1 The Housewife Assassin's Handbook Read online

  Just my luck: my van is sporting a ticket that is not even ten minutes old. I do that math: that means that the job took a half hour longer than I anticipated. Ah, hell, I’m going to be late picking up the boys for the ball game. The Highlander would have to be the only car on the road (a fantasy in midday, mid-week Los Angeles), run every traffic light, and break every speed record known to man in order for me to get to the boys the game in time . . .

  I do have another option: call my carpool partner, Penelope Bing, and ask her to cover for me –

  Hell no. That would hurt even more than Yuri’s whip. She’s bailed me out twice in less than a month: the time I was late getting back after taking out some hothead set on assassinating the Pope while he was here in LA; then there was that hit I had in Seattle, when I’d booked United on the return flight. (On that one, I should have known better and flown Southwest.)

  If I have to hear Penelope’s smug barbs again, I’ll cry. “Really, Donna, what is it this time? Another tennis lesson? My God, you’d think, after all that time on the court, you’d finally find your backhand. Maybe you’re using from the wrong pro. It’s Fernando, right? . . .”

  The inference being that I’m lying. Again.

  And for the wrong reason: that reason perhaps being that I’m two-timing my husband, Carl, with the local country club’s tennis pro. Fernando, with his bulging biceps and swarthy grin, leaves many of the club’s female members panting, both on the court and in the bedroom.

  Considering the number of times I’ve disappeared in the middle of the day, the assumption has merit to Penelope and her gossip-mongering clique. As if I would! As if I even could be unfaithful to Carl . . .

  To hell with her. I hit the road, tossing on a sweatshirt as I drive. At the longest turn-light on Sunset – the one at Beverly – I wrangle on my jeans under Mary’s miniskirt before yanking it off. The trucker to my left hoots his horn loudly to show his sincere appreciation.

  Miracle of miracles, I pull up only four minutes late! Relief floods Jeff’s face. The Terrible Two – his buddies Morton Smith and Cheever Bing, Penelope’s little angel – have been giving him a rough time. My tardiness is infamous. But now it’s my turn to be smug.

  Mary is standing there with them. Usually you would not catch her anywhere near her little brother and his friends, but Morton’s older brother, Scotty, is also hitching a ride to the game, and he’s a hottie, what with all that blond curly hair and those soulful eyes. To keep them peeled on her, Mary tosses her long flowing mane whenever he glances in her direction. Watching her, my heart leaps into my throat. At twelve, she’s already a first-class flirt.

  Just like her mother.

  The kids clamor into the back of the van, and we’re off. Mary, who, on any given day would have taken the passenger seat up front, chooses the two-seat row in the middle instead, with Scotty.

  I maneuver around a Porsche going too slow for my taste, and in the process get honked by a bus. The driver is miffed because we’ve killed any chance he has of making the light. “Cool driving, Mrs. Stone.” Scotty’s approval wins me a temporary reprieve.

  Then he smiles shyly at Mary. “So, you and your dad will be at the Parent-Student dance this Friday, right?” This eighth grade rite of passage is one of the highlights of the school year. Two years from now, it will be my turn to go with Jeff. Although it’s Mary’s turn, without Carl there to take her, she will miss out.

  But Jeff and Mary’s father is never there for them, no matter what the occasion.

  “No way! I wouldn’t be caught dead there! It’s for dorks! ” And certainly not for a girl who hasn’t seen her father in years.

  But Scotty doesn’t know this. Seeing his crestfallen face, Mary falls silent. She is angry at herself.

  No really, at Carl.

  I run the last light between the baseball field and us. Yes! Yes! We’re only nine minutes late! I’ve won Jeff’s approval. I know this because he stops to give me a quick kiss on the cheek. Then he asks: “So Mom, you brought my athletic cup, like I asked, right?”

  “What? But I – I don’t remember–,” I rummage through the athletic bag that was packed this morning: uniform, hat, glove, cleats . . . but no athletic cup.

  “I – I called and asked you to get it from my underwear drawer! Like, four times!” The caller ID on my cell confirms this.

