pair of sneakers.

  With a pair of white gloves on, she took the black bag and put it into the back of her Jeep Cherokee along with a couple bags of normal week’s garbage. She had set this routine up a year ago. This was all normal for her, including the white gloves. She had then driven the thirty minutes to the landfill just outside of town.

  There she had made sure every bag was tossed over the edge of the dumping area into an area full of other black bags that a bulldozer was moving around and covering in layers of dirt.

  She had paid the attendant in cash and he hadn’t even noticed her other than to nod hi as he did every week. His attention was focused on the two pickup trucks behind her full of junk.

  Now she was back at her house looking at the bottle of vodka and orange juice and wondering if she dared have one more drink.

  After all, it had been the first Screwdriver with just a little too much vodka in it that had started all this mess and then cleaning.

  Actually, it hadn’t been, but it was fun to think that it had.

  She loved her drinks, but was very careful in the thick of a job to not drink too much.

  As she stood there, staring at the fixings for a drink she felt she wanted but wasn’t sure she needed, her cell phone went off.

  It was her husband’s ring.

  She answered it. “Hi, honey.”

  “Afraid I’m going to be late for dinner,” he said. “Got a body.”

  “Oh, no,” she said, making herself take a deep breath. Her husband was the lead homicide detective for the entire city. This call was normal. Over their year of marriage it had happened a good thirty times.

  She had been responsible for a few of those bodies, just as she was for the one that had just been found. But he never knew that and never would.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “How about I wait for you and we go out to Murphy’s Diner when you are done.”

  “Might get late,” he said.

  “I’ll snack until you call.”

  “That would be nice,” he said. He told her that he loved her and then hung up.

  He was a good man. She had enjoyed the year plus they had been together. The sex had been good, the laugher real. After centuries of living and killing, she had learned to appreciate those times even more.

  She glanced at her watch. It was a quarter after four. The timing was spot on the money.

  She glanced at the bottle of vodka one more time, then set it aside, put the pitcher of orange juice back in the fridge and the clean glass back in the cabinet.

  Maybe after her dinner.

  She then took her purse and went out to her Jeep. The third row of seats was always down in her car so she could carry gardening and groceries easily.

  She lifted the seat and there was the bag with a rifle in it. Her disguise bag was there as well.

  She slipped on her gloves for a moment and did a quick inventory to make sure everything was with the rifle and the disguise bag and she hadn’t forgotten anything, then lowered the seats back into place.

  Fifteen minutes later she had parked her Jeep in the mall parking lot out of any camera sight. She then, when no one was around, transferred her rifle to the small Ford four-door sedan backseat and locked the car. The car was brown, with plates mostly covered in mud.

  The Ford sedan had been stolen by a man she had never met and left for her. She had paid the man ten grand for the car in a drop bag. He hadn’t asked questions.

  Then, carrying her disguise bag, she went into the mall and into the public restroom as herself. She came out almost forty minutes later, after dozens of other women had come and gone, as a long-haired blonde with a much larger nose and a tan jacket and red tennis shoes.

  She walked to her car not drawing any attention to herself, climbed into the brown sedan and fifteen minutes later had it parked on the top of a pine-tree covered hill just to the right of town.

  She had turned the car around so she could go straight down the hill she had just come up and be lost in the streets below in thirty seconds, long before anyone below even knew what hit them.

  She left the car running and left the disguise bag in the car. She then took her rifle and made sure it was loaded.

  It was a deer rifle, a classic bolt-action Roberts with a scope. Actually the rifle was a collector’s item that she remembered back sixty years really liking. The thief who had given her the rifle had assured her it was accurate and had been tested.

  She tested it on him and he had been right, actually. The thief was still one of her husband’s unsolved cases.

  She moved to the small stone wall that kept tourists on this hill from tumbling over the edge of a fairly steep cliff down into an old quarry below. This small turn-around often held teens out parking for some first love experiences in a parent’s car.

  She was so old now, she could barely remember her first sexual experiences. They had not been pleasant, she remembered that much.

  The quarry two hundred feet below was abandoned and mostly a playground for neighborhood kids after school and in the summer.

  The body of good old Sam lay below her, right where she had dumped it three hours before.

  Sam had been handsome in his own right for forty. He lived with his wife Becky three doors down the street from her and stayed home days to work on a novel. Mary Jo had asked him to help her with a wiring issue in her porch light that she had created. She told him it had sparked and she was afraid of a fire starting.

