Dirty Deeds Read online

  Dirty Deeds

  A Novel

  by Karina Halle

  Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  By Karina Halle

  The Artists Trilogy

  On Every Street (e-novella)

  Sins & Needles

  Shooting Scars

  Bold Tricks

  Dirty Angels Trilogy

  Dirty Angels

  Dirty Deeds

  About the Book

  Beautiful Mexican air hostess Alana Bernal is accustomed to men falling at her feet. And with her messed-up family, she’s used to tragedy following her around. But she’s never experienced love – real, rip-your-heart-out, all-consuming love. That’s until she meets Derek Conway – a hard-bodied American ex-soldier with steely eyes and a commanding presence.

  A chance encounter in Puerto Vallarta, and a weekend of hot sex and mindless passion, leads to something more – something deadly. Because Derek isn’t the type of man to fall in love, or stick around. And he’s not in Mexico for a holiday.

  He’s a heartless killer-for-hire who does ugly jobs for the highest bidder. And for Alana and Derek, the highest bidder has the power to bring their world crashing down around them. The highest bidder can destroy everything.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The call came at 6:30 a.m. from a voice I recognized but couldn’t place. The fact that it sounded familiar was surprising, though. The turnover rate for these guys was exceedingly high. They were shuffled around to different sicarios like a game of musical chairs. Sometimes I wondered if the ones giving me the orders – the narcos just underneath the bosses – ever lasted more than a few weeks. Did they go on to have long careers doing the dirty work of the patrons? Or were they so good at getting the job done that they were employed for a long time, even promoted, just like any assistant manager at McDonald’s?

  It didn’t really matter. I took these calls, I carried out the orders, and I got paid. I was at the bottom of their food chain, but as long as I wasn’t tied to just one cartel then I didn’t have to worry about long-term security. You didn’t want long-term security when working for the narcos. You wanted to stay as distant – as freelance – as possible. You wanted a way out, in case you ever had a change of heart.

  That was unlikely for me. But I was still a bit of a commitment-phobe. Freedom meant everything, and in this game, freedom meant safety.

  The girl next to me in bed moaned at the early intrusion, pulling the pillow over her head. She looked ridiculous considering she was completely naked on top of the sheets. Was it Sarah? Kara? I couldn’t recall. She was so drunk last night that I was amazed she even made it to my hotel room. Then again, that’s why I was in Cancun. I could pretend to be like everyone else, just another dumb tourist on the beach.

  I took the phone into the bathroom and closed the door.

  “Yes,” I answered, keeping my voice low.

  “I have a job for you,” the man on the other line said. His English was pretty much perfect but relaxed, almost jovial. Sometimes they gave me orders in Spanish, sometimes in English. I felt like this man was trying to extend a courtesy.

  “I assume I’ve worked for you before,” I said.

  “For me?” the man asked. “No. For my boss? Yes. Many times. But this has nothing to do with him. Let’s just say this is coming from a whole new place.”

  None of that concerned me. “Tell me about payment.”

  He chuckled. “Don’t you want to hear about the job?”

  “It doesn’t matter. The price does.”

  “One hundred thousand dollars, U.S., all cash. Fifty now, fifty upon completion.”

  That made me pause. My heart kicked up. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “It’s an important job,” the man said simply.

  “And what is the job?”

  “It’s a woman,” he said. “In Puerto Vallarta. She should be very easy to find for someone like you.”

  “I need a name and I need her photo,” I told him. Though the price was quite higher than normal, the man was ignoring the basics. It made me wonder if he had ever done this before. It made me wonder a lot of things.

  “I have the first, not the second. As I said, she should be easy to find. You might even be able to Facebook her.”

  I waited for him to go on.

  He cleared his throat. “Her name is Alana Bernal. Twenty-six. Flight attendant for Aeroméxico. I want a bullet in her head and I want it front page news.”

  It was a common name, which is probably why it sounded familiar. I wondered what she had done, if anything. Usually when I was sent to kill women, it was because they were involved with a narco and had overstayed their welcome. They knew too much. They had loose lips in more ways than one.

  I was never really given time to think about it. You weren’t with these types of things. There were a few minor alarm bells going off in my head – the high price for someone minor, the greenness in the man’s voice – but the price won out in the end. That amount of money could get me away from this business for a long time. I saw a lengthy hiatus on my horizon, one that didn’t include fucking drunk chicks on spring break just because I was horny, a hiatus that didn’t include bouncing my way from hotel room to hotel room across Mexico, waiting for the next call.

  I told the man I agreed to his terms, and we worked out the payment plan. I wouldn’t get the other half until she made the news. Considering how rare shootings were in Puerto Vallarta, I had no doubt it would happen. And I would be long gone.

  I hung up the phone feeling almost elated. The promise of a new life buried that worm of uneasiness. One more job and then I’d be freer than ever.

