Assassin Page 2

  “Don’t look so worried, our flight will arrive in about fifteen minutes, we’re early.” The scent of food from the Arby’s nearby wafts across the street in Troy’s direction and he turns as if he’s a zombie on the hunt. Marty grabs his arm just as the cab driver starts for home. “You’re not to mingle with the locals. We will wait here for our flight.”

  He’s about to argue, when a small plane starts circling, and gently touches down on the rough terrain. It stops just before it slams into the building housing the glider planes, and a young man gives them a two finger salute. Marty Summers begins walking away without a backwards glance at Troy as if he expects the hulking man to follow without explanation. And he does.

  The pilot is chatting with one of the employees of the airport on his radio when they board the plane. Troy sits down and immediately puts on his seatbelt. This is worse than the Boeing they were on. He leans forward with his head almost touching his knees and his elbows resting on his thighs as he tries to suck in air. Mr. Summers doesn’t say a word about his ward’s inability to handle flight and tells the pilot it’s time to go.

  Now that his chatting session with the airport employees is over, he commences his takeoff routine. Their flight to the Cleveland-Hopkins International Airport doesn’t take as long as Troy expects, and he’s barely drifted off into sleep by the time they land. It was a rather smooth flight with minimum turbulence, and the pilot seems satisfied with himself.

  “And we’ve arrived at your destination, boys. Have a grand evening and fine rest of your trip!” He’s all smiles with his bright red hair and hazel eyes. Troy actually grins back before he hops off the plane and follows Marty over the tarmac and through the airport. They make it through security, and out into Cleveland, Ohio.

  “This is where I leave you, Troy Red. I wish you good luck in your future endeavors, and try not to sleep with anymore agents.” With those words, Marty Summers walks away from him with one hand in his pocket and the other hanging at his side. The back of his suit jacket flaps in the wind that is building up from a storm outside, and then he’s disappeared into another taxi.

  “Troy Red?” This man is shorter than the last with dirty blonde hair and baby blue eyes that would make any woman melt. Still he’s a formidable five foot nine or ten inches with a lean frame. He’s also wearing a black suit with a white, button up shirt, and a red power tie.

  “Yeah, and you are?” He feels that lazy grin coming over his features again and tries to stifle it.

  “No names here. Let’s just get in the car and drive, shall we?” This doesn’t feel right to Troy, so he doesn’t move. This goofball didn’t ask for his identification, and he’s not flashing any of his own.

  “Where are we going?” Those baby blues look Troy up and down from head to toe, and the man pulls out a piece of gum from his suit jacket. He pops the cinnamon flavored stick into his mouth and chews methodically.

  “Why don’t you tell me that, Troy?” The smile he gives Troy makes him look like a maniac, and then he pulls out his Federal Agent badge.

  Taking the badge from the agent, Troy studies it for a long time and then asks for photo identification. The agent hands it over willingly, and Troy reads his name on the I.D. No wonder he didn’t want to say it out loud. Who names their kid Moonlight? Troy wonders.

  “Right, well why don’t we just head out?” Moonlight Rogers turns on his shiny, black shoe heel and marches out of the airport with superiority. This man must have a complex about his name, but Troy can’t blame him. He’s glad they weren’t sadistic at the eyewitness protection program headquarters when they picked out his new name.

  “I’m not getting in that.” Troy balks at this point in his journey. He takes a step back in disgust at the light blue Mini-Cooper and wonders if he’ll even fit in the passenger seat.

  “Why the Hell not?” Moonlight, a blue mini-cooper, this is turning into Troy’s worst nightmare!

  “It’s a girl color, and it’s a clown car. Do I need any more reasons?” Mr. Rogers, Troy inwardly chuckles at that, crosses his arms over his chest and tries to make himself look bigger as he rocks back and up onto his toes.

  “Do you want to die in Cleveland, Ohio?” Troy’s face twists into anger as he stares at the blue mini-cooper. He wrenches open the door with too much force and slams it shut. He’s probably ruined the integrity of the door frame with that display, but he could care less about the girly clown car he now has to ride in.

