Theresa Baumgartner

Too late. While Dani had been outside watching the house, alert for any signs of a trap, the afternoon had passed to evening. Now, the room was lit by a single lamp next to the hospital bed, and the occupant lay motionless.

An indefinable odor of sickness invaded her sinuses, a mixture of disinfectant, medicine, and decay. Surely there was no way the small form on the bed had been the man she remembered. It might have been a wax mannequin, with sunken cheeks and the yellow skin of liver failure. But no, this was the detective who had stalked her in a professional game of cat-and-mouse lasting three decades. Pain had worn deep grooves into his face, and the muscles that had once hidden under tailored suits had withered.

Finding him like this should have been a relief. She had agreed to talk to him, and that made him dangerous. Better that he should die with her secrets unspoken. And yet…

She hadn't expected the hollowness in her chest.

Name the feeling and then allow yourself to feel it. Stupid advice. If Dani had understood her emotions, she wouldn't have needed professional help.

On a regular job, back before she'd retired, a target checking out before she got there would not have been a problem. Dani's contracts were very clear — if the mark died through some other means, she kept the deposit and that was the end of the matter.

The figure's chest rose and fell, barely displacing the blanket.

Maybe not too late then. Good. She reached out and brushed his arm.

Detective Peris's eyes opened. "Ah." His voice was just above a whisper. "You came."

He wouldn't want sympathy, so she didn't offer any. "I was a little surprised to hear from you."

A ghost of a smile flitted over his face. Then Julian — they were on a first-name basis now, surely — reached out to the bed controls and used the motor to raise him into a seated position. "I would offer you something to drink, but I think you'll have to serve yourself. The nurse?"

"Sleeping. He'll wake in a few hours." Back when Dani had done this for a living, she had never killed anyone without getting paid, and she saw no reason to start now.

"I'm glad to hear it."

This might be just another interview — their talks had always been polite, with Detective Peris trying to trick her into admitting something that would prove her guilt, and Dani politely respecting his intellect while not giving anything away. Only one time had he been so frustrated that he'd made an angry comment, and he'd immediately apologized.

Dani dragged a chair near the bed and sat.

When she saw Julian glance to the side, she picked up the water cup from the nightstand and held it up, guiding the straw into his mouth. "Your message said you had questions."

After two swallows, he leaned back. "Thank you. Can I trouble you to hand me my notebook? I find my memory isn't what it once was."

She'd guessed correctly then. More than right and wrong, curiosity had always driven this detective. Very few cases during his career had defeated him. Only one of those had led to a book and a movie.

The notebooks — a stack of identical black leather-bound journals labeled by year  — took up a quarter of the shelf mounted to the wall. From the placement of the shelf, she assumed there had been a desk, cleared out to make way for the hospital bed when sickness made the upstairs bedroom inaccessible. Dani stood and trailed her index finger along the spines. She knew which one he wanted: the volume from fifteen years ago, which fell toward the end of his life's work. The binding was frayed, so she extracted the notebook gently.

At the edge of the shelf, nearly hidden, lurked the forest green cover of Hunting the She-Wolf: One Detective's Search for a Deadly Assassin.

"I read this in the airport a few years back." Dani turned and held up the hardcover along with the correct notebook. "It was well written."

"I would have sent you a signed copy if I'd known your new address." Julian exhaled, part laugh, part grimace. By the clarity of his gaze, she could tell he hadn't dulled the pain with drugs. He'd known she was coming this evening and had wanted a clear head. "I hadn't planned on writing it, but the publisher offered a large advance and Sheila was in the hospital. We needed the money."

Dani supposed that was as close to an apology as she would ever get. Not that she needed one. The book had amused more than irritated, and the publishers had been very careful to make sure she wasn't identifiable in the text. "Please tell me you weren't responsible for the title. Not to be pedantic, but if an assassin isn't deadly, they're hardly an assassin."

"That's what Sheila said. She also tried to convince them they shouldn't use such a clichéd name for you." His voice changed, as if he were imitating someone with a more earnest pattern of speech. "It doesn't pay to offend an assassin."

"Now I'm even more sorry I never met her." Dani placed the notebook in his hands, clinically noting his translucent skin. He would bruise easily. "Though I suppose it would have been awkward if you'd invited me home for dinner."