  Aw, heck.

  League rules: No one plays without a cup. Not even if you’re the team’s star pitcher. Because of me, Jeff will be benched for this very important game, which will decide the champions of the Orange County Major League division title.

  And there is no way I can make it to the house and back in time. We both know that.

  Cheever pumps his fist in the air. He is the team’s back-up pitcher.

  A tear rolls down Jeff’s cheek as he staggers to the back of the van.

  “Jeff, I’m so sorry—,” I yell after him. But I know he can’t stand to hear my lame excuse.

  Why should he? He’s heard them all before.

  “Hey, Mom, what’s my denim skirt doing back here?” Mary holds it up to me, accusingly, before shrieking “Ewwwyuck!” I glance over and notice that it is sprayed with some sort of white goo. One of the larger chunks is covered in hair follicles.

  Yuri’s.

  But that doesn’t seem to bother the Terrible Two. Otherwise they wouldn’t be mimicking Mary’s high-pitched squeal as they toss her skirt back and forth like a hot potato.

  Once again, I’m back in the doghouse with my kids.

  At least, until I outrun a Ferrari or something.

  Chapter 2

  Spring Cleaning

  The key to spring cleaning is to be ruthless! Throw out anything and everything you never use. (Or that may be incriminating. Burn, if necessary, but remember: if using gasoline, those fires should be contained in a non-flammable container.) Most certainly, though, you should make a place in your cozy home for items that have sentimental value. Handy tip: create an “altar” that provides the appropriate showcase! Perhaps a curio cabinet . . .

  It is naptime here at the Stone household. While Trisha snores softly in her bed, the cherry pie in the oven releases its sweet, heady fragrance throughout the house. The only sound that can be heard is the mute ticking of the grandfather clock that stands in the foyer.

  Well, that, and my muffled sobs. Yep, it’s the perfect time for my own private pity party.

  I’m crying because I miss my husband Carl.

  He is absent from my life, not (as my neighbors will tell you) because he’s the ultimate workaholic. And not (as my children think) because he left me for another woman.

  The truth of the matter is that Carl is dead.

  As part of my mourning process, I take the antique heart-shaped locket I inherited from my mother from its resting place in our living room curio cabinet, and open it to stare at the only picture that still exists of Carl.

  In it, he is smiling slyly, like a bad little boy with a secret. I now know what it was. You see, Carl was a CIA operative. I found that out five years ago, on the evening he was murdered.

  Worse yet, it was the very night Trisha, our youngest daughter, was born.

  Not that I’ll ever divulge that to Jeff, Mary, or Trisha. In part, because I can’t accept that truth myself.

  It’s why I work as a paid killer. My freelance assignments for Acme are how I avenge his death. Each hit takes me closer to the bastards who took him away from us.

  At least, that is what I tell myself.

  Even if that weren’t true, I’d still have to do something other than maintain a spotless household to keep from feeling so helpless about his death. I can assure you, no amount of scouring can purge my grief. But obliterating some bastard set on ruining more lives goes a long way toward assuaging my pain.

  Besides, can I help it if I’m a better assass
in than I am a housewife?

  My mother was the consummate homemaker. Our house, a tiny Craftsman cottage, gleamed and sparkled with her obsessive use of Lemon Pledge, Windex with Ammonia D, and any cleanser that produced scrubbing bubbles.

  Around our velvety lawn was a white picket fence from which pale pink tea roses cascaded gently to the sidewalk. From the thickest limb of the broadest oak out back hung a tire swing: a brand new Michelin, of course. It would never hit the road, but safety was always on my mother’s mind.

  This was why she never let Dad keep his guns in the house but out in the garage, under lock and key.

  Every meal was a bountiful delight, many of its offerings picked or plucked lovingly from our own backyard garden. Each holiday was a memorable themed event: a tie-dyed Easter egg hunt, a Christmas tree trimmed with tiny white origami cranes. One year the Thanksgiving meal was completely vegetarian! Did we miss the turkey that Dad brought home with him, a gift from his company? Not with the feast Mother prepared in its stead. She donated the bird to the local homeless shelter – already herbed and roasted, of course.

