CHAPTER TWO

"The man's a collector," Rayburn explained as their lunch arrived. "Ah. See, I told you. Wonderful fish and chips."

The generous slabs of golden, crunchy batter-fried fish rested atop heaps of steak-cut French fries, which had been dusted with a seasoned salt that was perhaps not entirely Olde English. It smelled heavenly and tasted better.

"A collector," Jade prompted when the waitress had moved on.

"History buff. Keeps everything in his collection in perfect working order. If you'd rather, I might be able to get you a sword or a knife instead, but I didn't think that would be your style. You just don't have that hack-and-slash Kill Bill air about you."

"You thought right," she said, picking up the envelope and feeling the familiar weight and heft. "How old is it?"

"I'm not entirely sure, but it's museum-quality. Ivory-handled."

"And you're confident it will do the job?" She regarded him from beneath arched brows. "Old guns aren't the most reliable. If I didn't know better, I might think I was being set up."

He looked genuinely wounded, which gave him an even more appealing little-boy quality, the sort of look that could make most women want to simultaneously mother him and seduce him. The flip side of Oedipus … was there such a thing as a Jocasta complex?

"We regard you as one of our most valuable associates, Jade," he said. "A set-up? Not hardly. You can bet your lucky charm on that."

She touched her necklace in a habitual gesture. It, as well as her green eyes and cool, hard demeanor, had gotten her the nickname … code name … working name … whatever you wanted to call it. A fine gold chain and a milky-green pendant carved in the shape of a sinuous Oriental dragon.

It wasn't a family heirloom or gift from a lover or anything sentimental like that. Only something she'd bought in a Chinatown gift shop on a trip to San Francisco. For Deirdre's bridal shower, that had been … five college girls on a crazy road trip because Deirdre had wanted to see male strippers and female impersonators and drink rainbow-hued rum drinks from tall glasses shaped like naked ladies.

Three years after the wedding, almost to the day, Deirdre had offered Jeanette five thousand dollars to arrange an accident for her husband.

"You don't need to reassure me," she said to Rayburn, putting the envelope into her shoulderbag beside the little tape player. "What else?"

Into the briefcase he went again, this time producing a folder stuffed with photos and sheets of paper. She flipped it open and saw a color 8x10 of a young man with wavy blond hair, the sort of tan that used to be considered healthy but nowadays was a walking ad for skin cancer. His smile couldn't rival Rayburn's in the perfect white and straight department, but it dimpled. A cute smile. A cute guy.

The next photo showed the same cute guy shirtless on a sailboat, and Jeanette took a moment to admire his sculpted, hairless chest and lean, chiseled abs. He looked disgustingly fit and athletic. Like one of the perfect specimens usually seen hawking exercise gear on late-night infomercials.

"What'd he do?" she asked. "Is it personal?"

"Tsk, tsk, Jade," scolded Rayburn. "I thought you didn't care about that."

"You know I generally handle corporate cases," she said, and had to close the folder as the waitress came back to ask if everything was to their satisfaction.

"Very much so, although I wouldn't say no to another Guinness," Rayburn said, tapping the rim of his empty glass.

"And more hot water," Jeanette said.

"What makes you think this isn't corporate?" he asked once the waitress had gone.

"He doesn't look like a businessman."

"He's on a sailboat with his shirt off. Donald Trump wouldn't look like a businessman on a sailboat with his shirt off."

"Spare me the mental image, please."

"Besides, you've bent that rule before."

"But I don't like it," she said. "The personal cases are the ugliest ones, and the ones where someone is most likely to crack. Remorse. You never see any remorse when it's politics, when it's business, when it's all about profit and not about emotion."

"Profound," Rayburn said, sounding unimpressed by her philosophy. "But for you, it is all about profit no matter the motive. And speaking of profit …"

He set another sealed envelope on the table, this one padded not by bubble wrap but by a thick pile of cash.

"What I meant was," she said, eyeballing the envelope and doing some mental math, "that the risk of the buyer blabbing about the deal goes way up when it's personal."

"That's why the fee goes way up."

"How far up?"

"Double."

She thought again about the athletic blond guy on the sailboat. Someone really must want him dead if they were willing to double her usual fee. What could a guy like that have done to make such an enemy? Did he stand in the way of a fat inheritance? Did some rival for a girlfriend want him out of the way?

"Double," she mused.

"A quarter of it now," Rayburn said, nudging the envelope toward her. "The rest on completion, everybody sing along, you all know the words."

Jeanette blew out a breath that was almost a whistle. She could feel the cables of her resolve giving way one by one. It was a lot of money. Not that she needed it; she could keep herself comfortably for a long time even if she never took another job.

But it was a lot of money.

