Retirement

As a retirement officer, Jillian had a job to do. Distasteful or not, it had to be done. She smirked, laughing at herself internally. Distasteful? I’m a professional, she thought, I don’t get to make value judgements.

She saw her mark, a painfully stereotypical “little old lady.” Slightly stooped, walking with the aid of a purple cane, heavily lined, round face pink with exertion, blue eyes swimming behind oversized pink pearl glasses, white curls in a style fifty years out of date, and a large shopping bag she struggled with.

Intending to verify and get closer, Jillian approached her as she was about to leave the store. “Excuse me, ma’am. Can I help you to your car with that?”

Valery looked up at Jillian. Slender, tall, straight brown hair against tanned skin, pale showing under the collar where it hadn’t had as much sun, and green, slightly hooded, almond-shaped eyes. “Well, aren’t you just the sweetest?” She set the bag down. “If you could carry that, I’d be grateful.”

Jillian picked up the bag. “I’ll follow you. My name’s Jillian, by the way.”

“Thank you, Jillian. I’m Valery.” She stopped for a moment to study Jillian’s face. “You’ve got the cutest little smile, like you know a secret.” She then continued her tottering walk to the parking lot.

Jillian chuckled. “That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard about my looks in a long time. Usually, it’s some guy saying something creepy or outright disgusting.”

“You don’t take that,” Valery said, an unexpected edge in her voice. “You never let a man talk to you like that. If we’d had ‘me too’ back in my day, damn near every man I knew would’ve been in trouble.”

“Trust me, I don’t let them get away with it anymore,” Jillian said laughing. “You’re a pistol, aren’t you? I bet you didn’t let ’em off easy, either.”

“Never have let a man walk over me, and don’t intend to start now.” Valery stopped at a well-maintained Honda from the late eighties and opened the trunk. “Thank you, sweetie. I could’ve made it,” she said, “it just would’ve taken me a bit longer.”

“Well, if I made your day a little easier, it was worth it,” Jillian said. “It was a pleasure to meet you.”

Jillian waved as Valery backed carefully out of her spot and pulled into the parking lot traffic. She leaned against the wall and watched how she drove out, stopping short of the lines, leaving a large gap between herself and the car in front, and smooth, slow acceleration.

Jillian re-entered the grocery store and left through a different exit, checking her phone on the way. Her map showed a marker with its speed, moving away from her, getting on the nearby freeway. She watched for a while as it moved down the freeway at a steady fifty-two miles per hour, getting off at the next exit. The marker finally came to rest and Jillian looked up the address: “Clear View Retirement Community.”

She spent the afternoon on exercise and meditation in her motel room, then slept for a few hours before she prepared to go out. Jillian cleaned her weapon, a .22 semi-auto pistol with a suppressor, and loaded it with subsonic rounds. The closest you could get to the movie-style whispers of shots.

After a final check to make sure Valery’s car hadn’t moved, she left the room with her only bag and dropped it in the trunk of the car. It took less than twenty minutes to reach the retirement community, and another five to drive around the perimeter before parking a few blocks from where the map still showed the car.

She walked toward the location marked on the map. As she approached, she realized the actual location of the marker was the middle of a parking lot surrounded by three tall privacy fences. “Why didn’t you park at your condo, old lady?” she quietly asked of no one.

Unable to see into the lot from her current location, Jillian walked to the fence, then crept up to the corner, pistol in hand, checking her back and above every step of the way. The lot was empty, save for a piece of paper flapping about, held in place by a large stone.

Jillian assured herself the lot was empty, and the size of the lot precluded an ambush as she had a clear view with time to react. She walked to the paper and saw the transmitter taped to the rocked. The note beneath it read, “Sorry. Not today.”

Jillian growled. This was supposed to be an easy one. At her age, all Valery was doing was prolonging the inevitable. She picked up the tracker and stuffed it in the cargo pocket of her black trousers. “Where are you, you old bitch?!”

She walked out of the fenced lot and a sudden sharp pain in her wrist loosed her hold on her pistol. “I’m right here! And just because you’re a woman doesn’t give you the right to call me a bitch.”

Training took over, and Jillian kicked the dropped pistol behind herself and began to get some space between the two of them. “You know it’s not personal. You’re past due for retirement.”

“Retirement? In my day we called things by their proper name. No wonder you’re so soft.” With unexpected speed and fluidity Valery jumped toward the retreating woman, spinning as she brought her cane in a swift arc toward the younger woman’s head.

Jillian avoided the strike only by falling back, landing her near the pistol. She rolled over the pistol, snatching it on the way, and got to her feet. “Retirement officers aren’t expected to live long enough for their work to be declassified,” she said.

“Retirement officers? I have a retirement officer; they make sure I get my government retirement checks from the Department of Energy secretary position I never had.” Valery kept moving, using her cane as a staff, forcing Jillian back, looking for an opening to get the pistol out of her grasp again. “You and I, we’re assassins, and if you can’t get over it without prettying it up, you’ll never survive. Of course, if you survive now, I can congratulate you on your first contact. I didn’t place it until I swept the car and found the tracker.”

Jillian kept backing away, trying to get enough distance to raise her pistol and fire but the older woman kept closing on her. Deciding that a gamble was better than a continued stand-off, she took two quick steps back as she raised the pistol and fired.

The gamble didn’t pay off. On the second step back, her heel caught the curb, tumbling her to her back for the second time, and sending the shot wide. She didn’t have time to react as Valery connected with the cane, crushing her windpipe, and standing on her hand that held the now useless pistol.

“Before you die, you’re going to learn something they should’ve taught you in training,” Valery said. “Watch out for the old folks in a profession where most die young.”

Valery watched as the younger woman’s lips turned blue, her gurgling ground to a halt, and the light left her eyes. She stepped off the trapped hand and sighed. “I’ve put down better than you,” she said. She found the phone in the woman’s pocket and entered the emergency code on the lock screen, hoping someone would be by soon to clean up the mess.

She’d known it would come eventually, and now it had. With no reason to take it easy any longer, Valery floored the accelerator as she hit the freeway, the turbo whining. She wouldn’t bring anything other than the bag of clothes and case of money in the trunk with her. The monthly retirement checks were done, but she’d never needed them. She wondered, as she flew down the interstate at 100 miles per hour, where she should hide out first.