Prologue                

Twenty-three hits and no questions asked. It was a string of success even his mentor might envy. The Valenti job was textbook. Flawlessly executed.

But the deaf girl threatened to screw it   all to hell. 

Anger crept up Sam Carbone’s neck like   a rash. Anyone could whack a guy. Give a sixteen-year-old a Glock and a couple hundred dollars and you’ve got a potential hitter.

But to engineer an accident, that takes  an artist. And the Valenti job was a work of art.

A frickin’ Sistine Chapel.  

Until the deaf girl turned up.

Sam leaned on the cold metal rail and looked down at the Orange line platform. His nose twitched. The air in the T station,    Boston’s underground, was always a stale       fug of diesel fumes and too many bodies in a confined space, not all of them terribly clean.     A good-sized crowd was beginning to gather    for the outbound train.

A flat smile tugged at Sam’s lips. In a press like this, who’s to say who shoved who? Picking the right location was the first task in  the art of an accident.

Irritation fizzled along his spine. Even though it was the perfect place, this was a  waste of his talents. But it couldn’t be avoided. Unfortunately, it was his fault. Damn sloppy of him to take that call in the van. Still, who’d   have thought an enclosed vehicle qualified as public place? 

He drew a deep breath and shook off     the anger. He couldn’t afford it. There was nothing personal about what he was about to  do. This was about pride of workmanship.

He’d been careless. He had to clean it   up.

A hit was like a tapestry, his mentor always said. Leave a loose thread and sooner   or later someone would notice and give it a    tug. The entire work could unravel. He’d left something dangling in an otherwise perfect    job.

Sam scanned the commuters below. There she was, right on time, her scarlet    trench a dash of color among the blacks and grays. Whoever said redheads couldn’t wear that shade had never seen Megan Kelly on a rainy day. Even though her figure was a little  too round for high fashion, she was still the   best looking skirt he’d ever off.

A tingle of desire rippled through him.    He tamped it down. He wasn’t some freak      with a fetish. He was a professional.

But he understood the compulsion.

It wasn’t dominance or the buzz or     even the kinky sex that drove serial pervs. It was the connection with their victims, that delicious moment when the soon-to-be dead recognized their killer as the harbinger of the great dark.

Even in this crowd, he hoped to see that glint of terror-filled awe in Megan Kelly’s green eyes before the spray of blood and crunch of bone and squeal of the train’s emergency brakes.

In that slice of a moment, Sam would   feel like God Almighty.

“Outbound train approaching,” a computer generated voice splatted over the loudspeaker. “All trains terminate at Oak    Grove Station.”

“And some commuters terminate sooner,” he murmured.

Megan Kelley was positioned perfectly, shifting her weight from one foot to the other,  on the yellow caution line.

The air stirred in anticipation of the coming train. Sam descended the stairs, his tread silent.

How fitting for a deaf girl, he thought, pleased by the symmetry. This was art, after  all.

Time to tie up his little loose thread. Permanently.

* * *

Chapter One

            The stalled traffic on I-93 lurched forward a car’s length. Megan Kelley stomped on the accelerator, but her car died again. The guy behind her glued his palm to the horn.

            “Yeah, right. Good idea,” she said to the jerk in her rear view mirror. “Like that’ll get us moving.”

            He blared his displeasure in another long blast.

            Megan’s right hearing aid whined. The air conditioning had made her car over-heat in this pile-up so she’d turned it off and rolled down the windows. Boston didn’t get too many 90 degree days with matching humidity, but this was one of them. The heavy air made her hearing aid batteries short out intermittently. Megan slipped off her right one and the horn’s blast faded to a tolerable level.

She started her car and goosed it forward, almost rear-ending the white cargo van ahead of her. The honker started a rap-beat on his horn again.

Rather than flip him a gesture that wasn’t listed in the American Sign Language manual, she slipped off her other hearing aid as well. It didn’t happen often, but sometimes, it was a blessing to be able to tune out the world around her. Megan sank into a soft hum of unintelligible sound, the white-noise of her uncorrected hearing.  

