Assassin by Tara Moss Page B

romantic in him? — but the sheer weight of Euros at stake more than ameliorated his guilt. Everyone died. It was a fact of living. This woman was a person like any other. An adult and therefore fair game. The only difference was that by the end of the day she would be dead and Fausto would be considerably the richer for it. Anyone with that high a price on her head was going to get hit by someone. It may as well be him.
    Fausto, like many in the game, had noticed the half-million-Euro offering for her neat execution. But where to find her? Weeks had passed, and he had almost forgotten about her when Javier Rafel contacted him. The well-known counterfeiter wanted a twenty per cent finder’s fee for his troubles, which was steep considering he wasn’t risking anything. But that still left four hundred K for an afternoon’s work. Well worth the long drive.
    The woman, Makedde Vanderwall, was due to return to Javier Rafel’s shop for her passport at five. The fat counterfeiter had asked that she not be harassed until she left his shop. No doubt he wanted the payment for his work before she was taken. When she exited the shop, there would be plenty to distract her from Fausto’s presence in the crowd. The timing of her visit to Javier’s shop had been carefully chosen.
    When she emerged, Fausto would be ready.
     
    ‘Bogey,’ Makedde Vanderwall whispered.
    Bogey.
    Mak rolled over and breathed in Bogey’s dark, musky hair. She kissed his ambrosial mouth — the sculpted cupid’s bow of the upper lip and sensual fullness of his pillow-like lower lip. His candied tongue. His warm skin, illustrated with ink in lines and shapes to trace with an appreciative finger.
    Yes.
    Her lover was returned to her, in her arms and in her mouth and inside her. And even from within layers of her sleep the familiarity of his touch brought a tear to Makedde’s tightly shut eyes.
    Bogey Mortimer.
    She tilted her face to the white ceiling, arched her back. Her fingers caressed the clean bed sheets, fingertip to cotton. Shafts of sunlight lit her body as she pulled the sheets from her thighs, feeling his touch, or at least a touch she felt was his.
    And then like every dream of him for the past two months, her tears of joy at Bogey’s return transformed swiftly to tears of horror. This was a brutal evolution of the subconscious, an inevitable nightmare that was somewhat more vivid and detailed than the brief erotic dream that had preceded it. Arecent memory replayed perennially in the hours when her conscious mind let go: Bogey’s lips were cold and Makedde kissed them with finality, despair, revulsion. His body was no longer responsive, sensual and warm. It was heavy and exanimate, a bundle of flesh and bone, reeking of death and the pungent stench of rotting flowers. She was no longer in her lover’s bed: she was alone with him in the French countryside, struggling to pull his heavy corpse up by the arms to the edge of the shallow grave she’d dug for him. Shaking, fingers raw, she gave one last effort and got him over the edge.
    She dropped him and he hit the dirt below her with a dull thud, and did not flinch.
    Bogey.
    Mak did not know how long she stood there, weeping, her fingers bleeding. She’d wrapped herself in her lover’s leather jacket to battle the chill night air, but it was little comfort. The jacket was speckled with his blood. Mak had thought she’d finally gone mad, holding herself against the dawn light and watching his inert body in that dirty hole. His legs twisted. His chest unmoving. How long had she stood there, transfixed with horror? He was a young man, dead before thirty. And why? Because he’d loved Mak, if only for a short time. She’d loved him. In a way it was her fault. She’d encouraged him to visit her in Europe. But how could she have known what would unfold? Bogey deserved better than to be killed by a brutal stranger and buried in a makeshift grave, his loved ones cursed never to know what had