Maggie Lee (Book 17): The Hitwoman Takes A Road Trip Read online

  The Hitwoman

  Takes a Road Trip

  HITWOMAN 17

  JB Lynn

  THE HITWOMAN TAKES A ROAD TRIP

  Copyright © 2017 Jennifer Baum

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted by US copyright act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in any database or retrieval system, without prior permission of the author.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, establishments, or organizations, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously to give a sense of authenticity. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Hitwoman Takes a Road Trip is intended for 18+ older and for mature audiences only.

  Cover designer: Hot Damn Designs

  Editor: Parisa Zolfaghari

  Proofreader: Proof Before You Publish

  Formatting: Author E.M.S.

  Table of Contents

  THE HITWOMAN TAKES A ROAD TRIP

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  More from JB

  Other Books by JB Lynn

  About JB Lynn

  Prologue

  You just know it’s going to be a bad day when you wake up to something burning.

  It’s not the first time I’ve had close contact with a fire, and the bitter, acrid smell burning my nose sent me into full-blown panic. I forgot to breathe, adrenaline pumped through me, and yet I couldn’t move.

  “Fire!” DeeDee, my Doberman pinscher, barked in my ear, jolting me with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

  Heart pounding, I jumped out of bed.

  “Owwwww!” the cat yowled as I inadvertently stepped on her tail.

  “Sorry!” I said, stumbling toward the stairs that lead from my bedroom in the basement to the kitchen.

  “I have sensitive lungs,” Godzilla, the anole lizard who prefers to be called God, bellowed from his glass-enclosed terrarium.

  “Fire!” DeeDee barked again, running in front of me.

  Tripping over her, I did a face-plant right at the base of the stairs. I saved my chin by throwing my hands up, but I wrenched my wrist when I landed with a dull thud.

  Meanwhile I thought my heart might beat right out of my chest as smoke curled beneath the kitchen door. I scrambled, half-crawling, half-running, up the steps with the dog nudging me from behind. Throwing open the door, we ran straight into a wall of smoke.

  Coughing and choking, I spotted a shadowy figure near the stove, fanning the orange flames that roared in the oven.

  “Fire!” DeeDee whined, racing back down the stairs.

  The fire alarm began to beep its warning, so loudly that I had to cover my ears.

  “Suffocating!” God called dramatically from the basement.

  “Good idea,” I yelled back. Diving under the kitchen sink, I felt around. My panic increased tenfold when I couldn’t find the fire extinguisher.

  “Where the hell is it?” I yelled.

  No one answered. Or if they did, I couldn’t hear them over the tone of the fire alarm that was drilling into my head like an ice pick.

  Finally, I yanked out an oversized box of baking soda. Shoving the person in front of the oven out of the way, I doused the flames with the powdery white stuff and slammed the door shut.

  “What are you doing?” Aunt Leslie asked.

  “Putting out the fire.” I moved to open the kitchen window. “What were you doing?”

  “I was trying to extinguish it using this towel.”

  The smoke stung my eyes and I had to blink away tears to see she was holding a singed tea towel in her hands. “I thought you were fanning the flames.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  Before I could answer, a stampede of coughing and spluttering human beings rushed into the kitchen.

  Katie, my niece, wearing her pink princess nightie, was the first through the door, hands over ears, eyes wide, mouth hanging open.

  Her fear twisted my heart even more painfully than the fall had hurt my wrist.

  “Something’s burning,” my sister Marlene, in an old men’s t-shirt that was barely long enough to cover her privates, pointed out oh-so-helpfully, as she scooped up Katie.

  “No shit,” I replied, reaching into the pantry.

  “Language, Margaret,” Aunt Susan, in a flannel nightgown that looked like something straight out of Little House on the Prairie, corrected. “You should be ashamed of yourself speaking like that in front of a child.”

  Fighting the urge to scream, screw you, I pulled a broom from the pantry and hoisted it over my head. I winced at the sharp pain that zipped up my arm.

  “Don’t do anything rash, dear,” Aunt Loretta, in a skimpy negligee that left nothing to the imagination and did nothing to hide the ravages of time on her body, urged.

  Ignoring them, I waved the broom beneath the offensive fire alarm on the ceiling, trying to dissipate the smoke.

  “Why doesn’t everyone go out on the front porch?” a voice of reason suggested.

  Thankfully, the herd followed the advice of U.S. Marshal Larry Griswald and shuffled off to the relative safety of the porch.

  Even as they were exiting, Susan said, “For heaven’s sake, Loretta, wrap yourself in a tablecloth or something. The neighbors will think we’re running a brothel.”

