Short Stories

The Wrong Hit

Grey set up his gun on top of the hill overlooking the mansion on the lake. His mark was a woman that had killed her husband in order to receive the life insurance payoff and his rich lifestyle without him. The reason he was there, was because the murder was unsolved without any competent evidence of her crime, so she couldn’t collect the insurance just yet. Her name was Clara Trice-Alrin, a thirty-one year old woman with long dark brown hair, solid brown eyes and standing six inches shorter than him at her height of 5’6. He had her picture in his back pocket, and the woman that had just arrived at the house only five minutes ago was definitely Clara.

As he watched her, waiting for the opportune moment to make the shot, she suddenly turned in her vastly sized living room and walked into a room out of view. A moment later she returned but something was wrong with the way she came back – she wasn’t alone.

Releasing his finger from the trigger position, he brought his military issued binoculars up to get a better look at Clara. In her arms she held an infant, someone that wasn’t in his dossier sent to him by his employer, and someone that hadn’t just arrived with one of the woman’s friends. The baby couldn’t be anyone else’s, and that screwed up the mark.

Grey was someone other hit men would call a vigilante hit man, someone who only killed those that deserved their deaths but the courts were unable to pronounce guilty. If his employer had left out the fact that this woman had a child, what other important details might they have falsified?

Slipping quietly into the massive sized house, Grey kept his gloved hands wrapped around his nine millimetre. Even if this woman had a child, who knew if she was armed or not, better kept safe and ever vigilant.

The only way to get the truth would be to scare this woman into telling him with the efforts of a faceless armed man hiding in the shadows. Peering out through his green eyes, he shuffled across the back of the kitchen out into the living room where Clara now sat in silence. Odd for someone who’d killed her husband and lived in a million dollar house.

Nearing the woman, he brought the gun up to the back of her head and spoke, “Move and your dead.” She dropped the photo album she’d been looking at and began to shake ever so slightly.

“Oh-okay,” she stuttered, as Grey sized her up. He noted the wedding band on her finger, something that shouldn’t be there if she’d planned the death of her husband and followed through over a year ago, at least not in the comfort of her own home so long after.

Glancing at the photo album he made out pictures of a wedding, her wedding to her deceased husband, also peculiar for a guilty woman. “State your name and familial status,” he demanded of her, knowing someone who was guilty of a crime and was as manipulative as this woman was supposed to be, would quite probably lie easily in the face of death.

Her gripped tightened around the base of the couch. “Clara Trice-Alrin,” she began, her voice an echo of misery. “Widow to Mark Alrin, sister-in-law of Kevin Alrin, and mother of five and a half month old Lilly Alrin. Both of my parents have passed, as well as my in laws.” This woman spoke with such a despairing tone, Grey almost believed off the bat that she wasn’t who he’d been told she was. But he had a few more unanswered questions before he could make that assumption.

“What is the extent of your knowledge of your husband’s death?” he asked in monotone, he couldn’t afford to give away the exact dialect of his voice unless he wanted to get run out of the business. Or pulled out and thrown into prison by his military comrades, a day job he couldn’t afford to lose.

She seemed to hesitate, which was a sign of guilt, although he couldn’t be quite sure of that as he wasn’t able to note her facial expressions. “He was mur- murdered,” she muttered, a stutter that could be described as either guilt or by loss based on whatever facial expression went along with it. In order to get the real truth and not make the mistake of killing a woman innocent of this pertinent crime, he’d really have to test her.