"Sheila would have loved it." His gaze slid to the framed photo next to the bed, and he smiled, as if sharing a secret with his wife. "I'm afraid she was less bothered by what you did than she ought to have been."

It was a point they'd argued about in more than one interview. "They weren't good people." Dani's specialty had been targets in the public eye, and nobody paid six or seven figures to get rid of someone on a whim.

"Is anyone?" But then his eyes cut to the photo of his wife, and he smiled again. "Well, maybe one." He focussed on Dani and gave another exhale that could have been a laugh. "Your sympathy card with the wolf on the front made a few people worry for my safety."

"Because of the book? Oh. please. Besides, they hired someone interesting to play me, so we're good. Even if they did get it all wrong." It had surprised her, how much she had wanted to correct the record as she'd sat in the dark, watching a version of herself on the enormous screen. But that would have been a stupid way to supply the proof they needed to convict her.

He gave a cough of disgust. "Since I couldn't tell them how Bates was killed, the scriptwriters made up that nonsense of tossing a tablet into his drink from five feet away." Julian opened the notebook on his chest and flipped through the well-worn pages with trembling fingers. A hint of stale coffee wafted across the room. "Impossible. There would have been pills all over the floor. I tried it one afternoon with sugar tablets and spilled enough to attract ants."

"To say nothing of the fact that the poison only comes as a liquid."

After so many years of silence, it felt odd to talk about it. But the memories felt off, as if she were putting on the clothes of a different person and they didn't quite fit.

Julian acknowledged her point with a nod. He reached the section he'd been searching for and scanned it with one finger. "We had multiple angles of security video from the moment you met Bates on the tarmac until you parted ways four hours later, and I've gone through every frame." He paused and looked up from his notes. "Why were you on that jet? I never believed your story that it was a first date."

"It was a date, of sorts." Dani sat down again, bringing their faces to the same level. "Bates wanted me to kill his wife and make it look like a botched kidnapping. But he insisted on meeting in person before he hired me. My agent thought it was funny, him reaching out to me while I was looking for a way in." Dani raised an eyebrow. "I told you my targets weren't good people."

Victims, the voice of her therapist suggested, but Dani ignored it.

"Who hired you?"

Dani shrugged. "I honestly don't know. My agent insulated me from all that. I got a name, a picture, and the date it had to be finished."

"But if you had to guess…" Even this close to death, Julian couldn't let it go.

"From something Bates told me, I suspect he'd been looking for a professional for a while. I think his wife figured out what was coming and decided to protect herself. But I have no proof."

Julian's fingers twitched, as if he wanted to pick up a pen and jot down a note, but he smoothed the blanket instead. "You gave him a bottle of his favorite wine when you met. It didn't look like you were wearing gloves…"

Dani smiled at this conjecture. "No, it wasn't a contact poison on the outside of the bottle. That would have killed the attendant who opened the wine."

"And you never got near enough to touch him." There was a hint of the old frustration in his voice.

"No. He wanted to be able to brag later that he'd met the assassin who'd killed his wife. But he was nervous, so he kept his bodyguards nearby." She cocked her head. "Not near enough to stop me if I'd decided to break his neck, but he thought he'd taken enough precautions." People always underestimated a small woman, and she'd taken advantage of that during her entire career. "It was a game to him, you know. See how close to the edge he could stand without going over."

"That's why he insisted that you drink a glass with him."

"Yes. He always had a glass of wine before dinner and another afterward." Bates had been a creature of habit. He flew to California every Sunday night, and his private chef served the first course the minute he took his seat.

The wrinkled pages of Julian's notebook made no sound as he leafed through them. "The poison couldn't have been in the food before it was served." Both the chef and the attendant ate the same meal without getting sick. "And it couldn't have been airborne or the bodyguards would have died." He paused and looked at her.

"Correct." Even now, she could tell he wanted to figure it out by himself, so she waited.

Julian turned another page. "Bates didn't call a doctor until two days later. By that time everything on the jet had been cleaned up." He gave a grunt of frustration. "It had to have been in the wine. But how did you not poison yourself? The doctors swore there was no antidote you could have taken."

