We pulled out of his driveway all packed, at eight that morning. He made it a point to drive through the middle of town to wave at Mrs. Privet. She waved back from behind her shop window, a dreamy smile on her face.
It occurred to me that June Privet was now part of Shannon’s alibi should something go wrong. I wondered how else he’d secured his Thailand alibi. I was sure he must know someone overseas who would claim he was there, helping bring clean water to some poor village. What a saint. He probably had a whole back story. Without a lot of tedious emotional baggage and drama to deal with, Shannon had lots of mental space to concoct all sorts of alibis and backup plans for every possible contingency.
Though I reminded myself it was just a contingency. Shannon planned things too well to have need of any of them. We couldn’t fly with the weapons, airport security being what it was. He told me that when he did big jobs overseas, he was sent by private plane. There was nobody bankrolling this job but Shannon, so we wouldn’t be flying private, though a part of me thought we probably could if he really wanted to.
I was sure he had a stockpile of money hoarded away somewhere. He lived nice, but modestly and didn’t appear to own anything too extravagant. But I knew being a contract killer wasn’t like being an accountant. There was some big money sitting around somewhere. It was possible that Shannon only did enough work to keep him in a modest comfortable lifestyle, but I had begun to be able to see the itch creep over him. It seemed increasingly likely to me that he took nearly any job that came his way just so he could feel like a normal person for short stretches of time and convince the rest of the world of the same.
It took nearly a week—with stops at night to sleep—for us to reach our destination on the other end of the country. I hoped my plants would be okay. Most of them could go a while between waterings without freaking out, but I was still concerned. I couldn’t help it. I’d say it was an occupational hazard if I’d ever gotten the chance to use my schooling in an actual occupation.
Every night during our journey, Shannon stopped at a run-down motel in some out of the way place, just before the front desk closed for the night. He always went in. I stayed outside. He always paid cash, and I was sure he was using a fake ID. Just like that first night, he always got a room around the back, away from any possible passing traffic, and backed the car into the parking space so the license wasn’t visible to anyone else who drove around for a secluded room in the back.
The primary difference in these nightly stops was that he didn’t seem paranoid if I took a longish shower. He no longer assumed I was fashioning weapons out of bathroom pipes, and he didn’t tie me up for the night. Well, he did one night, but that was sex games, and it wasn’t as if he made me sleep like that.
On Professor Stevens’ Day of Reckoning, we arrived at our destination a little after midnight. The Professor lived a few blocks from the university campus in a heavily wooded neighborhood. It was a full moon, but the moon was obscured by thick cloud cover, making the street even darker than it would normally be. There were no street lights on Professor Stevens’ street, which was just fine for our purposes.
Shannon backed the car into an unlocked empty garage at a house two doors down with a for sale sign in the front. He’d done meticulous research. Even if the garage had been shut and locked, we could have still parked close enough to the abandoned house—given that there was a high row of hedges beside the house that allowed cover. But happily, the garage was open.
I thought it was dangerous doing this so close to the campus, but Shannon reasoned that if Stevens was able to commit sexual assault here and get away with it, that it was as good a place as any to kill him. And Stevens did have that horrible basement he’d taken me to. Of course Shannon was right, but I still looked over our shoulders from the front porch, paranoid someone would come up the path. But it was late on a weekday. Surely everyone was asleep already.
Shannon rang the bell, dragging Professor Stevens out of what must have been a sound sleep from the bleary-eyed grumpiness that answered the door. Shannon had instructed me to wait behind the bush until he was inside. So when the door opened, a strange man dressed in black was all the professor saw on the darkened porch.
“This better be good,” he snarled at Shannon.
“Trust me, it is.” Shannon lunged forward and knocked the professor out with a chloroform soaked rag, then with speedy smooth practice, he handed it out to me all while he kept the Professor from hitting the ground. I disposed of the bag in Stevens’ trash at the end of the drive. Both Shannon and I wore gloves, appearing as shadows everywhere except for our faces.