And the blond guy … maybe it wasn't emotional after all. Maybe it was as clinical and detached as the others. Purely business, so sorry, you know how it goes. Nothing personal. No offense. So sorry, old bean, that's the way the cookie crumbles.

The less she knew about that end of things, the better. She didn't need to know. All knowing did was clutter up her head. It wasn't her job to decide whether any given person deserved it or not.

Maybe the blond guy was a complete shit. Maybe he liked little kids in the wrong way, and had the bucks to keep it quiet. Maybe he was a contender for some trophy or big expensive endorsement deal and a competitor wanted him eliminated. There were plenty of reasons, plenty of possibilities. None of which concerned her.

"Fine," she said. "I'll take the job."

Rayburn broke into a winning smile that Pierce Brosnan could have used to great effect on every leading lady from Famke to Halle to Selma. "Good," he said.

And the hell of it was, Jeanette realized as she put the money and the folder into her purse alongside the envelope with the gun, that a large part of her reason for accepting was because she didn't want to let him down. Didn't want him to go back and report to his employers that 'Jade' was developing principles, or getting cold feet. That maybe 'Jade' wasn't cut out for this kind of work after all … and that if she was weakening, if she was going soft, she might become a risk.

Oh, it was the money and the pride and the self-preservation, all stacked up against the life of one hunky blond guy with a sailboat. Was it her fault that she liked her work?

She and Rayburn ate fish and chips and carried on their pretense of a typical business lunch. She left the tape running because she never knew if something of interest might be said. Something of value, either now or later. Every little nugget of information she could put away about Rayburn or any of the people he worked with might some day come in handy.

Jeanette would wait until she was home to go over all the details in the folder, which would tell her the things about her target she would need to know. His name and his address, yes, but also as much about his routines and habits as Rayburn's sources had been able to gather. Where he was likely to be and when. It would be up to her to choose the exact place and time, though she was also provided with a list of no-no's and particulars.

Shot with a gun from his own collection. A man that young, that seemingly outdoorsy, who also collected old weapons. Interesting. Not her concern, but interesting all the same.

But maybe it could become her concern, if she wasn't careful. He was athletic and collected weapons … did he target shoot? Hunt? Practice martial arts? Fence, even?

All that would be in the folder. She'd take her time and do this right. Do this right, like she always did.

Not like that first time.

Sipping her tea, she caught a brief shiver and felt her cheeks turn warm with the memory. What a debacle.

Rayburn noticed. "Jade? Something the matter?"

"No," she said.

That first time, a disaster!

She looked back on it now the way that a successful novelist might look back on a first faltering, hackneyed attempt at a book. With cringing embarrassment and a sort of awful contrary defiance. It had been clumsy, stupid, full of mistakes. But it had put her on this path, had gotten her where she was today, so she couldn't complain all that much.

She'd only been in high school, for crying out loud.

Back then – fifteen years ago, had it been that long? – there hadn't been any questions about whether it was personal or business. It was personal all the way, deeply and intensely personal. She hadn't been hired, she hadn't been paid.

And he had deserved it.

Kenny Murphy. The prick.

When Lisa-Beth Perkins had started dating him, Jeanette and all her other friends had tried to talk her out of it. Kenny was a jerk, a thoughtless selfish creep, a poser. He would try to pressure Lisa-Beth into sex, they told her. Never mind her oft-stated desire to wait for her wedding night. He would hurt her feelings and break her heart if she didn't wise up and dump him, they predicted.

Oh, they'd had no idea. Only later, when a sobbing Lisa-Beth told them the whole story, had they really seen Kenny Murphy for what he was.

He hadn't been content with pressuring her to put out, but had slipped something into her drink at a party – one of the so-called "date-rape" drugs that had been new back then but had lately become almost as common a ploy as "if you really loved me" in the male arsenal.

Lisa-Beth had awakened the next morning sore, groggy and sticky, with no memory of the previous night. Rather than confess to any of her friends what she feared had happened, she kept silent.

Kenny dumped her that very day, claiming he felt 'smothered' and that they 'should see other people' and that he wanted to 'still be friends.' Two months later, the miserable Lisa-Beth had gotten an early and very much unwelcome Christmas present when she found out she was pregnant.

When she told Kenny, clinging to some dim and desperate hope that it might get them back together, he had laughed. He sneeringly informed her that three of his buddies had their fun with her that night, too, so she couldn't be sure which of them was the father. If she accused them all, he'd said, she would look like the biggest tramp in the history of the world.

Only after this shattering revelation had Lisa-Beth finally broken down and told her friends everything. Sherry, being a few months older and the most worldly of the quartet, had taken Lisa-Beth to a clinic for an abortion. Ashley spun the creative lies they told Lisa-Beth's parents.

And Jeanette killed Kenny Murphy.

**