  He had fixed it, they had laughed, she had offered him a Screwdriver in payment for his hard work, and then she had stabbed him in the back, perfectly through his heart with a long ice pick as he moved to get ice.

  His blood mostly had pooled on t
he floor around him, but she had still cleaned everything to make sure.

  She had sipped her first drink of the day as he lay dead on her kitchen floor.

  She loved Screwdrivers. Best drink ever as far as she was concerned.

  Killing never did anything for her, one way or the other, and poor old Sam was just bait for her husband who was the real target.

  She checked the area in the small clearing around her to make sure no one was nearby that she would also need to kill, then eased up over the edge of the stone wall and looked down.

  Sam’s body was now covered.

  Her husband stood with two other detectives in a tight group near the body, talking.

  Good, she would take care of all three at the same time. First her husband, who was her target, the one she was getting paid to kill. She had slept with her target for fourteen months. She thought of it like a cat playing with a mouse.

  She studied the scene quickly one more time. By taking out the other two detectives, it would slow down any investigation.

  “Goodbye, dear,” she said softly. “This is what you get for pissing off the wrong people who have far too much money.”

  The rifle was loud, but had almost no kick. The echo of her first shot bounced around through the trees and over the surrounding farmlands.

  Her husband went to the ground instantly.

  She knew the entry wound would be small in his chest, but most of his back would be blown away from the high-velocity rifle as the hollow point bullet expanded on impact and blew him apart.

  She quickly took out her husband’s best friend and partner with a second shot before anyone even thought to move for cover.

  She killed the third detective as he turned to run.

  She picked up the three shells, made sure she had left nothing else where she had fired, then put the gun back in the case on the back seat of the car and headed down the road.

  She turned away from the police and then worked her way slowly back toward the mall.

  She parked the Ford sedan next to her Jeep again. Then transferred the disguise bag and everything into her car and put the rifle back under the back seats.

  She climbed into her Jeep and turned on a high-tech scanner she had in her purse that told her if any camera was watching at all.

  Nothing, as she had known for this area of the large mall parking lot.

  She quickly pulled off her disguise and tossed them into the bag, zipping it up and putting it on the floor behind her driver’s seat.

  Then she took off the thin, transparent gloves she had been wearing that were embedded with fake fingerprints and stuck those in the pocket of her jeans.

  Back at home, Mary Jo put back on the fake fingerprint gloves and pulled out two more black garbage bags full of weekly trash from the kitchen, including a bunch of stuff she had tossed out of the fridge after wiping prints and putting the fake prints on the stuff.

  Then she got the rifle from the car and broke it down and put parts in three bags, wearing her fake fingerprint gloves as she did.

  Then she took parts of her costume and spread them through the garbage as well. And she made sure that there was nothing in the bags that would lead to her in this home in any fashion.

  Then she headed back to the landfill, made some mention to the man taking her money that it was her second trip because she was cleaning house. He didn’t care.

  And she tossed the three bags over the edge and into the stinking mess of the landfill.

  A moment later the large grader covered all three with a layer of dirt.

  Mary Jo then went home to wait to play the part of the grieving widow.

  Sam’s wife would be grieving as well tonight.

  She was watching television two hours later when two uniformed cops came to her door.

  One was a woman cop who seemed to be almost in tears.

  They told Mary Jo the news and she broke down as the two cops expected her to do.

  They asked Mary Jo if there was anything they could do and Mary Jo told them she had a sister who would come over and stay with her. She didn’t, but the two cops bought it.

  Then the woman cop hugged her harder and longer than was necessary and gave Mary Jo her card for anything she needed.

  Mary Jo wondered if her good old husband had been getting a little of that on the side. He didn’t seem to be the type. But that had sure been a strange hug.

  Mary Jo was about to go fix herself that long-overdue second Screwdriver after the two officers left when her alarm bells went off.

  Instead, she went to her bedroom and stripped down and climbed in the shower, all the while pretending to be distraught.

  Finding nothing attached to her body, she came out and used a scanner she kept hidden in the back of her dresser drawer to check for bugs.

  The woman officer had planted one all right, under the back collar of her blouse.

  Audio only.

  There were no other bugs in the house.

  No young rookie cop would do that, especially so quickly after the entire department was tossed into panic mode. Besides, there was no reason to suspect her.

  That girl worked for someone outside the department. More than likely the same idiot who had paid Mary Jo to kill her husband and would pay a second half as soon as she reported in to him.

