Last Contract

By Clark Howard

A hit man tries to make a clean break from his murderous career in this chilling novel from an award-winning author.
 
He has no police record, not even a traffic ticket. But he’s killed twenty-seven people during his career as a professional assassin. And sometimes it’s not just the target who takes a bullet—if the bodyguard or mistress is unfortunate enough to be around. When the time comes, it happens fast: assemble the weapon, load, ditch the evidence.
 
Now he wants out—but the people he works for may not allow that—in this suspenseful thriller from a crime writer whose works have earned numerous honors, including an Edgar Award and two Shamus Award nominations, and been adapted for film and television.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: May 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781504060684

Clark Howard

Howard Clark was a coordinator for War Resisters' International and embedded in civil peace initiatives in Kosovo throughout the 1990s. He is a founder of the Balkan Peace Team, and the author of People Power (Pluto, 2009).

Book preview

Chapter One

George Trevor woke up with a severe stomachache on the morning he was scheduled to kill the Greek shipping magnate.

He got out of bed and went into the bathroom, being careful first to slip his feet into a pair of house slippers he had lately taken to wearing. Until recently he had always gone barefoot in the apartment; the soles of his feet were heavily calloused and corded with scar tissue from being beaten with bamboo poles, so that he had never really felt the need to wear shoes indoors. But he had caught three colds now in the space of that many months, and after the last one, a particularly irritating, liquidy head cold, he had determined to start taking better care of himself. That was when he had bought the house slippers.

In the bathroom, he opened the medicine cabinet and got out a box of foil-sealed Alka-Seltzer tablets. He removed the wrapping and dropped two of them into a tumbler of tap water. Leaning on the basin with one hand, he grimly watched them begin to fizz. The burning ache in his stomach intensified, almost as if in protest, as if it somehow knew that its duration had now been decided by the two dissolving tablets. Trevor wet his sleep-dried lips. What in hell, he wondered, could be wrong with his stomach lately? The pains were becoming increasingly worse and persistently more frequent. Was it possible that he had appendicitis?

When the tablets had fizzed into foam and bubbles, Trevor drank the liquid down in four quick gulps. He stood patiently for a moment, letting the effervescent mixture go to work in his stomach. When he felt the first signs of relief, he straightened, rinsed the tumbler, and went back into the bedroom.

The cat—his cat, he supposed it was, since he had given it a place to live and was, feeding it—was sitting in the living room doorway watching him as he walked back to the bed. He ignored it and sat down on the bed to wait for the Alka-Seltzer to take its full effect. He looked at an old-fashioned windup alarm clock on the bedtable. It was half past six. In less than three hours he would be killing the Greek shipping magnate. And probably one of the Greek shipping magnate’s three bodyguards. And maybe even his beautiful French mistress, if she happened to be in the suite with him.

Resting back on his elbows, Trevor hoped the Greek’s mistress would not be there. He had killed only one woman in his life and that had not been by choice but by necessity. Of course, if he had to kill the French mistress this morning, it would be by necessity too, but it would be a different kind of necessity. She was just a woman doing a job for money, selling her talent the way he was selling his. She wouldn’t be trying to hurt him in any way, not like the woman he had had to kill. She would just be there, the Frenchwoman. But if she saw him, if she saw him kill the Greek or the Greek’s bodyguard, then he would kill her. He would have to.

Trevor sat up on the bed, sighing. He concentrated on his stomach for a moment and found that it had stopped hurting. He looked over at the cat. It was still sitting in the doorway, still watching him. He studied the animal in a detached, almost clinical way. He had never paid much attention to cats before, but he was certain that he had never seen an uglier one. It was dirty gray in color, like the city’s snow an hour after it stops falling. Shaggy and unkempt, its hair seemed to grow in a hundred directions and stuck out like porcupine needles. Its eyes were as cold and commanding as unfired bullets. In the month since the first time Trevor had sneaked it into the apartment, it had not made a sound.

Sometimes Trevor spoke to the cat, sometimes he did not. This morning, because of his stomach and the contract on the Greek shipping magnate, and because he was faced with the prospect of possibly having to kill a woman, he only looked at the cat; he did not speak to it.

Presently he got up and returned to the bathroom. He stripped to the waist and shaved; then stripped all the way and stepped into the shower. As the hot, very hot, water cascaded over his shoulders, Trevor reviewed for perhaps the fiftieth time the schedule he planned to follow that morning. He would leave the apartment at 8:15. The taxi ride downtown would take thirty-five minutes; he would get out of the cab one block from the Greek’s hotel at 8:50. Five minutes later, briefcase in hand, he would enter the lobby of the hotel and cross directly to the elevators. He would take an elevator to the third floor, where the hotel’s general offices were located; instead of entering any of those offices, however, he would proceed to the end of the hall and take the fire stairs up to the twelfth floor.

At approximately 9:10, Trevor would be on the landing of the fire stairs between floors eleven and twelve. There he would pause to open his briefcase and quickly assemble the gun he would use. The weapon, a modified .45 caliber grease gun, would be in three parts: breech-and-muzzle, with an open trigger; folding tubular stock; and silencer. To open the briefcase, completely assemble the weapon, load it with a twenty-round magazine, then close the briefcase and put it behind the fire stairs door half a flight up, would consume exactly nineteen seconds.

When the gun was ready, Trevor would put it under his topcoat and hold it in place with one gloved hand slipped through a slit in his right coat pocket. His topcoat would remain casually unbuttoned as he entered the twelfth floor hallway and walked just a few steps to the double-doored entrance to Suite 1200.

