Assassin Zero

He skidded into a tiny kitchen just in time to see Ike pulling a small, ugly pistol loose from a drawer. He tried to bring it around, but Zero leapt forward and stopped it with a hand, and then snapped it from his grip in a twisting maneuver that definitely dislocated, if not broke, one of the guy’s fingers.

Ike yelped sharply and cowered, holding his hand, as Zero aimed the gun at his forehead.

“Don’t shoot me, man,” he whimpered. “Don’t shoot me. Please don’t shoot me.”

“Tell me what I want to know. Where is Sara? When did you last see her?”

“Okay! Okay. Look, she came to me, but she couldn’t pay, so we worked out a deal where she could run my stuff around town—”

“Drugs,” Zero corrected. “You had her running drugs. Just say that.”

“Yeah. Drugs. It was just a few days, and she was doing okay, but then I gave her a big score of pills…”

“Of what?”

“Prescription pills. Painkillers. And she just ghosted me, man. Never showed up, never delivered. My people were pissed. I was out more than a thousand bucks. And she even took one of my cars, ’cause she didn’t have one of her own…”

Zero scoffed loudly. “You gave her a thousand dollars’ worth of drugs, and she ran off with it?”

“Yeah, man.” He looked up at Zero, his hands up near his face defensively. “If you think about it, I’m really the victim here…”

“Shut up.” He gently pushed the barrel against Ike’s forehead. “Where was she going, and what kind of car did she take?”

*

Zero took the black Escalade, which he’d “borrowed” from Ike along with his gun, and used the GPS on his phone to drive as quickly as he could to the drop-off point, all the while looking for a light blue 2001 four-door Chevy sedan.

He didn’t see one before he reached the delivery point, which much to his chagrin was a local rec center. But he couldn’t worry about that in the moment. Instead he thought to himself, What would Sara do? Where would she go?

He already knew the answer before he even finished asking himself the question. It floated to him on the salty scent of the air as easily as recalling a memory.

It was no secret in their family that Kate, Maya and Sara’s late mother, had a favorite spot in the entire world. She had taken the girls there on three separate occasions, the first time when they were only eight and six respectively, and told them: “This is my favorite spot.”

It was a beach in New Jersey, a phrase that would typically make Zero cringe. The beach was too rocky and the water was usually too cold except for two months in the summer, but that’s not what Kate liked about it. She just liked the view. She’d gone there every year when she was a little girl, all through her teens, and had a fond and almost unfounded love for the place.

The beach. He knew that Sara would go to the beach.

He used his phone to find the closest ones and drove there like a maniac, cutting people off and blowing lights and overall generally surprised that no cops zipped out from hiding places to pull him over. The parking lots at the beach were only a few rows, long and narrow and full of cars and happy families. But he didn’t see any vehicles that matched the one that Ike had described.

He searched three of the largest, closest beaches to Sara’s home and work and found nothing. Dusk was falling fast. In the back of his mind he was aware that the US had a new president; the former Speaker of the House had been sworn in that afternoon. Maria was invited there, to the ceremony, and was most likely at some cocktail party by now, full of stuffy politicians and wealthy constituents, sipping champagne and talking idly about a bright future while Zero searched the coast of Jacksonville for his estranged daughter who, last time he’d seen her, had called the police on him and shouted that she never wanted to see him again.

“Come on, Sara,” he muttered to the ether as he flicked the headlights on. “Give me something. Help me find you. There must be a…”

He trailed off as he realized his mistake. He’d been searching public beaches. Popular beaches. But Kate’s beach had been small and sparsely visited. And Sara had a thousand dollars’ worth of drugs. She wouldn’t want to be where people were.

He pulled over to the side of the road and opened the browser on his phone. He frantically searched for less popular beaches, rocky beaches, places that people didn’t often go. It was a hard search, and it didn’t feel like he was making progress until he touched the “images” tab and then he saw it—

A beach that looked remarkably like Kate’s beach. As if it had been molded from his own memory.

Zero headed there at about eighty miles an hour, not caring about police or traffic laws or even other drivers as he swerved around cars going far too slow, people casually heading home for the night and not concerned that their daughter might be dead in the surf somewhere.

He skidded into the tiny gravel parking lot and slammed his brakes when he saw it. A blue sedan, the only car in the lot, parked at the farthest end. Night had fallen, so he left the headlights on and put the Escalade in park right there in the middle of the lot, and he jumped out and ran over to the sedan.

He threw the back door open.

And there she was, looking like both heaven and hell: his baby girl, his youngest daughter, pale-skinned and beautiful, lying prostrate in the backseat of a car with her eyes glazed and half-opened, pills scattered around the floor below her.

Zero immediately checked for a pulse. It was there, though slow. Then he tilted her head back and made sure her airway was clear. He knew that most overdose deaths were the result of blocked airways that resulted in respiratory failure and eventually cardiac arrest.

But she was breathing, albeit shallowly.

“Sara?” he said hoarsely in her face. “Sara?”

She didn’t answer. He hefted her out of the car and held her upright. She was unable to stand on her own two feet.

“I’m so sorry,” he told her. And then he stuck two fingers down her throat.

She retched involuntarily, then again, and vomited into the parking lot. She coughed and sputtered while he held her and told her, “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

He put her in the Escalade, leaving the doors of the sedan still open with pills all over the seats, and drove two miles until he found a convenience store. He bought two liters of water with a twenty and didn’t stick around for his change.

There in the parking lot of a Florida gas station, he sat with her in the back seat, her head in his lap as he stroked her hair, feeding her small amounts of water and watching for any signs that he should bring her to an emergency room. Her pupils were dilated, but her airways were open and her pulse was slowly returning to normal. Her fingers were twitching slightly, but when he slipped his hand into them they closed around his. Zero held back tears, remembering when she was just a baby, when he’d hold her in his lap and her tiny fingers would clench his.

He lost track of time sitting there with her. The next time he glanced up at the clock he saw that more than two hours had gone by.

And then she blinked, and moaned slightly, and said: “Daddy?”

“Yeah.” His voice came out a whisper. “It’s me.”

“Is this real?” she asked, her voice floating to him dreamily.

“It’s real,” he told her. “I’m here, and I’m going to take you home. I’m going to take you away from here. I’m going to take care of you… even if you hate me for it.”

“Okay,” she agreed softly.

And eventually he relaxed enough to realize that the danger had passed. Sara fell asleep and Zero slid into the front seat of the SUV. He couldn’t put her on a plane in this state, but he could drive back, through the night if he had to. Maria would get rid of the vehicle for him, no questions asked. And the local authorities would be paying a visit to the dealer, Ike.

He glanced over his shoulder at her, curled in the backseat with her knees drawn up and her cheek on the soft leather, looking peaceful but vulnerable.

She needs you.

And he needed to be needed.

4 WEEKS LATER

CHAPTER ONE

“You ready for this?” Alan Reidigger asked, his voice low as he checked the magazine on the black Glock in his meaty fist. He and Zero had their backs to a plywood structure, keeping hidden and obscured by the darkness. It was almost too dark to see, but Zero knew that in moments the whole place would be lit up like the Fourth of July.