Free The Housewife Assassin's Hostage Hosting Tips (Housewife Assassin Series Book 9) by Josie Brown Page A

She turns around to give me a wink.
    Thank you , I mouth to her.
    I wait until she closes the door before I open the only file on the computer’s screen.
    The dossier for Tatyana Zakharov is one of the documents within it.
    With one click, I’ll discover how this woman changed my destiny.

    The dossier is fairly slim. In fact, Acme only has a few pictures of Tatyana, and the two reports are just a few pages long at best.
    In the first photo, she is several years younger. In it, she’s a redhead, and she’s wearing a turquoise sundress and a matching wide, floppy hat. It looks as if she’s stepping out of a sleek motorboat onto a dock alongside a Venetian canal.
    Jack is on the motorboat too. At least he’s not the man helping her off the boat while giving her the once-over. And, to his favor, he’s also not one of the many men giving her admiring glances.
    As I read the report attached to the photo, I understand why. Later that night, Jack was found along the canal with a bullet in his shoulder. He lost a lot of blood before a couple of good Samaritans took him to a nearby hospital. He was sent to retrieve intel at some private party.
    Apparently, she was too.
    The accompanying report puts it this way:
    The photos enclosed herewith, obtained via public security cameras, provide formal verification to Acme Agent J. Craig’s eye-witness report that Russia FSB agent Tatyana Zakharov was onsite and carried out the extermination of Irina Romanov. – A. Locklear
    Jack succeeded in obtaining what he came for, but the price was precious: an innocent bystander’s life. Thank goodness it wasn’t his.
    In the third picture of Tatyana, it’s obvious that she’s in Paris because she’s descending in one of Charles de Gaulle Airport’s famous escalator tubes. She’s so gorgeous that she draws the attention of many eyes–those of strangers from some of the other tubes. Jack owns a pair of them. I spot him in a tube that seems to be ascending to the gate she must have just left.
    They seem to have spotted each other. Whereas he glares at her, she smiles supremely back at him.
    The last photo of Tatyana must have been taken a few moments before the last one, at a departure gate. The sign over it indicates the plane is headed to Los Angeles.
    The security camera only caught her from behind. She’s kissing someone, but her head is tilted so that you can’t make out his face.
    I don’t need to see it. I already know who it is: Carl. I recognize him from his Burberry raincoat, now slung over one arm. His valise is open because of a toy jutting out of it.
    A Wolverine action figure.
    He’d brought it home from a trip right before Jeff’s fifth birthday.
    Why, that son of a bitch.
    He’d been in Paris, and yet he told me he was in Chicago.
    None of this should surprise me. Still, Carl’s lies and betrayal sting after all these years.  
    The report with the photo says, simply:  
    Obtained via public security cameras, provide formal verification to Acme Agent J. Craig’s eye-witness report that Acme Agent C. Stone conducted unauthorized contact with the suspect, Russian FSB agent Tatyana Zakharov. – E. Honeycutt.
    Unauthorized contact? That’s putting it mildly.
    Well, at least now I understand what Jack meant when he said he has some unfinished business to take care of before he can walk away from Acme.
    Go for it, Jack. You have my full support, for as long as you need it.

    The final photo in the file is one that shows Tatyana as I last saw her: high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes the color of a bright cloudless sky, white blond hair, and dressed in her Versace widow’s weeds.
    Apparently, Arnie captured her via the morgue’s security webcam during my face-off with her. Knowing him, I presume he erased all video traces of both of us from the web feed.
    It is attached to a report that was filed by Jack. It is a surveillance map, studded with coordinates listing dates, times, addresses, routes, and descriptions of