  “I resent that,” Loretta and Marlene complained simultaneously.

  Considering that Loretta runs a lingerie shop and Marlene had previous experience as a prostitute, I didn’t really understand their objections.

  When fanning away the smoke didn’t work, I did the logical, mature thing. I turned the brush upside down and began beating the shit out of the offensive piece of plastic, intent on silencing it forever.

  It didn’t work. It just kept bleating like a deranged sheep being led to slaughter.

  Thankfully, Griswald had another more measured and logical approach. He dragged in a chair from the dining room, climbed up on it, and yanked the battery out of the annoying device.

  “Nice save,” I told him when the noise stopped, noticing that he’d taken time to get dressed to his shoes.

  Getting down, he asked, “What happened?”

  I shook my head, trying to get my ears to stop ringing. “I
don’t know. I woke up, smelled smoke, and came up here to find Leslie beating at the flames in the oven.”

  He looked around. “Where’s the fire extinguisher?”

  I rubbed my aching wrist. “Couldn’t find it. I covered the flames with baking soda to deprive it of oxygen.”

  “Smart,” Griswald approved. “You suffocated it.”

  “I gave her that suggestion,” God yelled from the basement.

  “No, you didn’t,” Piss countered with an annoyed meow. “Maggie did that all on her own.”

  “She could have just closed the oven door. It would have done the same thing without making a mess,” God groused.

  “But what started the fire?” Griswald asked.

  I stared at the lumpy mound covered in charred powder. “Maybe Leslie was cooking?”

  “At three in the morning?”

  “I don’t know. She’s been kind of erratic lately.”

  He nodded.

  What neither of us said aloud was that Leslie’s problems stemmed from the fact she’d fallen off the clean-and-sober wagon.

  Griswald shook his head. “She could have burned the place down.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” I promised.

  “No doubt Susan and Loretta are already giving her a talking to,” the marshal said. “But I don’t know if that’s enough.”

  A chill tickled my spine as I worried that he was considering taking legal action against her. Sure, Leslie drove me nuts at times, but she’s relatively harmless and I’d hate for her to end up in jail.

  “We might need to have a full-blown intervention,” Griswald suggested.

  I let out a shaky sigh of relief. “That sounds like a good idea.”

  “But first we should make sure this fire is out.” Griswald opened the oven and peeked inside.

  I waited to find out what his determination was.

  “Made a hell of a mess, but it did the job,” he said. “Susan’s not going to be happy.”

  “We really should have a fire extinguisher,” I said defensively.

  “This family should have a lot of things,” Griswald replied darkly.

  “Speaking of which,” I said carefully, knowing this wasn’t the right time to repeat a request. “Have you given any more thought to letting me see my father?”

  Griswald scowled.

  “It’s just that—”

  Griswald finished my sentence for me. “You need to find the fifth.”

  I blinked, surprised he knew that.

  “I was at the séance too,” he reminded me, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe he’d ever been roped into doing something so ridiculous. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thank you.” Without thinking, I hugged him to express my gratitude.

  He stiffened for a moment, then hugged me back. “On the bright side, at least the alarm didn’t trigger a visit from the fire department.”

  “Small miracle,” I agreed, pulling away from him. “I’ll clean the oven in the morning after it cools down.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Griswald snapped. “Leslie caused this mess, she can clean up after herself.”

  “Well, technically I caused the mess,” I reminded him.

  He shook his head. “I get that it’s ingrained in you to take care of your family, Maggie, but as I’ve told you before, they’re not your responsibility.”

  I nodded. Part of me knew he was right. But part of me didn’t know who I’d be without the burden of looking out for them on a daily basis.

  I was about to find out.

  Chapter One

  Considering that I’d had difficulty going back to sleep, I was not happy when my friend Armani banged on the cellar’s storm door later that morning.

  “Gotta! Gotta!” DeeDee yipped excitedly the moment she knew I was awake.

  I got out of bed, taking care not to step on the cat’s tail, and stumbled over to let the dog outside.

  “I brought coffee,” Armani announced the moment I threw open the door.

  “Did you use your psychic powers to determine I needed it?” I asked.

  “Coffee!” DeeDee barked excitedly, sniffing hopefully at the cups balanced in a cardboard tray in Armani’s good hand.

  “Not for you.”

  She ran off to race through the yard.

  I squinted up at Armani. With the sun to her back, and her gorgeous hair framing her face, she looked a little like an angel as she held out the steaming cup. I forgave her for disturbing me.

  Afraid she was a mirage, I quickly snatched the beverage from her and then retreated a step or two back into the basement.

