Hit Woman

By Jim Parks

Priscilla Johnson felt a shiver run down her spine, through the crack of her butt and up into her pubic mound just the moment she heard the key in the door. She had been reclining nude on the cool marble of the massive mantle in the Spanish Colonial mansion now for a half hour, becoming more and more still and focused by the moment on the matter at hand. The look on his face was priceless when he suddenly beheld her nubile nudity, the shaved delta of her sex, her graceful, pointed young woman's toes.

First, he dropped the suit bag, then the shoulder-strapped carry-on, saying "What the..." She gracefully arose to sit balanced on the edge of the ledge, gesturing to him with both hands upraised to come hither.

She was as naked as a woman could be with not a piece of jewelry or a stitch of clothing on her body, her female attributes swelling and swooping to perfection and giving every indication of absolute fecundity. "Mister, I want to do you a job," she said simply. "Come and get me down off this mantle."

Artemis "Artie" Bundeschlager, III, third-generation scion of one of the world's most productive uranium mining families, forgot all about the bitchy wife in Philadelphia, the ridiculous daughter at Stanford and the overdue payments on his Gulf Stream. He crossed that living room with every intention of sweeping the girl into his arms and taking her then and there on one of the huge leather-covered sofas in the darkened great room of the house on the mesa while the gaudy sunset played out over the high desert.

For the first time in years, Artie was totally unfocused on the details. As he stepped off with perfect military school cadence and posture, a petite woman dressed in a black leather jacket and skin tight jeans with her blonde hair stuffed under a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap stepped out of the shadow of a potted plant where she had been waiting. She raised the Berretta .22 automatic in a hand gloved by a plastic bag to catch the spent hull and double-tapped two hollow point rounds into Artie's left temporal lobe.

He collapsed as if he was a suddenly empty suit of clothes that once held a man striding down the sidewalk.

Priscilla gasped in spite of herself, as if she hadn't known all along what would be coming. The hit woman, a seasoned body builder an intelligence operative with survivalist training, helped her down off the mantle. Priscilla could feel her muscles rippling under her leather jacket as she hugged her neck and shoulders.

"Get your clothes on. Let's hope he went out a happy man," the woman said. She chuckled in an unfeeling tone, not at all nervously. She had done this dozens of times.

It never failed. A woman lured a man into a position where he could be quickly shot, stabbed, garrotted or bludgeoned. Priscilla gasped again when she looked down at Artie's head centered in a widening pool of blood on the tile floor. She still had that vacant look on her face as they stepped outside the mansion and got into a Jeep that lurched to a stop under the portico for the quick ride back to the airport.

The disposal team was just wheeling in to clean the premises and get rid of Bundeschlager's body. Their shiny black van screeched to a stop and the four men in coveralls jumped out quickly. No one paid any attention to one another. It was as if they did not exist.