  Sometime around ten that evening, Troy finally falls into a fitful sleep as Moonlight Rogers keeps driving. When he wakes up again, the scenery looks the same as it did a few hours ago. They’re at the top of another mountain, and in the light from the moon and the stars shining clearly in the sky, Troy can see nothing but trees for miles around them. He closes his eyes and tries to picture the city.

  All he can remember are the women wearing their shorts and their sequin tops with trendy haircuts. Then he sees flashes of his family gathering in the row home his mother lived in, and he feels his heart sinking when he realizes that no matter how hard he tries, he’ll never see them again. Troy didn’t believe in a place like Heaven existed until his niece died. Someone like her, she deserves to go to someplace like Heaven.

  “We’re almost to your new home!” It’s been four hours since they left the airport. Troy sits up in his seat, pulls the lever so that the back of the seat comes up again, and rubs his eyes to make sure he’s seeing right. Yep, nothing but godforsaken trees for hundreds of miles. I’ve been dumped in the middle of hick town, great.

  He knew that he wasn’t going to a city like New York or maybe even a smaller one like Newark, Delaware. No, he knew he was going to a small town. But did it have to be surrounded by trees like this? What’s the population total of this tiny place, anyway? And how is he supposed to get any tale here when all the women are probably delightful little Catholic girls that hate men like Troy Red?

  Well not men like Troy Red, but men like him.

  “What the Hell am I supposed to do here anyway? Don’t tell me I’m going to be shoveling up cow shit. If you say I am, I will go back to Los Angeles and turn myself in to the mob bosses!” Moonlight Rogers just turns a sickening smile on Troy and takes one of the dirty roads leading away from the town. His little mini-cooper barely makes it up the hill and gets stuck a few times. Troy feels dread building up in his lower abdomen as they finally near a farm, and he almost screams when he sees where he’ll be living for the rest of his life.

  Not if I have any say in it.

  “Take me home.” He is gripping the dashboard with both hands.

  “Oh, Troy Red, but you are home!” Mr. Rogers throws his head back and laughs with sadistic mirth as his eyes close. He’s holding his stomach by the time his laughing fit is over as if it hurts him, and Troy wishes he could grabs this man’s scrawny neck and ring it like the chickens he’s going to have to deal with. He would be shocked if this place didn’t have chickens.

  “Fuck you, Moonie Rogers, fuck you.” He slams open the door to the car and kicks it shut with a boot. Troy Red loses control, even though the man he was before never showed this much emotion.

  The sound of a horse nickering in a nearby barn makes Troy’s heart slam behind his ribcage. Will he be expected to clean up stalls? The thought makes his skin crawl more than the thought of having to clean up a man’s guts off the floor. He’s done that more times than he’d like to admit, but it was just his job.

  “Hurry up before the kid wakes up.” His skin seems to frost over as Moonlight Rogers mentions the word kid. He’s expected to live with a child? But then he hears it. It’s the sound of a goat bellowing in the night, and he almost resorts to tears.

  “Please, please don’t leave me in this craphole! Please!” But Moonlight is ignoring his pleas as he knocks on the door to the small, quaint farmhouse. It’s one of those houses with white siding and blue shutters. It’s the kind that has a dark blue front door with a brass knocker on it, and a doorbel
l on the doorframe. The front lawn is manicured, but beyond that it’s a few large fields, and some trees.

  The man who opens up the door reminds Troy of the classic mountain man. His hair is silver and thick, tied back into a neat ponytail, and he bets it goes down past his shoulder blades. That’s about all Troy can see because the light is coming from the house behind the stranger. Swallowing the insidious fear that he will be stuck here for an eternity, Troy stares at the man.

  They’re standing about twenty-five feet apart, with Troy still by the mini-cooper. But he can still hear the old man as clear as day.

  “So that’s the asshole that’s stayin’ with me?” Mr. Rogers turns around and motions for Troy to approach, but for a moment he thinks about stealing the car and driving all the way home. It’s the fear of death that makes him walk forward.