Dani regarded the man in front of her. He was dying, yes. From what she'd seen, he only had days to live, but days were a precious thing when they were coming to an end. "Are you sure you want to know?"

He understood. She could see it in his eyes.

"I'm sure." Then he gave in to the levity that had never been far beneath the surface, even when he'd been interrogating her. "Admit it, it will be a relief for you to tell someone. Though I suppose you could have talked about it in therapy. Do assassins have therapists?"

Dani echoed his quiet laughter. "My therapist is just a tiny bit afraid of me. She doesn't ask for details."

"So this is your chance. Satisfy a dying man's curiosity."

If she didn't say anything, she could still walk away and leave him with whatever time he had left. But he didn't want that. He had hired her, asked for answers. And it would be a relief to talk about it.

Dani listened for sounds in the house, but the nurse was still asleep. She leaned forward and lowered her voice. "The wine was opened when the jet was on the ground. We each had a glass. His second glass wasn't poured until we were at cruising altitude." She'd known her target before she'd ever come near him, known that he wouldn't waste another glass on her after he was sure the wine was safe to drink. "Private jets are pressurized to 4000 feet. Better than flying commercial, but still a lower pressure than ground level."

He considered that for a moment before giving a small shake of his head. "And?"

"Inside the bottle was the poison reservoir. It had a rupture disk that would deploy at around 3000 feet." It had taken nearly two weeks to find a source of rupture disks that would reliably work at the right pressure. "The poison only mixed with the wine when the bottle was open at higher altitudes. Anything poured at ground level was safe." She paused and winced. "Safe-ish, anyhow. These things aren't exact."

He exhaled slowly, the question that had been nagging at him for fifteen years finally answered.

In the silence, Dani could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock in the living room.

Julian's hands fell from his notebook onto the blanket. "Why take the risk? You didn't need to be on that jet." His voice chided, as if he disliked the gamble she'd made.

Her breath caught, but she ignored it. Name the emotion, her therapist advised her, and allow yourself to feel it. Most of the time, she couldn't do either. Was sadness a tightness in the chest and the beginning of a headache behind her eyes? How did other people know? Later. She'd try to name that feeling later. "I was running out of time on the contract, and it seemed the easiest way to get to him."

"And you always stick to the contract." His eyelids drooped.

"Yes." But he knew that. She was here tonight, wasn't she? Dani waited patiently for him to gather his strength. If left undisturbed, the nurse wouldn't wake for hours. There was no need to rush.

He opened his eyes with an effort. "So you found a therapist? That's good. I'd wondered why you retired."

"I'd offer you her number, but…" She only caught the twitch of his lips because she was watching for it. "After the book came out, the wrong kind of people kept trying to hire me. I decided to quit while I was ahead." No need to mention that his questions had started keeping her up at night.

"Wise choice." He shifted on the bed, and the lines on his face deepened. "I'm glad you came tonight. I've missed our little chats."

Dani lifted the book with the ridiculous title. "Can I keep this?"

"Of course." Julian shifted again, as if trying to get comfortable. "Is it time?"

"Whenever you're ready. I'm not in any hurry." That was true. Before, she had been impatient to fulfill her contracts and move on. But something had broken — changed, her therapist insisted — inside her. Or maybe it was just that this job was different. She would wait as long as he wanted.

For a few moments, he was silent, and she thought he might be sleeping. Then he laughed. "A rupture disk. That's clever. Though if we'd had the trash from the jet, we would have found it."

"The crew always cleaned the jet thoroughly after each trip. And I deliberately chose a slow-acting poison."

Another two measured breaths. "Thank you for telling me."

"You're welcome."

"I think I'm ready now. I'm tired of pain."

They talked for a few moments more as she prepared the tools of her trade — about people they had known, about the day he'd first met his wife, about his belief that he would see her again. And then, exhausted, Julian fell asleep, and Dani sat with him until he breathed his last.

The nurse stirred as Dani slipped out of the house, Hunting the She-Wolf in hand. The blush of dawn suffused the horizon when she reached her car. She opened the book to the title page. To my quarry and friend, may you find peace in your new life. Julian.

Dani started the engine and pulled into the traffic of the morning commute, every action controlled and steady.

This burning in her eyes had a name. Grief. She was sure.

Perhaps someday soon she would allow herself to feel it.

* * *