  “You look like hell, chica,” she said.

  “I played firefighter last night,” I groused, sipping the hot brew.

  “Oooh, is that some kind of role-playing thing,” she asked excitedly. “Did you play it with Angel? That must have been hot.”

  I shook my head, though I couldn’t blame her for entertaining the fantasy. Just the memory of Angel’s kiss was enough to leave me hot and bothered. “Nothing that exciting. There was a kitchen fire. And don’t forget, Angel moved out.”

  Angel Delveccio had lived at the B&B for a while, acting as Katie’s manny and my sounding board, but he’d recently moved out to help care for his nephew.

  “Such a shame,” Armani pouted. “Get yourself dressed.”

  “Why?” I asked suspiciously.

  “We’ve got an adventure ahead of us.”

  She sounded excited about that possibility. I was anxious about it.

  “Come on, lazy bones. Up and at ’em.”

  “I’m up,” I reminded her.

  “But you can’t go out dressed like that,” she countered. “Wear something sexy.”

  “Sexy?” I squeaked, wondering what kind of adventure she was getting me into.

  “At least wear something not boring,” she conceded grudgingly.

  “Come on, DeeDee,” I yelled. “Breakfast time.”

  The dog nearly knocked my friend over and managed to make me slosh a bit of my coffee on my hand as she barreled back into the basement, panting, “Time breakfast. Time breakfast.”

  “Give me five,” I told Armani, pulling the storm door shut over me.

  “Hungry. Hungry,” the Doberman reminded me as though I could have forgotten the task at hand in the last ten seconds.

  “Starving?” I mocked.

  “Death starving to,” she agreed, rolling onto her back and playing dead.

  “I’m going with you,” God said from his terrarium.

  I wasn’t sure if he was making a statement, issuing a warning, or pleading for my cooperation, but I nodded my agreement.

  Grabbing a handful of dog food, I threw it into the air like it was confetti. Aunt Susan would have disapproved of the mess, but DeeDee thought it was great. She ran around like a maniac, greedily gobbling up every bite of kibble like it was the last she’d ever eat.

  While she was distracted, I pulled on a pair of jeans and stared at the contents of my closet, trying to figure out what Armani wouldn’t deem boring. I settled on a black silk shirt with a plunging neckline. A gift from Aunt Loretta, who was always trying to pump up the world’s sex appeal, it was more revealing than I normally wear.

  “What do you think?” I asked Piss once I’d pulled on the shirt.

  The cat stretched out, examining me with her good eye.

  “It’s wrinkled,” God offered.

  “Well, it’s not like I own an iron,” I shot back.

  Piss arched her back and squinted at the lizard. “If she did, she’d probably flatten you with it.”

  “See what I endure?” God complained. “That kind of threat is exactly the reason I need to go with you. Living under the threat of death is exhausting.”

  “Fighting no,” DeeDee panted hopefully, jumping in between them.

  “Oh good,” God drawled sarcastically. “The dog is going to play peacemaker. That can’t go wrong.”

  “Back off,” I wa
rned the lizard, “unless you want to be stuck here all day.” Patting the dog, I assured her, “Good girl. Just ignore him.”

  “That’s what I do,” Piss interjected.

  I shot her a look. “Don’t encourage this.”

  She batted her good eye at me innocently. “This what?”

  Shaking my head, I scooped God out of his enclosure and let him scamper up my arm to perch on my shoulder.

  “What kind of adventure are you going on?” Piss asked curiously.

  I shrugged. “An Armani kind.”

  “I hope there’s no sand involved.” God shuddered. “No séance either.”

  Considering the last adventure I’d had with Armani had entailed taking part in a séance on a freezing cold beach, I had to agree with him. “Hopefully not.”

  “Go can I?” DeeDee panted hopefully.

  “Not this time, sweetie.”

  She sighed heavily, spun in a circle three times, and curled into a ball on the floor. “Cartoons?”

  “What?” I asked, confused.

  “Cartoons,” she repeated.

  “Angel used to leave the TV on for her. She likes cartoons,” Piss explained. “Something about the silly voices.”

  “Cartoons will rot your excuse for a brain,” God lectured.

  “And what?” I mocked. “Wheel of Fortune is educational?”

  The lizard flicked his tail, slapping my cheek with it. “Don’t you dare insult the wisdom of the Wheel.”

  The cat snickered.

  “Cartoons?” the dog begged.

  “Sure, DeeDee,” I said, turning on the television and searching for an appropriate channel. “Here you go.” I looked to the cat. “Anything I can do for you?”