Profound loss, her audiologist described it.

“Not always,” Megan said, eyeing the guy in her rear view mirror. A cool bead of sweat ran down her spine as she craned her neck out the window.

Must be an accident just before the Tobin Bridge.

She’d ducked out of her last class a little early in order to meet with a new speech pathologist. Not that her summer school students minded. A sub was always easier on them than ‘Ms. Kelley the Hun.’ Megan wouldn’t use her impairment as an excuse not to excel. She wouldn’t let them either. 

Now she’d be late for her appointment, if she made it at all. The little light that warned of her engine’s rising temperature still blinked sporadically.

In the side mirror of the van ahead of her she caught a glimpse of the driver’s square jaw and thin-lipped mouth. A cell phone was plastered to his cheek. He was talking a blue streak.

Megan wasn’t going anywhere, so she decided to practice her speechreading.

It might be a little rude. Almost like eavesdropping, she supposed. Since she had some measure of hearing, about 60% of normal with the aids, she didn’t rely entirely on speechreading. She worked hard to stay ahead of her Deaf students in this area.

Besides, who would it hurt if she ‘listened’ in?

She stared intently at the mouth in the mirror.

“ . . .how you want . . . OK, I’ll do . . .”

She wished he’d hold still. His mouth moved in and out of the mirror’s range.

“ . . . a professional . . . If I . . . the job . . .”

The sun-bronzed, masculine arm propped on the driver’s side door slipped inside the van and the window scrolled up. The man’s mouth disappeared entirely.

Megan sighed and inched her car forward, crowding the lines on the pavement to get a better view.

White cargo van. No lettering on the back. Probably in a service business, lawn care or something, trying to negotiate with a new client.

The bottom half of his face came into sharp focus again.

“No, no. . . . no mistakes,” the lips formed. “You want . . . accident, you get . . . accident.”

What on earth is he talking about?

“Once . . . money shows . . .,” the lips said, “Valenti . . . dead.”

Megan blinked hard. Surely she was mistaken. Several words look relatively the same if a speechreader was forced to focus just on someone’s mouth with no auditory or context cues, after all. And there were times when he spoke so fast, she missed a number of words completely.

His lips compressed into a hard line for a moment, then started moving again.

“. . . your call,” she thought he said. “Fine . . . tonight.”

Traffic started moving. The van surged forward and slid into the left lane to inch around the accident that caused the bottleneck in the first place.

Accident. That might be why she thought she read the word. She must’ve made errors in the rest of the conversation as well.

But what if she hadn’t?

Megan tried to squeeze in behind the van, but an electric blue Honda rushed forward to keep her from easing into the lane. She only managed to see the last couple digits on the plate.

She flipped on her turn signal and babied her Taurus toward the left lane, still straining to read more of the swiftly disappearing number. The car behind her plowed into her rear bumper with a sickening thud.

Her head snapped back and then forward, narrowly missing a knock on her steering wheel. When she looked up, the white van was long gone.

“Great, just great,” she mumbled while she put her hearing aids back in. They crackled with static, but she’d need them to deal with the man who was already climbing out of his car, mouth running and arms flailing.

‘Valenti . . . dead,’ the lips in the van had said.  

She pulled her registration and insurance information from the glove compartment. The other driver stomped toward her vehicle. Once he realized she was hearing-impaired he’d probably fall all over himself trying to be nicer.

Pity the poor deaf girl.

He could keep it for someone who needed it. If he was going to be mad, she wished he’d stay mad. The rear-end collision was his fault anyway.

She pawed through her purse and realized she’d left her cell phone at home. She should be text messaging the police right now.

Over more than just her fender-bender. 

Sixty-seven. The only numbers she could see before the van pulled away. Lot of good that’ll do. I can’t even be sure it was a Massachusetts plate.

She shook her head in disgust. How many times had Jake complained about the unreliability of eye witnesses? He’d be ashamed of her.

At least it’ll be for a different reason this time.

* * * * *