Leslie Langtry - Stand By Your Hitman (Romantic Mysteries)

REX KRAMER :Do you know what its like to fall inthe mud and get kickedin the headwith aniron boot? Of course you dont, no one does. It neverhappens. Its a dumb questionskip it.

Airplane!

I stared at the letter in my hand. I was making the same face Id made a few moments earlier when checking my phone messages. Its not a pretty face. You wouldnt like it.

Dear Ms. Bombay,

Your application has been accepted. We are thrilled to have you as a contestant in the new television program, Survival! We received thousands of applications for the show, but quite frankly, your video blew everyone away here at CAB network. I dont think Ive ever seen anyone defuse an explosive device so quickly. You are exactly what we are looking for. In a few days, you should receive a complete package in the mail with all of the information you will need. I look forward to meeting you next month.

Sincerely,

Bob Toole

Executive Producer, CAB

Well, that wasnt right. Id never applied to be on Survivor. True, it was one of my favorite shows. But I think Id remember submitting an application. Its not like I go around videotaping myself defusing bombs every day. Okay, there was that once, but I just wanted to see what it looked like in the third person. It was my little egoist guilty pleasure. No one knew I had it. Or at least, I thought no one knew.

So, maybe thats what Bob is talking about. Hmmmm.If I didnt send it in, who did?

Mom! The unanimous shout came in unison from my two teenaged sons, Montgomery and Jackson Bombay. My name is Mississippi Bombay, but I prefer Missi.

In here, I responded suspiciously. Did they do this?

Monty and Jack popped their heads through the doorway simultaneously. Fraternal twins, youd never look at them and even think they were related. Monty was tall and gangly, with dark hair and green eyes. Jack was short and stocky with a shock of unruly red hair and freckles. In spite of their physical differences, the boys shared one obnoxious personality.

Do I need to ask? I waved the letter at them.

Monty snatched it out of my hands and began to read. Cool! Mom, this rocks!

Jack grabbed it from his brother and scanned the page. Ohmygod! He shouted it as one word. How cool are you? Why didnt you tell us?

From the looks on their faces, I surmised they didnt do it.

So you had nothing to do with this? I had to ask just to make sure. I havent survived this long as a single mother of twin boys without confirming everything. Usually twice.

They shook their heads. We wouldve if we thought you were interested Monty started.

But we never dreamed youd want to go on the show! Jack finished.

I swiped the letter from Jack and put in on the table. Well, its obviously just a joke, so well forget about it. I now had other ideas. After all, I came from a family of assassins. A prankster or two in the gene pool was to be expected.

You heard me right. Assassins. The Bombay family has had a monopoly on the biz since ancient Greece. Every blooded member of the family begins training at the age of five and works untilwell, forever. My grandma was just forced into an early retirement or shed still be taking on contracts. Not that she needed to. She was on the Council. Thats the geriatric crew who runs the operations, dishes out assignments, and kills off renegade family members. Thats right. This family business isnt exactly optional. And if you screw up or screw over the family, the Council will take you out.

I broke free of my mental meanderings to find the boys gone. Oh well. Where could they go? We live on a small, private island off the coast of South America.

Speaking of mental fragmentationIve been experiencing that a lot lately. Maybe it has something to do with being forty-five. Or it could be that I havent had sex in a long, long time. Being widowed will do that to you. Well, that and the isolation of being on an island no one but my immediate family lives on. Or it could be the bizarre nature of my work. Besides killing people for a living, Im a bit of an inventor. Its my only creative outlet. And it was one more service I could offer the Bombays.

What do I invent? Oh, this and that, really. Hairdryers that can blow your head off, lilies that can suffocate you, explosive jockstrapsthe usual bric-a-brac, I guess. My mind began to meander again and I started thinking about Pop-Tarts. I LOVE Pop-Tarts. But only the chocolate-fudge ones. I could eat those for every meal.

The Pop-Tarts made me think of Kleenex, which reminded me that I still had a few finishing touches to make on my latest explosive device. I headed for the lab.

Mantisnuts was the secret word I spoke into my security system. The door popped open and I went in thinking it was time to change my password. Maybe something like bananaface. Did praying mantises have testicles? I wasnt sure. At least in the figurative sense they did. It takes balls to make love to a woman you know will bite your head off afterward.

On a table in the middle of the room was one of those Wacky WallWalkers. Remember those? Real big in the eighties. I had several back then. Anyway, for those of you who are big hair and shoulder pad challenged, they were these sticky little octopuses (octopi?what is the plural anyway?) you threw at a wall or sliding glass door (sliding glass doors were also very big in the eighties) and it kind of flopped, ass over, um, tentacles all the way down the wall. Youd think something like that would be a failure, wouldnt you? But the inventors of that stupid little toy (did I mention that I owned several?) made millions. You never know what will hit it big.

It was with that in mind that I decided to work with the gummy little bastards as some sort of explosive device. Remember Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in Mission:Impossible? The first onenot the crappy sequels. Anyway, he had that stick of gum he just had to fold in half and stick on the aquarium at that restaurant in Prague, and it blew up? Of course, it was ridiculous. Have you ever tried to fold a stick of dry gum in half? It snaps in two, doesnt stick to itselfdoesnt stick to anything really, so it wouldnt have worked in real life. But thats okay, cuz I liked the movie.

The trick with the Wacky WallWalkers was to get just the right compound that would ignite as it struck a solid surface and wouldnt affect its inherent gumminess. I didnt want to overdo it, but I wanted something that would do the job. I wasnt sure what the job was yet, but it didnt matter. I loved working in my lab. I could work with whatever I wanted and the family didnt give a damn. Ha.

An hour later found me behind my blast shield as I blew up my fifth piece of glass-coated drywall. I was having a pretty good time too. That is, until the alarm went off. Id set it to high because I wanted to know if anyone came into my lab unannounced.

Hello, Mississippi. York Bombay stood in the doorway. I couldnt stand that man. My moms cousin York was a creepy old dude. Of course, his father, Lou, was much worse. Thank God hes still locked up with Grandma and the other former Council at that maximum-security nursing home in Greenland. I folded my arms across my chest and made up my mind to definitely change my password. How the hell did he get it, anyway?