  The shelter’s chef called up the next day to thank Mother for the most succulent bird they’d ever served. “Can I have your recipe?”

  “Sorry. It’s a family secret . . . ” was the answer she gave, with that tinkling laugh of hers.

  Family secrets. Yep, she was big on those.

  Her biggest one wasn’t divulged to either Dad or me until it was too late. When I was eleven, her doctor diagnosed her with terminal cancer.

  She covered up the news with a whirlwind of activities – specifically ones aimed at teaching me the necessary skills to take her place as the lady of the house. But no matter how many devil’s food cakes I baked perfectly from scratch, no matter how many curtains I sewed or how shiny the tub gleamed or how white the sheets came out in the wash, I could never take my mother’s place.

  At least, not in our hearts.

  My father didn’t put it that way. Instead, he drank himself into oblivion as he mourned his sweet, perfect wife.

  During that first year after Mother’s death, her older sister, my Aunt Phyllis, came to live with us. Sweet, sloppy, lovable Aunt Phyllis, who had none of Mother’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies, who thought nothing of letting me have a collie (something Mother wouldn’t have let me do, what with all the hair they shed!),who never fussed when I left my room a mess, and who burned every meal she attempted to make.

  Well, nobody’s perfect, right?

  And that was the point. I didn’t have to be, either. Not for her. Not for myself.

  Certainly not for Dad. He wasn’t going to notice, anyway. Not with his head stuck deep in that bottle.

  Then one day out of the blue, I asked my father to teach me how to shoot his gun. It wasn’t that I wanted to be the son he never had, but I desperately wanted to share something with him, anything at all.

  Since I was too young to drink, guns were my only alternative.

  To his credit and to Aunt Phyllis’ horror, he didn’t try to discourage me. In fact, two things came out of those hazy afternoon practice sessions with his .38 Special:

  I’d finally earned his grudging respect – at least for a few hours anyway.

  And I learned I was good at something. Great, really. In fact, I was a crack shot. I had an innate ability to turn, aim, and shoot. Tin cans off our picket fence. An old stump. Anything and everything in our backyard or out in the vast empty field beyond, was a potential target. Then to see how well I did with moving targets, Dad yanked one of the rock star posters off my bedroom walls, pinned it onto the tire swing, gave it a push –

  I hit the horny bastard right between the eyes.

  After that, any fears Dad had about my abilities to take care of myself seemed to vanish – and along with it, some of his dependence on Johnny Walker Red. I was making him proud. He finally wanted me to feel the same about him.

  By the time I turned fifteen, others had picked up on the my cool, calm confidence, too: mainly unabashed, taut-muscled boys who rightly detected that some ice hot desire lay beneath the surface of my sunny demeanor, and wanted to be the first to unleash it – preferably in the backseats of their muscle cars. Gently, I’d demur.

  Even if they ignored me, they certainly listened to my Smith & Wesson.

  That was how I learned that men other than my father also appreciate the way I handle a pistol. No doubt about it, a gun is a deadly weapon. But in a woman’s steady, skilled hand, it can also be the most potent aphrodisiac.

  And a great way to pick up guys.

  I was never a hunter. Back then, the sight of blood made me queasy. But I lived for target practice. In fact, I met Carl at a shooting range. A cute meet, don’t you think?

  Maybe too cute, now that I think about it.

  It was during my last year at UCLA. We’d just completed midterm exams, and the whole campus was looking for a way to unwind. For some students, that meant a weekend of clubbing, maybe even a trip down to Cabo. I, on the other hand, found my release in the click of a cocked pistol. I’d just purchased one of the new Ladysmiths, which was smaller and lighter than the guns I was used to shooting. That should have allowed me to be more accurate, but for some reason I kept missing the pop-up targets, ones that I would have easily hit with my eyes shut had I been sporting my old tried-and-true snubbie five-shot Smith and Wesson. Maybe I was overcompensating for the Ladysmith’s puny size . . .