Suite 1200, Noble Foremaster, Trevor’s employer, had told him, is reserved for Presidents of the United States, heads of foreign governments, crowned and uncrowned royalty, actors and actresses of the first magnitude, and known millionaires. Foremaster had paused, inhaled from one of the Cuban cigars he still managed to obtain, smiled briefly, and added: And, in this case, a Greek shipping magnate with at least one enemy who takes his animosity seriously.

When Trevor reached the suite, he would press the buzzer and wait, his finger comfortably on the trigger of the gun under his coat. The probability was that one of the Greek’s bodyguards would respond to the ring.

Who is it, please? Trevor imagined the bodyguard asking.

Valet, sir, with Mr. Kristopoulos’s suits.

At this point there would be no question of the door’s being opened. If the man who answered was the night bodyguard, he would think one of the day bodyguards had sent the suits out. If he was one of the day bodyguards, he would think the other day bodyguard had done it. Even if the Greek’s personal manservant answered, which was highly unlikely, he would probably assume that the Frenchwoman, interfering as women are prone to do, had sent the suits out. And of course if the woman herself answered, which again was highly unlikely—though not entirely improbable, since unlike the Greek she was a person of humble birth—but even if she herself answered, she would simply assume that the suits had been sent out by one of the four men.

In any case, Trevor was ninety-nine percent certain that the door would be opened. And ninety-nine chances out of a hundred constituted better odds than he normally worked against.

He turned off the shower and got out and toweled down briskly. When he was dry he stood in front of the mirror and examined himself critically. He was forty-one and supposed he looked it, although he really had never given the matter much thought. Age did not bother him, nor looks; he was in no way a vain man, except perhaps when it came to efficiency. In that trait he excelled, and he knew it. In seventeen years as a professional assassin, he had killed twenty-seven people. That was an average of one person every seven-and-a-half months. And he did not have a police record of any kind. In all that time he had not so much as been issued a traffic citation. That was efficiency. As far as age and looks, he had always been content to simply feel good. But lately he had not even had that comfort, what with the repetitious colds and now this persistent stomach distress.

He sprayed deodorant under his arms, patted some talcum on his body, and returned to the bedroom to dress. The cat, he noticed, was in the same place. Trevor ignored it again as he turned first to the bureau, then to the closet, and got into his clothes. When he finished dressing, he stepped past the cat into his small living room and then to the left into his efficiency kitchen. He turned one of the gas burners on and put a kettle of water to boil. Walking back into the living room, he crossed to the apartment’s front door and opened it far enough to fetch in his morning paper from the hall. As he returned to the kitchen he noticed that the cat had turned in the bedroom doorway and was now watching him go about his business of preparing to eat. Which is probably what it wants to do too, he thought.

Trevor put the paper on the table and looked in the cupboard for something to feed the cat. He supposed he really ought to start buying it some regular cat food if he intended to continue letting it come in. Were it not for the fact that he himself was a habitual tuna sandwich eater, he would have been hard put on several occasions to find anything the cat would eat. Right now he found a can of beef stew, opened it, and spooned the meat chunks and some of the gravy into a dish. He put it on the floor just inside the kitchen.

All right, he said, and the mongrel cat came at once and began eating.

Trevor scraped the vegetable part of the stew into a container and put it into the refrigerator. He would heat it up for lunch when he came back from killing the Greek shipping magnate. And next time he went to the market he would buy some regular cat food.

Turning to his own meal, he put two slices of whole wheat bread into the toaster and a spoon-and-a-half of powdered coffee into a cup. The toast was ready by the time the kettle whistled, and with the butter and a jar of strawberry jelly on the table, he was ready to eat. He had taken his first bite and was chewing as he opened the paper and immediately saw a two-column photo of the Greek and his beautiful companion, as the newspaper called her, attending the opening of a play the previous night.

As he ate, Trevor studied the woman in the picture. Her predominant feature was a wide, sensuous mouth with splendidly curved lips. Her eyes were large and dark, hair long and upswept, and her body predictably magnificent. The Greek holding her arm was twenty-five years her senior, jowly, and had heavy eyelids which, to Trevor, gave him a dishonest look. Trevor did not like Greeks anyway. Or Orientals either. He instinctively did not trust them.

The Frenchwoman was as beautiful as she was reputed to be, Trevor decided. Looking at her picture, he bit into his toast again and several drops of jelly accidentally dropped onto the paper. They were small drops, round and red, and they fell onto the Frenchwoman’s picture, hitting her in the left eye, left breast, and throat. Like bullet holes, Trevor thought. The bite of toast in his mouth seemed to go suddenly dry and he had difficulty swallowing it. He took a quick sip of coffee and as it went down he could feel his stomach discomfort returning.

Irritably pushing the paper away, Trevor got up and went back into the bathroom for another Alka-Seltzer.

A little while later, he began to worry in earnest about having to kill the Frenchwoman. As he was rinsing his breakfast dishes, he wondered with more than mild concern whether he would be able to do it if it became necessary. He was a conditioned professional and approached his work as such; but his work had never before called for him to kill a woman. The one time he had killed a woman was in an entirely different situation, a sudden, emergency situation. It was completely unlike the situation today, where he would be walking in knowing that the woman might be there, and that he might have to kill her.

Sighing quietly, he picked up the dish from which the cat had eaten and put it into the sink; it would have to be washed later, with soap. The cat was now sitting next to the television set, where it usually slept. It was licking one paw unenthusiastically; for a cat, it displayed unusual indifference toward its appearance. Drying his hands, Trevor recalled the night he