Furious Jones and the Assassin’s Secret Read Free Page B

uncanny, I realized. My mom and dad had been killed in almost the exact same way. Three shots to the body. Both of them killed at hotels.
    I wasn’t there when my mom was killed. She had left mewith my grandpa while she went to some small Illinois tourist town called Galena. I guess that was the first sign that something was wrong. She had never left me behind. My mom traveled for business, and I always went with her. We had been all over the world together. But she’d been acting very strange before the trip to Galena. She had even reached out to my dad, something she had never done in the six years they had been divorced. If there was anyone on the planet tougher than my dad, it was my mom. And I was positive something was wrong as she pulled out of my grandpa’s driveway. She seemed nervous. Like we were saying good-bye for the last time. And it turned out we were.
    Most of what I knew about my mom’s murder came from what I read in the Galena Gazette . Which wasn’t much. The Gazette ran a picture of my mom’s bloody body on the sidewalk in front of the DeSoto House Hotel in downtown Galena. The sheriff was quoted as saying that a car pulled up and someone opened fire. That was it. The whole thing was over in a matter of seconds, and he said that my mom had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I never really believed that.
    The article went on to say that, until very recently, Galena hadn’t had a murder since the Chicago gangster Al Capone had used the area as a hideout seventy years ago. So it’s not like drive-by shootings happened all the time there. Galena was a little town of six hundred people andno recorded violence. The shooting was not random. She was killed on purpose. But why?
    My mom was an accountant. We had moved around so much, neither of us had friends, much less enemies. And judging by how nervous my dad and grandpa had been since her death, they didn’t seem to believe it was random either. And now my dad was dead too.
    Someone was hunting my family.
    I got off at Grand Central to transfer to the New Haven line. I looked at my phone. It was 8:09 p.m. and it was an hour ride to New Canaan. The next train left at 8:30. I sat down on a bench and pushed my hair back. It immediately fell over my eyes. My long hair always bothered my dad.
    I closed my eyes and images of the ballroom rushed in again. I could see my dad standing behind the podium. I could see the look of fear and sadness as we locked eyes. What was he worried about? Why had my grandpa and my dad been so worried about me? Did they know someone was after us? Was I next? Did it end with the guy with the slicked-back hair?
    The train to New Canaan pulled into the station. I got on and stared out the window for the better part of an hour, thinking about my mom and dad. I suddenly realized that, technically, I was an orphan. My grandpa was the only family I had left in this world. I couldn’t stop crying as the train cut through the Connecticut countryside. Should I call my grandpa? Whatwould I say? Hey, it’s me, just checking in. I wanted to make sure you hadn’t realized I’m an ungrateful liar.
    My grandpa took me in after my mom died. I guess it sort of made sense to me. I hadn’t lived with my dad in years. I actually had no memory of my parents together and had only seen my dad once or twice a year since the divorce. He was busy traveling and writing his books, but I had always hoped that we would spend some time together eventually. But at my mom’s funeral, my dad came up to me and said he was working on his new book and he had a lot of research to do. He said his research would take him to a dangerous place. That it wasn’t safe and he would need to go there alone.
    But I had spent six years traveling with my mom and we had seen all kinds of dangerous places. My mom took a job as an accountant with a government contractor after she left my dad. Her job required us