  Or maybe my nervousness came from knowing that the very cute guy standing next to me there on the firing line had been scoping me out from the moment I first walked in.

  “Would you be offended if I gave you a few tips on your aim?” He was trying hard not to grin at my helplessness but wasn’t succeeding. I shrugged. He was adorable, with deep-set green eyes and a dark curly forelock that just begged to be tousled.

  I nodded. What the heck? It had been a while since I’d played the damsel in distress.

  He steadied me from behind and softly murmured sweet directives into my ear: “You see, it’s all in the timing. Raise your hand just a bit . . . Push down gently on the hammer . . . That a girl . . . ”

  Oh yeah, you better believe I was ready to be rescued.

  Bullseye.

  The passionate kiss I gave him certainly led him to believe that I owed it all to him.

  It was the last lie I was ever to tell him.

  If only he’d made that same promise to me.

  Afterward, he took me out to an all-night diner, where I learned that he too was living on a student’s budget. Carl, a recently decommissioned Navy SEAL, had returned to graduate school on Uncle Sam’s dime. His undergraduate degree, which he earned while at a small, Midwestern college on a baseball scholarship, had been in mathematics – not that he’d planned on using it. Considering the accuracy of his pitching arm, it was taken for granted that he was headed for the major leagues.

  But the first Gulf War changed that. In World War II, his grandfather had been a Marine. His father had also enlisted in the Corps, during Vietnam. For Carl, it was a no-brainer that God and country came before baseball.

  That was okay. He was a winner in the game of war, too. His two Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and the Distinguished Flying Cross, earned over two tours of duty, were proof of that.

  Once home, he worked just as hard for that master’s degree in statistical analysis because he wanted his bosses at some international conglomerate called Acme Industries to take notice, to realize that they could count on Carl to win for them, too, at any cost.

  He’d lost both parents before he reached eighteen, and like me he had been raised an only child. “That’s why I want a big family,” he said, looking me straight in the eye.

  If he were looking for an argument, he’d get none from me on that issue. I, too, would have preferred some brother or sister who could have shared my
grief over Mother’s death and the job of propping my father up afterward, so I was certainly open to the concept.

  More than open. I was ready, willing, and able to make babies with Carl Stone. He was everything I’d ever dreamed of in a husband.

  And in a lover: Playful. Passionate. Thorough.

  I found that out also that night, as we fell into bed together – well, really on the hard tufted mattress of my futon, back at my studio apartment in downtown LA’s Koreatown.

  He was right. It was all in the timing: how he spaced those sweet, gentle kisses which made their way from my lips, down my neck, then onto each nipple, giving one then the other its fair share of his knowing tongue until, erect and quivering, they ached for more. His hands, inching their way across my body, took their time, too, most appreciatively as they discovered that spot – the tight, moist center of my being – that ached to have him there inside me.

  He didn’t keep me waiting long. His cock – thick, hard, and generous – smarted as it entered me but immediately found the tempo for its satisfying thrusts in the rhythm of our hearts as they beat together as one.

  All in the timing.

  We married right after my graduation. Dad’s liver lasted just long enough to allow him to walk me down the aisle, which is a shame because I know he would have been proud of his grandchildren. To his credit, he didn’t drink at all during the wedding reception. Between Aunt Phyllis and AA, he had finally found the strength to forgive Mother for leaving him.

  Leaving us.

  I never questioned whether I’d taken enough time to really get to know Carl. I assumed that everything was right there on the surface. He was one of those quiet, still-waters-run-deep guys who always kept his cards close to his vest. Mary’s birth, a year into our marriage, and then Jeff’s, added a dimension of purpose I hadn’t seen in him until then. He was a hands-on father who made vanilla-cinnamon waffles for the kids and went to all of Mary’s ballet recitals. It was why, at five, Jeff could throw and catch a baseball as well as kids three years older. In fact, because of Carl and Jeff’s daylong practice sessions, Jeff was good enough to skip T-Ball altogether.