Free Elemental Assassin 02 - Web of Lies by Jennifer Estep Page B

hadn’t been fired until almost noon.
    Why? Why had the assassin waited so long? I’d been moving through the restaurant all morning. Cooking, cleaning, wiping off the tables and booths, flipping the sign on the front door over to Open. He could have taken me out at any time during the morning. So why hadn’t he taken a shot before lunchtime? Why then?
    I went back over the shooting in my mind. I’d been standing behind the counter when the shots had been fired. A tough shot to make, even for a professional assassin, no matter how good with a gun he was. Maybe he’d wanted an audience when he killed me. Maybe that’s why he’d waited. Finn had been in the restaurant, standing off to my left. The girl had been there too, more or less in front of me—
    And I realized what I’d been missing. The shooter, the assassin, hadn’t been firing at me.
    He’d been aiming at the girl.

6
    The girl, Violet. The shooter had been aiming at her, not me.
    That was the only thing that made sense. The assassin could have shot me any time I’d been close to the storefront windows. But he hadn’t. Instead, he’d sat in this apartment for almost an hour, waiting for her. She’d been sitting in a booth in the back, out of sight of the storefront windows, so he’d had to wait for her to finish her lunch. When she’d paid and started for the front door, that’s when he’d taken his shot.
    My mind processed the information and moved on to the next question. Why shoot her inside the restaurant?
    Why not wait for her to step outside onto the street? Why not just do her in some back alley?
    The answer came to me. The robbery. The assassin must have seen the story in the newspaper about the botched robbery at the Pork Pit.
    Maybe the assassin had realized that if he took out the girl in the restaurant, there was a good chance her death would be connected to Jake McAllister and the robbery last night. No doubt the cops would have had the same first thought as me—that Jake or whomever he might have hired had been aiming at me, not the girl. That I’d been the target. That Jake had wanted to silence me and make all the charges against himself just disappear. Given all that, the police wouldn’t be inclined to look too hard in other directions, to consider other theories. Like the fact the girl had been the intended victim all along.
    And if laying the blame on Jake McAllister didn’t work, well, there was another option. The Pork Pit wasn’t officially located in Southtown, but it was only a couple of streets over, which meant the whole area had its share of crime. Drug deals, shootings, domestic disputes. One or more of those happened every day of the week.
    Given the rough neighborhood, the girl’s death today might have just been chalked up to random violence in the area, if the cops were feeling particularly lazy. Some sort of drive-by or gang shooting that she’d been unlucky enough to get in the middle of. A ten-year-old kid and his younger sister had gotten caught up in one of those last week, less than a half mile from the restaurant.
    Either way, nobody would think it had been a planned hit. The best assassinations were always the ones that looked like something else. A nice, neat, easy plan all the way around.
    Maybe the assassin had been following the girl, looking for just such an opportunity. Maybe he’d known she was coming to the Pork Pit today to eat lunch and ask about somebody named the Tin Man. Either way, when she’d gone into the restaurant, he’d decided to make sure that she never came out again. It would have been easy for him to slip into the building unseen, find the empty apartment, and jimmy the lock. All he would have ahd to do after that was wait for the right moment, the right angle, and then pull the trigger.
    I stared at the cracked storefront of the Pork Pit. He would have hit her too—four kill shots clustered in her chest.
    If the restaurant didn’t have bulletproof windows.
    No, this