  I came out of the bathroom to see the chick sitting up in bed and looking extremely nauseous. Once she saw me though, her eyes managed to light up.

  “Wow,” she said. “You’re fucking hot.”

  I tried to smile, hoping she didn’t find me enticing enough to stay. “Thank you.”

  “Did we have sex last night?”

  I stood beside the bed and folded my arms across my chest. Her mouth opened a bit at my muscles. I still had the same physique I had back in the military, and it still got the same reactions from women. They never knew the real me – knew Derek Conway – but at least, with the way I looked, they thought they did. Just another built, tough American boy, a modern G.I. Joe.

  They had no idea what I did.

  They had no idea who I was.

  “No,” I told her, “we didn’t have sex. You stripped and then you passed out.”

  She looked surprised. “We still didn’t …”

  I gave her a dry look. “Sex is only fun when you’re awake, babe.” I stretched my arms above my head and she stared openly at my stomach, from the waistband on my boxers to my chest. Okay, now it was time for her to go.

  I told her I had stuff to do in the morning and needed her to move along. I could tell she wanted to at least take a shower, but I wasn’t about to budge.

  I had a plane to catch.

  Alana Bernal was extremely easy to find.

  At least for me. She had a Facebook page under Alana B. Her privacy settings were hi
gh, but I was still able to see her profile picture, dressed in her Aeroméxico uniform. She had a sweet yet beautiful face. Her eyes were light hazel, almost amber, both stunning and familiar at the same time. They glowed against her golden skin, as did her pearly white teeth. She looked like a lot of fun, and I could imagine all the unwanted attention she got from unruly passengers in the air. She looked like she could handle them with a lot of sass.

  Once again I found myself wondering what she had done.

  And once again I realized I couldn’t care.

  That wasn’t my business.

  Killing her was my business.

  I drove to the airport, and for the next two days I began to stalk the employee parking lot, using a different rental car each time. Most of the flight crew I saw looked a bit like her but lacked the certain vitality she had. So I waited in mounting frustration, just wanting this job to be over with.

  On day three, just as I was driving past for the forty-second time that morning, I spotted her getting out of a silver Honda, wrestling with her overnight bag. I quickly pulled the car around again and parked at the side of the road, plumes of dust rising up around me. There was nothing but a chain-link fence between us as she began the long walk toward the waiting airport shuttle. Her modest high heels echoed across the lot and she tugged at the hem of her skirt with every other step. Not only was she beautiful, but there was something adorably awkward about her.

  What had she done?

  No, I couldn’t care.

  I looked down at the bag in the passenger seat and took out the silencer, quickly screwing it on the gun that I was holding between my legs.

  She only had a few seconds of life left before I put the bullet in her heart.

  I got out of the car, moving like a ghost, gun down at my side. In three strides I would make it over to the fence where I would take quick aim and shoot. She would go down and I would be gone.

  I was one stride away when it happened.

  A golden sedan pulled out of a parking space in a hurry and slammed right into Alana, knocking her to the ground. She screamed as she went down, tires screeching to a halt, and people started shouting from the shuttle.

  The sedan reversed then sped around Alana’s crumpled body, not stopping to check on the woman they had just hit.

  I’ve been in a lot of situations before that smack you square in the face – abrupt and brutal scenes that change the course of the day, the course of a life. They come out of nowhere, but you adapt, you roll with them. You refuse to be shocked. I should have been able to collect myself better than I did.

  But seeing that car speeding away toward the parking gates and crashing through them as it fled the scene, well I seemed to lose all logic. Before I knew what I was doing, I was getting back into my car and driving after the hit-and-run sedan.

  As I passed the broken gates to the parking lot I could see people – employees – emerging from the shuttle, one of them pointing at me. I had been spotted. Maybe as a witness, maybe as someone that was a part of the crime.

  Only it wasn’t the crime they thought it was, but the one I didn’t get to commit.

  I was fucking everything up for myself and I knew it. But seeing that car gun her down then keep going, as if the driver thought they could get away with it, brought back every debilitating moment from Afghanistan. I watched a lot of people get killed before I became the killer.

  I would like to tell myself that I was going after them because they fucked up my potentially perfect assassination. That would make more sense than the truth – that I felt like a helpless soldier again, watching the world around him crumble from senseless acts. I was angry, angrier than I had been in a long time.

  I’d snapped. I guess I had it coming.

  I drove the beat up car I’d rented from a cheap agency right on his ass, following him in heated pursuit. I wasn’t thinking, I wasn’t even breathing, I was just reacting to some long-forgotten, deep-seated need for vengeance.

  The sedan screamed down the road, tires burning on hot asphalt, heading for the highway. I was going to stop him before that. I didn’t know what I was going to do after that, but I had an idea.