  “I’m the asshole who’s staying with you.” Troy tries to make a point about the English language, but the old man doesn’t seem fazed. He looks his new house guest up and down as if he’s looking at a foal at auction, and grunts.

  “He’ll do, I guess. What’s his name?” Before Moonlight can answer for him, Troy pipes up.

  “It’s Troy Red, and I don’t know what you have planned for me, but I’m not cleaning up horse shit.” Mr. Rogers clears his throat before the man can respond and shakes hands with the hillbilly from Hell.

  “I’ll leave you two to get to know one another. You have my number if anything goes wrong, Mr. Grant. I genuinely appreciate your help.” The blonde, city boy agent retreats to his car and takes off as fast as he can down the dirt road. Troy watches his only escape option leave and wonders if this is a good idea. The old man seems to be assessing him and thinking the same thing when Troy turns around.

  “I’ll show you to your room.” With those horrifying words, Troy follows the old man inside and gets a better look at him when they’re roaming through the farmhouse. He gets the quick tour of where the kitchen is, the bathroom, and the living room. There’s a room that he is not shown, and Troy assumes that’s the old man’s room.

  “This is your room. There’s an attached bathroom, rather small, but you’re a man so it’ll do. The day starts at five in the morning, so set yer alarm clock on the stand there, and I’ll see you then.” The fuck it does! Troy waits for the old man to leave and closes the door a little too forcefully. He sits down on the bed with his head in his hands, and tries not to laugh hysterically. If the crew he hung with could see him now, one of them might shoot him just to put him out of his own misery.

  He doubts this guy even has television.

  Chapter Two

  At some point during the night, he actually fell asleep with all his clothes still on and his hands behind his head on the bed. Troy didn’t bother pulling the covers down, and his flesh is covered in goose bumps since the temperature dropped low overnight. Therefore, he’s barely sleeping when Mr. Grant bangs open his door at exactly five minutes after five in the morning with a passive aggressive vengeance.

  “Get up, Troy Red! Or you’ll miss breakfast, and we don’t eat until noon after breakfast!” The loud bellow has Troy sitting up in bed with his fists at the ready, but when he spots the old man by the door, he lets out a loud whoosh of air.

  “Are you trying to kill me? Because if you are, then you might as well just get a gun and do it now. Don’t torture me in the process.” Mr. Grant crosses his arms over his chest as his eyebrows come down low over his eyes and furrow at the center. He looks as if he’s studying a sample of some odd germ under a microscope, and strangely Troy feels violated by the look.

  “If I’d want you dead, boy, you’d be dead. Now get out of bed and come downstairs for breakfast. If you’re not down in another five minutes, the goat will get it. I’m not making anymore, and neither are you!” With his point across, the old man’s arms uncross and he closes the door behind him with as much force as Troy used yesterday.

  “Fucking farm boys,” Troy mumbles as he pulls on his boots that slipped off sometime during the night. He runs a hand over his short, dark brown hair and rolls his dark eyes up into his head as he stands and stretches. He drops on the floor like he used to at home, and does thirty before he stands again. Getting a workout here is going to be difficult without the equipment, but maybe he needs to think about retiring the guns as well as his job.

  The clock reads nine after five when he appears in the doorway to the kitchen. If it weren’t for the scent of coffee wafting out, he might not have remembered how to get to the kitchen. Last night seems like a bad dream to him, and pretty blurry at best. There’s an extra coffee cup sitting beside the tiny coffee maker. It looks like it makes just one cup at a time.

  “My daughter bought it for me for Christmas, one of those fancy ones that make hundreds of different flavors. I told her I didn’t need something like that, but she insisted. Told me it would ‘open my horizons’. Why the hell would I need to do that?” Because if you had, you’d realize most people don’t talk this much this early in the morning. Troy plasters on a smile, but it falls flat when he sees the homemade hash browns and eggs in the same pan.

  “Get your coffee, sit down at the table, and after we’re done breakfast I’ll show you around the farm.” Troy can’t help it.

