The Hit Read Online Free

waiting for her when she got there. Along with all the equipment she would need to complete her designated task.
    And then she would make her exit, leaving behind at least one person dead.
    She fingered her phone. On the screen was her boarding pass. The name on the e-ticket was not Jessica Reel. That would have been a little inconvenient for her in these suddenly troubled times.
    Her last task had not gone according to plan—at least not according to the plan of her former employer. However, it had been executed exactly as Reel had envisioned it, leaving a man named Douglas Jacobs dead.
    Because of this Reel would be not only persona non grata back home, but also very much a wanted person. And the people she used to work for had an abundance of agents who could be called up to hunt her down and end her life as efficiently as she had Jacobs’s.
    That scenario was definitely not in Reel’s grand scheme, and thus the new name, fresh documents, and panama hat. Her long hair was colored blonde from the natural brown. Tinted contacts transformed greenish eyes to gray. And she had been given a modified nose and a revised jawline courtesy of a bit of ingenious plastic surgery. She was, in all critical respects, a new woman.
    And perhaps an enlightened one as well.
    Her flight was called. She rose. In her flats she was five-nine—tall for a woman—but she blended in nicely with the bustling crowd. She donned her hat, purchased her Starbucks, and walked to the nearby gate. The flight left on time.
    Forty somewhat bumpy minutes later it landed with a hard jolt on the runway tarmac minutes ahead of a storm’s leading edge. The turbulence had not bothered Reel. She always played the odds. She could fly every day for twenty thousand years and never be involved in a crash.
    Her odds of survival on the ground would not be nearly as good.
    She walked off the plane, made her way to the cabstand, and waited patiently in a long line until her turn came up.
    Doug Jacobs had been the first but not the last. Reel had a list in her head of those who would, hopefully, join him in the hereafter, if there was such a place for people like Jacobs.
    But the list would have to wait. Reel had somewhere to go. She climbed into the next available cab and set off for the city.
    The cab dropped her near Central Park. The park was always abusy place, full of people and dogs and events and workers, controlled chaos if ever there was such a thing.
    Reel paid the cabbie and turned her attention to the closest entrance to the park. She walked through the opening and made her way as close as possible to where it had happened.
    The police had taped off great chunks of the area so they could perform their little forensics hunt, collect their evidence, and hopefully catch a killer.
    They would fail. Reel knew this even if New York’s Finest didn’t.
    She stood shoulder to shoulder with a crowd of people just beyond the official barricades. She watched the police methodically working, covering every inch of ground around where the body had fallen.
    Reel looked at the same ground and her mind started to fill in blanks that the police didn’t even know existed.
    The target was what it was. A monster who needed killing.
    That didn’t interest Reel at all. She had killed many monsters. Others took their place. That was how the world worked. All you could do was try to keep slightly ahead in the count.
    She was focused on other things. Things the police could not see.
    She lined up the taped outline of the body on the trail with trajectory patterns in all directions. She was sure the police had already done that, Forensics 101 after all. But soon thereafter, their deductive ability and even their imagination would reach their professional limits, and thus they would never arrive at the right answer.
    For her part, Reel knew that anything was possible. So after exhausting all other possibilities and performing her own mental algorithms to figure the shooter’s