“Ace isn’t going to kill you in the pool,” Ernie said, obviously amused. “If he didn’t like you, he would have told you to move on and left it at that.”
Eric grimaced. Sure, Ace would have done that. But given that he’d seen the results of Ace’s work the day he’d arrived here, he was still a little wary.
Ernie let out a sigh. “Look, I can see that you still don’t quite get us. But please believe me when I say you have to be arealscumbag to have to worry about one of us offing you. I mean, I’m all-but-married to a government assassin. I wassupposedto be ahit.”
“He couldn’t do it?” Eric asked, surprised. After meeting Burton, he didn’t thinkanythingcould interfere with the man’s agenda.
“Well, he was studying me as a hit, and he realized that it wasn’t that I was dangerous to the population, but what I knew wasverydangerous to the man who’d tried to train me to help create assassins.”
“Oh! Karl Lacey?” Eric’s old unit, Corduroy, had been going to hook up with Admiral Lacey’s little psychosocial experiment—with an emphasis onpsycho. He saw the expression on Ernie’s face and said, “God rot his soul in hell.”
Ernie nodded. “Yup. That’s the fucker. Burton figured out I could bring Lacey down, so he and Jason worked an undercover op to do that. We had some help, and it’s not all wrapped up yet, but yeah. Burton and Jason both have a conscience—and a skill set. Same with Ace and same with Jai.”
“The, uhm….”
“Giant bald Russian enforcer,” Ernie said. “Yeah—hi, Jai!”
“You are here,” said the giant bald Russian enforcer from Eric’s doorway. “I thought so. George is at work, and I am going to the garage. You are coming?”
Ernie grunted. “Yeah. I told Ace I’d work today. I wanted to show Eric how to care for the cats so he could be—”
“You wish to indoctrinate him into our happy neighbor assassin cult,” Jai said, and his broad face was so intimidating, Eric had trouble deciding if he was kidding or not. Only a twitch of his full mouth gave it away. “No need for the high pressure. You had him at cinnamon rolls.”
Eric was going to protest that he wasn’t that easy, but his mouth was full, and he didn’t want to rush the cinnamon orgasm that was about to explode in his palate.
Ah yes. He could breathe now.
Okay, then.
He gazed at Ernie and Jai in pure bafflement and said, “If I’d known my soul could be bought so cheaply, I might have settled for petty theft and assault before graduating to full-out assassin.”
Ernie guffawed like the twenty-something he appeared to be, and Jai’s laughter shook the RV. From their crate, the kittens purred contentedly, and Eric decided they would be fine in the mild temperatures while he took a tour of Ernie’s house.
OH, THISwas a mistake.
The house was… lovely. It had an open-plan kitchen/dining room/family area, a glass-bricked hallway to three bedrooms, one of which was filled with cat trees and cat beds (and cat boxes on the tiled floor), and the other of which was relatively cat free, but which had a carpet and a king-size bed. The third was used as a den, with a desk and a computer and a guest bed.
Ernie obviouslylivedin the spacious kitchen, which had restaurant-sized appliances, including a mixer, a blender, a deep fryer (for donuts, he explained proudly), and three ovens.
Much of it was done in white tile with red or wood accents, and while it wasn’t to Eric’s taste, it was….
Luxurious.Veryindividual. And obviously decorated for the people who lived there, including the cat fur, which some people might have objected to but Eric thought was the perfect finishing touch.
The fact that he knew people who agreed with him on that seemed more of a miracle than the assassin thing.
“So,” he said, after getting the tour and memorizing all of the places cat food needed to go and how often the many boxes needed to be cleaned. “Why are these houses here again?”
Ernie let out a laugh. “Well, the nearest we could figure was that when Karl Lacey was running hisillegitimatemilitary ops not far from here, an enterprising contractor caught wind of it and thought, ‘Hey—officers live off campus!’ So he started building an officer-quality neighborhood. But Lacey was off-book—and crazy—so no officers. By the time he was killed, the contractor wasfreaking outbecause he was about to take a bath. So when Burton offered to buy the one place, the contractor practically gave it away—and let on that the power, gas, and water hookups were partially completed through the military base. Jason heard about it and thought, ‘Hey, that could be handy, being gay and in the military and stuck out here in hell,’ and since it was going for a song—”
“He arranged for the hookups and bought the property,” Eric filled in.
Ernie shrugged. “Burton, Jason, Jason, Burton….” He held his hand up and wobbled it back and forth. “See, the desert is sort of an amazing place. Everything here has to fight to survive. This cul-de-sac is like water from a cactus, or maternal instinctfrom a coyote. It’s designed to give shelter to the creatures who belong here.”
Eric swallowed and glanced out Ernie’s window to his RV, parked in the driveway across the street. “You think so?” he asked, rather moved by Ernie’s poetry.
“You know who Karl Lacey was?” Ernie asked.
Eric swallowed grimly, remembering how Corduroy had seemed a decent place to work with a skill set like his, and then it had fallen apart when Lacey had signed on to give “perfect assassins” to his boss.