  “How? It’s still as black as night out there!” The old man looks at him with the same frown he had upstairs, and plops a plate onto the table rather loudly. Trying not to grumble under his breath, Troy fixes his coffee with two tablespoons of sugar. There’s no creamer on the counter, and he’s not going to root around this guy’s refrigerator.

  “Sugar in your coffee? You know real men drink coffee black, son. A woman’s not going to respect a pussy.” I just have to make it until I can afford to buy a place of my own. Then I get out of here. Just keep your damned mouth shut, Troy Red. Keep it shut. But it’s too late.

  “A real man has his woman make breakfast for him.” It’s out before he can bite his tongue to keep it in. Shockingly, the old man throws his head back and laughs raucously with his fork in his hand and his coffee cup halfway to his lips. Troy shakes his head as he fills his own plate with the buttery mess.

  “Woo! You’re not gonna get a woman with that kinda attitude, son! Not in these parts. Didn’t your mother teach you to respect women?” Gritting his teeth, he sits down at the table across from the old man and tries not to let his bladder get the best of him when the chair creaks. He may not have believed in God before, but he’s praying that the chair does not break while he’s eating.

  “Let’s get one thing straight. You will not talk about my family. I will not talk about yours. Got it?” His laughter dies off while troy is speaking, and Mr. Grant looks at him seriously for once. It’s not with lack of respect or mirth in his eyes, but with understanding.

  “I got it, son. I won’t talk about your family. I meant no disrespect.” The rest of their breakfast is consumed in silence, and Troy follows the old man’s example when he rinses his dishes and puts them in a dishwasher. At least there’s one modern appliance here. Well, relatively modern, it’s probably six or seven years old, maybe more.

  After breakfast has been cleaned up, Troy puts on the too small sweatshirt that the man throws at him and follows him out the front door. The front yard is covered in a light frost, and the sun’s rays are just starting to peak over the horizon. It’s six thirty in the morning, and it’s freezing cold yet. Rubbing his hands together, he follows after the old, crazy man to the large, red barn.

  “Now, I’ll help you today with the stall cleaning. But tomorrow I have to get back to raking the hay, so you’ll be on your own. Do you know your way around a horse?” Son, it seems to be implied at the end of the sentence. Troy almost groans aloud at the mention of a horse. Then he really does let the noise out when he glances around and sees eight stalls. All of them have a horse inside, and their large, dark eyes are staring at him expectantly.

  “No, I’ve never seen a horse in my life.” The old man looks shocked
by that, but he doesn’t say anything smart-ass about city boys or his mama being ignorant for not showing him a horse.

  “Well, then I guess we’ll start with Lightning. He’s not as fast as he was when he was two, so there’s no need to be afraid of him.” Troy snorts, afraid of a horse? He tries to tell himself that he’s not.

  The stall the old man walks up to holds a gray horse with exceptionally light blue eyes. They’re eerie and striking at the same time, and Troy can see why the horse was gifted the name Lightning. He probably looked like a streak of one when he ran past. He’s obviously no longer able to do much more than stumble along at a slow pace anymore.

  Mr. Grant opens up the stall and leads the horse out into the aisle. The knees are knobby, and his mane is brittle, but he looks well cared for. The thug from Los Angeles wonders if Mr. Grant takes care of this all himself, or if he has help. Yeah, he’s got people like me to do the job for him.

  “Now, each morning I let them out before I clean. Sometimes Cassidy does it for me, but I gave her the morning off. By the way, Cassidy is my daughter. And my daughter is off-limits!” He makes a scissors motion in front of him with both his hands to reiterate his point while he talks. Troy nods in understanding because Cassidy is probably as ugly as the piles of shit in the horse stalls.

  “Right, now if you’re not comfortable letting them out into the pastures, I will do it. While some of them are old and wise, there are three young ones here that may test your limits. They’re just curious and ornery, don’t forget that. This is the door that leads to the pastures, please don’t let them out the one we just came in.” He opens up the barn door to the outside and Lightning trots out with renewed vigor, if only for a few seconds. Then he slows and begins to graze out of the path of the other horses.