The Last Hit

The Last Hit

“Who wants to have me killed?” This was not a rhetorical question Kyle was asking himself. It was a very real question for Kyle knew who had been hired to kill him, he just didn’t know who had issued the contract on him. The funny part, if an assassination could have anything funny about it, was that the assassination had been set up through a double blind process using a broker where the assassin and the person hiring the assassin could never know each others identity. In fact, the broker conducted business incognito and knew none of the parties he dealt with.

It was much safer that way, especially for the person putting out the contract. The assassin, of course ran the risk of getting caught or even getting killed if a hit went sideways. But that was not likely in this instance, because Kyle had been hired to kill himself.

He got the contract the usual way. No phones, no emails, no web sites, nothing electronic that could be heard or seen by the NSA or anyone else with electronic eyes and ears. Kyle preferred simple tradecraft. A visible chalk mark, a marigold flower sitting in a window, or a blind partially lowered would alert him to have a prepaid pizza delivered to an address of his choosing.

This time it was a potted marigold flower in the window of a beauty shop in Glenmont that alerted him to order a “special” pizza with artichokes on it from a pizza parlor in Olney to be left on the porch of an unoccupied house in Sandy Spring. Kyle ordered the pizza using a burner phone and followed the pizza delivery from the pizza parlor to the address he had given them to make sure the delivery person wasn't followed by anyone else.

There were no issues with the pizza delivery and Kyle had safely retrieved the pizza from the stoop of the empty house. Back at his own townhouse rental, he took out of the Large pizza box a gallon sized ziplock bag that had in it a slim package wrapped in plain brown paper with no markings on it. Only when he opened the package did he discover that he was the designated target. The pizza smelled good, but Kyle had already eaten at Silo Falls Restaurant in Brookville before going to stake out the pizza place.

It amused him that someone was willing to pay $60,000 to put him away. The broker, of course, took 25% off the top as the fee, so the assassin would get $45,000 for the job. But Kyle only dealt with the broker, who earned the money by vetting the buyer, collecting payments, and placing the contract. Kyle had only to make the kill and collect from the broker. Half Kyle'sfee, in this case $22,500, was paid up front and was in the package with information about where to find Kyle to assassinate him.

Kyle put a lot of thought into figuring out who might want him dead. No angry wives or girlfriends were in the background. He owed no money to anyone so there were no debtors. He had no estate in his Kyle identity, no one knew of his real occupation as an assassin, so there was no blowback there. He had no clue.

What he didn’t know was that Mrs. Randall, an elderly woman he had protected from a mugger outside the Silver Spring Metro Station some two years back, had made Kyle the primary beneficiary of a million dollar life insurance policy, but had named a ne’er-do-well nephew as contingent beneficiary. She had been in eldercare, but had recently been moved into hospice care with a congestive heart condition accompanied by pneumonia. She was not expected to live more than a couple of weeks.

Her loving nephew, Calvin, had moved into her apartment in Silver Spring. While searching the apartment for money, jewelry, credit cards and checkbooks, Calvin found her life insurance policy and discovered that some guy he didn’t know stood between him and a million dollars. Hell, he deserved that money because he was kin. So, going through an unsavory friend, he was able to hire someone to kill Kyle and get him out of the way. $60,000, plus a promised $5,000 to his friend after he collected the insurance, was a lot of money to Calvin, but when measured against a $1,000,000 insurance payout, it was well worth it.

Back in his townhouse, Kyle looked over his identity options. He had been Kyle for three years now, and decided he would kill off Kyle and assume the identity of Garrett Deville of New Orleans. He had maintained that identity for almost a decade now, and even owned property in that name across the river in Algiers.

Police got a frenzied call from an anonymous caller reporting a jumper on the Chesapeake Bridge. Investigating authorities found a valise with a wallet, identification, and a suicide note for a Mr. Kyle Robbins of Colesville, Maryland. No body had yet been recovered.

Kyle (now Garrett) collected the rest of the fee for Kyle’s last hit. After Kyle was finally declared dead, a process held up for a while because there was no body, Calvin collected $1,000,000 in life insurance.

Correspondence from the insurance company trying to locate Kyle, somehow landed in the hands of Garrett Deville some months later. Finally understanding what had happened, Garrett made an overnight trip from New Orleans to BWI.

Calvin’s body was never found.