Furious Jones and the Assassin’s Secret by Tim Kehoe

a few people still standing around the accident site, but traffic was flowing now and the hay bales had been removed. Just the same, I was glad to be walking north. I walked for a mile and came upon Galena Senior and Junior High School. Someone had spelled out GO PIRATES with plastic cups stuck through the holes in the chain-link fence surrounding the football field. Pirates? In the middle of the country? Someone had a sense of humor.
    I found the Piggly Wiggly about a mile past the school. I picked out the cheapest phone, two seven-dollar T-shirts, and a bag of minidonuts for dinner. The bill came to $69.87. That left me with $234, and it was only Saturday. There were five more days until my dad’s book came out. Five days until I could tell the world that my dad’s new book was 100 percent true. That whatever happened in the book was actually happening in Galena. But there was no way I could stay in Galena for five more days on two hundred bucks. Not if I wanted to eat.
    I walked back to Betty’s and closed the door to the Second House. I plugged in my new phone, and it chirped to life. I pulled up my dad’s website, entered the code, and read the next excerpt.
    There were many aspects of Carson Kidd’s job that he would agree were difficult. Interrogatingcorrupt foreign officials was difficult. Running while wearing night-vision goggles was difficult. In the CIA, even the paperwork was difficult.
    Carson Kidd could compile a long list of difficulties that came with his job, but spotting a trained killer, that was not one of them. That was easy. The CIA had volumes on the subject. They had entire manuals on assassin behavior. They had elaborate profiles, models, and statistics. And these weren’t your typical Harvard professor touchy-feely hunches about the relationship between bed-wetting and serial killers. No, these were tried and true facts collected by studying killers. By creating killers.
    But Kidd didn’t need any of those studies to identify the killer standing in front of him now. He knew this guy was a killer, because they had been trained together. Anton and Kidd had become killers together.
    Kidd was about to cross the street and approach Anton when Anton suddenly stopped and knocked on the front door of Cannova’s Pizzeria. An Italian-looking man with long black hair opened the door and had a brief conversation with Anton. And then they both disappeared into the restaurant.
    Kidd stood and stared. Did Anton know the guy in the restaurant? Was this part of Anton’s cover?
    And then Kidd remembered his training and realized he was standing still in the middle of a public sidewalk. He was drawing attention to himself. Kidd started walking slowly down the sidewalk, trying to blend in. He wondered if he would blow Anton’s cover if he tried to connect with him in public. But as he pushed open the door to Cannova’s Pizzeria, he figured he would pretend to not know Anton until Anton made it clear it was okay to talk.
    Kidd stood in the doorway and lowered his left hand. It brushed against his hip. It was a subconscious move. He did it every few minutes without realizing. He only noticed the move when the bump from his faithful sidearm, his SIG, was missing. But it was there now and Kidd subconsciously felt safe as he walked into the restaurant looking for his coworker.
    The pizzeria was one small room with a dozen linen-covered tables and brick walls. It looked nice. It looked like the kind of place Kidd would have enjoyed. Like the kind of place that would know how to make good gnocchi. He loved good gnocchi.
    Kidd took a few steps into the restaurant. The floor creaked. He paused.
    â€œHello,” a woman said as she walked out of the kitchen. “We don’t open until noon, but I can bend the rules a little.” She smiled.
    â€œOh, excuse me,” Kidd said. “I thought I saw people coming in.”
    â€œNope, just the staff. But you’re welcome