That’s how they got me, of course. They found me in college with my jeans embroidered with peace signs and they dangled the bait of changing history. I was recruited in late 1978 along with Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie as part of Project Sphinx, the first all-female squad. I put down my protest signs and stamped out my burning bra and let them make a killer out of me.
Helen doesn’t like that word, but I always ask her, Why bother with anything else? It’s simple and true. We kill for a living. A good living, in case you’re interested, with a solid base salary, bonuses, and benefits—including full dental and a pension. And we kill who we’re told and only who we’re told. Let’s get that clear right up front. We’re not sociopaths. We don’t murder for fun or for free. We kill to get paid. Now, Mary Alice loves her idealism and still clings to the notion of us murdering people who need killing in order to improve society. That was the official line when we were recruited, and even though times have changed—more computers and pencil pushers doing cost-benefit analyses—that part is not negotiable. We only kill people who are specifically targeted by the Museum for extermination and we don’t freelance, ever. We don’t murder on our days off any more than a thoracic surgeon will cut your rib cage open for kicks. We have standards.
CHAPTER THREE
The packet arrived in the mail in late November 2018, a predictably gloomy time of year. Contract assassination is surprisingly busy during the holidays—targets are as much creatures of habit as the rest of us, and you can often knock them off when they’re traveling over the fields and through the woods to grandmother’s house—but I had finished my last assignment the week after Halloween, leaving me rattling around my rented town house like Miss Havisham, only with leftover breakfast tacos instead of a wedding cake. There was no more work on the horizon, the Astros had lost to the Red Sox in the playoffs the month before, and to add insult to injury, it had actually snowed in Houston. In short, I was ripe for anything that hinted at adventure, and an all-expenses-paid retirement cruise embarking the day after Christmas was better than nothing.
I flicked through the brochures, noting the deliberate omission of prices.
It was too much. I gave up after reading about the thread count of the sheets （“hand-loomed from cotton grown in the Nile delta”） and threw the packet into my tote bag. It was still there a month later, buried under a bottle of sunscreen, a pack of cigarettes, and a bag of licorice whips, when I boarded the boat in San Juan for a late-afternoon departure that felt like a class reunion. Mary Alice and I had met up in the Dallas airport on our way east; Helen joined us in Miami. Leave it to Natalie to dash on at the last possible minute, spilling lipsticks and miniature liquor bottles from her bag as she ran up the gangplank in the harbor in Puerto Rico.
“She’s going to break a hip doing that,” Mary Alice said mildly. We were standing at the rail next to Helen, watching as Natalie teetered across the deck on wedge espadrilles that were four inches high and tied halfway up her leg with yellow satin ribbons.
“Or by falling off a porter,” I said, nodding to where Natalie was furiously batting her lashes at some poor twenty-year-old who didn’t know what had hit him.
“Leave her be,” Helen said, a little too sharply. I raised a brow at Mary Alice but neither of us replied. Natalie shifted her gear into the porter’s waiting arms and waved him away as she launched herself at us. She was the smallest, barely coming up to Helen’s shoulder, but somehow she managed to gather us into a group hug.
“It’s been so long!” she cried, pulling back to see us better. “Let me look at you! Christ, you’re all so old!”
“It’s been six months,” Mary Alice told her, smoothing out her linen tunic from where Natalie had crushed it in her exuberance.
Natalie flapped a hand. “Bullshit. It’s been longer than that.”
Helen was calculating. “It was my last birthday. You all came to Washington,” she said. She didn’t finish the thought. We’d gone to DC armed with dinner reservations and tickets to the Camelot revival at the Kennedy Center to get her out of the house.
I gave her a close look. She’d worried me on that trip. Kenneth’s death had hit her hard and I wasn’t sure she was going to make it. He’d been gone for three months when we showed up. The blinds had been drawn and the house dark, smelling of gin and unwashed sheets and even more of unwashed Helen. We stayed for four days, rousting her out of the house for spa trips and movies and a baseball game. We made her promise to keep her hairdresser’s appointments and her volunteer commitments and signed her up for pottery classes and a meal-delivery service. And then we’d gone home and gotten back to our own lives with a sense of having accomplished what we’d set out to do, like Helen was a chore on a to-do list. Check off the box marked console widow and move on to the next thing.