  And now he would pay a far higher sum. You didn’t try to double cross Mary Jo. Not ever. The idiots who had hired her had no idea the order of assassins even existed.

  Keeping up the act of a distraught wife for the bug, she put her blouse back on with her jeans and tennis shoes. Then she put on thin, clear gloves and took from what looked like a perfume bottle a small drop of fluid on a pad. She carefully wrapped the pad in a tiny bag and stuck it in her pocket. It was an odorless, untraceable poison that would kill anyone who touched it within five minutes.

  Then she called the young officer. “I want to see my husband.”

  “I don’t think that is such a good idea,” the young woman cop said.

  Mary Jo nodded. Both of them were right on script.

  “I’m coming to the station anyway,” Mary Jo said.

  Fifteen minutes later, she pulled up out front after pretending to cry most of the way to the station so that anyone listening to the bug wouldn’t be shocked.

  The young cop met Mary Jo at the big double door. Concrete steps led up into the front desk of the station.

  “I don’t think this is a good idea,” the young cop said. “He was shot and they need to do an autopsy.”

  Mary Jo had the poison pad in her hand and her hands were covered in the thin gloves. “You may be right. I don’t know what I am thinking.”

  She gave the young cop a hug, rubbing the pad along her neck before backing away.

  “I’m sure sorry,” Mary Jo said.

  “It’s understandable,” the young cop said.

  Suddenly the young cop looked pale and swallowed hard.

  Mary Jo took her under her arm and turned to take her up the three steps and into the station. The drug was very fast acting and this woman would be dead in five minutes tops.

  As she did, Mary Jo took off the glove and tossed it into a garbage can near the front door full of Burger King cups and food bags. The poison wouldn’t last in the air like that for another thirty minutes and the gloves would dissolve in two hours.

  “Help!” Mary Jo shouted to the officers inside as she opened the door. “She just collapsed into my arms on the front steps.”

  Two cops ran to grab the young officer, then a third nodded to Mary Jo and offered his sincere condolences.

  Mary Jo broke into sobs, as scheduled for her part of this passion play, and they let her sit in a back office and calm down before having an officer drive her home.

  Then Mary Jo killed the bug on her blouse and made sure the rest of her house was clean of all recording and electronic devices.

  It was.

  She dug out a burner phone from a fake bottom of her purse and dia
led a number.

  “Yeah,” a voice on the other end said.

  “Target is dead. The remainder of my fee has tripled because of your attempt at a double cross. If the money is not in the agreed-upon account by this time tomorrow afternoon, you know the consequences.”

  “You can’t threaten me,” the voice said.

  “I know where you live, where your children sleep, where your wife loves to eat sushi,” Mary Jo said. “I am patient, invisible, and you hired me because I get the job done. The job you hired me to do is done. The price is now four times my fee. Please do not fail me.”

  Then she hung up, put the phone in a baggy and smashed it into tiny pieces.

  Then she put some bleach and a few drops of a special solution into the baggy, sealed it, and tossed it into the trashcan outside. The entire thing would be a puddle of goo in the bottom of the can in an hour.

  She then took a deep breath.

  Finally, it was time.

  She took out the pitcher of orange juice, a highball glass, and the vodka. She filled the glass with ice, added a good solid shot of vodka, then filled the rest of the glass with orange juice.

  Then she put everything away before sipping the wonderful drink.

  Perfect.

  Just perfect.

  Maybe, just maybe, a little later, she might just have one more.

  After all, a grieving widow could be forgiven a drink or two.

  When two couples decide to play the Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice pretend game, things can take a nasty turn for the worse.

  Especially when the wives want to change the movie.

  A very strange crime story with a movie twist.

  One

  “Why in the world does anyone live in this god-forsaken humidity?”

  My words drifted through the thick air with no wind to take it away. Two midwestern natives—used to this thick, water-filled air—sat next to me in the drainage culvert under the concrete bridge as above us trucks thundered over, swimming through the thick air down I-70. The two men ignored my question without even pretending not to hear it.

  Bob-from-Minnesota, my husband and a real jerk, just shook his head and stared at the ground, blood dripping down his arm. It had already soaked his white T-shirt, mixing with the sweat-stains growing under his arms. It looked like a lot, but it wasn’t that much blood loss. He had just dislocated his shoulder and had a few surface wounds. I figured it served him right for being such a screw-up. And the worst driver I had ever seen, especially for a getaway car driver.