  I pressed the gas pedal down as far as it would go and willed it to catch up, muttering expletives as it shuddered beneath me. The rental car was a pile of shit to look at, but it turned out the engine worked well enough to let me catch up with the sedan that was sputtering erratically, a tire having blown out as it fought for control on the rough road.

  I couldn’t get a good look at the driver, but through the dust I could see him thrashing around in his seat, panicking at the wheel. He wasn’t a professional by any means. Then again, I was supposed to be one and I was trying to kill his fucking ass for no reason at all.

  No reason except that it felt one hundred percent right.

  His car suddenly shifted right and I took that moment to gun it until my front end clipped his back. The headlights shattered, and with a screech of metal, the car went spinning to a stop.

  Before I could comprehend what was going on, I was jumping out of the car, gun at my side, and running to his door. I threw it open and aimed it right at the man’s head.

  The dust blew around us, and through the haze he looked at me, mouth open, the whites of his eyes shining as they stared at me with fear or shock or regret.

  I didn’t care which one it was.

  He raised his hands, screaming out in Spanish, “It was an accident, please, it was an accident!”

  “Who are you?” I asked, my voice more steady than I felt.

  “It was an accident,” he cried again. For a brief moment he took his frightened eyes off the gun and looked behind him, at the parking lot in the distance and the commotion that was gathering there. Soon they would be heading our way. “Is she all right? Please, please, the girl, is she all right?”

  “No,” I told him, and pulled the trigger.

  Because of the silencer, the sound of his brains and skull splattering on the window – a bright burst of red – was louder than the gun.

  I quickly got back in my car and drove away. There was no time to stand around and figure out who the man was, if it was truly an accident or something else. Questions would come later, as they always did, only this time I’d be the one doing the asking.

  ***

  I spent the rest of the day inside my hotel room, cleaning my guns and watching the local Puerto Vallarta news, trying to see if the accident would be mentioned. It was at the end of the segment when they finally reported on it. It was the usual shoddy shot of the serious reporter standing in front of the smashed gates to the parking lot. Alana, as it turns out, wasn’t killed or even critically injured. She had been admitted to the nearest hospital. The bigger part of the story was the part that had my hand all over it. It was that someone had caught up with the driver and shot him in the head. The news wasn’t sure whether this was a botched hit-and-run or vigilante justice.

  I didn’t know what to think of it myself. One minute everything was going to plan, the next minute I was putting a bullet in the head of someone else, acting out of pure, untrustworthy instinct. That lack of control scared me. I hadn’t responded like that, so loosely, so foolishly, since my wife had been killed.

  Regression was not a good thing in this business.

  It was just after nightfall when my phone rang. I waited a beat, trying to read my gut before it got compromised by the voice on the phone. My gut was telling me to back out.

  “Hello,” I answered.

  “Hola,” the man said in that light tone of his. “I think we may have gotten our wires crossed here. I heard you were the best in the business. I’m a bit confused as to why you killed someone else instead of the woman you were paid to kill.”

  “No time for pleasantries,” I noted.

  “No,” the man said. “Not when she’s in the hospital and you’ve jeopardized this whole operation.”

  I cleared my throat. “It was all lined up. Before I was even
able to take my shot, she was hit by a fucking car. Everyone saw it. What was I supposed to do, still go through with it with everyone watching me?”

  “That still doesn’t explain why you shot the driver.”

  No, not really, I thought.

  “I guess I lost my cool,” I told him.

  “I didn’t think that was possible with you.”

  “Maybe you’ve heard wrong about me.”

  “They’ve called you soulless.”

  “Maybe I’m getting tired of this game.”

  “Ah,” he said. “The game, but not the money, hey?”

  “Maybe money gets you killed in the end.”

  “No, no,” he said. “Money is what gets other people killed. By you.” He sighed long and hard, and I tried to picture who this man could be. So, so familiar. And so, so wrong.

  “Listen,” he went on, “I know things are more complicated now, but the job still has to go through.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “No?”

  “It’s more than complicated. There were witnesses there that could have seen me.”

  “No one has come forward.”

  “How would you know that?”

  “Don’t you worry about it. Just trust me when I tell you that you are clean. The only real complication is the fact that you’ll have to get into the hospital. She’s being guarded, will be for some time. But I know you’ve handled dicier situations than that before.”

  I frowned. “How much do you know about me?”

  “Enough,” was his dry answer. “The price is now two hundred thousand dollars. You can keep that fifty we gave you. This is on top of that.”

  Fucking hell. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars would end all my problems forever. But that was way too much money for just a girl, unless she was more than just a girl. She was a death sentence.

  Something was terribly fucking wrong here, and I would be an idiot to stick my nose in it for one minute longer.

  “No,” I told him with steely resolve. “I haven’t survived this long to know when there’s something more at stake. I’ll meet your people somewhere, give you your deposit back if you want, but this is where we part ways.”