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    Mama Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Hitmen
    Mama Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Hitmen
    Mama Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Hitmen
    Ebook141 pages2 hours

    Mama Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Hitmen

    By Leslie Langtry

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    About this ebook

    The Bombay Family of Assassins have hung up their gun belts, vials of undetectable poisons and throwing knives for good. Or have they? The kids of the newest generation have itchy trigger fingers and an opportunity pops up that’s too good to refuse.

    It won’t be easy. Should they bring back the family business and defy their parents? Will this younger generation work together without killing each other? Can you pass off a garrote as a cheese slicer at the family garage sale?

    Romi Bombay and her cousins are about to find out if they’ve got what it takes to make their own mark on the Bombay Legacy in MAMA DON’T LET YOUR BABIES GROW UP TO BE HITMEN.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLeslie Langtry
    Release dateAug 17, 2017
    ISBN9781370203871
    Author

    Leslie Langtry

    Leslie Langtry is the USA Today bestselling author of the Greatest Hits Mysteries, The Adulterer's Unofficial Guide to Family Vacations, and several books she hasn't finished yet, because she's very lazy. Leslie loves puppies and cake (but she will not share her cake with puppies) and lives with her family and assorted animals in the Midwest.

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      Book preview

      Mama Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Hitmen - Leslie Langtry

      MAMA DON’T LET

      YOUR BABIES GROW UP TO BE HITMEN

      By Leslie Langtry

      Copyright © 2017 by Leslie Langtry

      All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

      CHAPTER ONE

      Coming home after graduating from college without a job is hard enough. But when you’re trapped in a gas station bathroom with a Vic who won’t die and no way to get him out, that’s a bit more of a challenge.

      To be honest, taking out this target wasn’t really my problem. Humans are soft and squishy which makes them easily vulnerable to death via sharp pointy things and projectiles. My attempt to exploit that fact, however, was reminiscent of Rasputin. That guy was poisoned, stabbed and beaten before being tied up and tossed in an icy river. How did he die? He drowned. And at the hand of a Bombay, no less. But that’s another story for another day.

      Stop moving! I hissed as I kicked the guy in the ribs.

      He didn’t even seem to feel it. He could at least have tried to flinch to spare my feelings. But no, this guy was selfishly clinging to life. Like moments earlier when I punched him in the throat, tried to garrote him, and did the ear clap thingy with both hands. At least I was able to tie him up and gag him.

      This whole thing had gone south an hour ago. I’d poisoned his food at his favorite restaurant and ran over him with my car, but he escaped and still found the energy and desire to buy foot fungal powder (something I thought was a tad optimistic) at the nearest convenience store. That’s when I trapped him in the bathroom. There was only one thing I could do…call for backup.

      What’s up, Cuz? Louis sounded sleepy. To be fair, he’d just gotten home from graduating summa cum laude from MIT. He’d been sleeping for two days straight, according to Uncle Dak.

      I’m in a situation where I need your help, was all I could manage.

      What? Like help with your checking account again? Because if that’s the case, you’re on your own this time.

      Of course, he brought up my banking challenges. For some reason, I never could manage accounts. And yes, I know that writing every transaction down in something called a ‘checkbook’ would help, but I didn’t have a checkbook and wasn’t at all sure how to get one. When I’d set up my bank account, all they gave me was a debit card. I couldn’t help it that the technology hadn’t really caught up with good old paper and pen.

      I shoved those distracting thoughts on how I could revolutionize the banking industry and got back to the task at hand.

      No. I paused trying to think of how to say this. With a job. A Bombay job.

      Louis hung up before I could give him the details. He probably thought I was kidding and went back to sleep.

      Mmmmmrghffff! The hog-tied body at my feet said.

      Sigh. Fine. With one silenced bullet to the head, it was over. Don’t feel bad for him. This was a bad dude. I’d just hoped to make this kill a little cleaner, that’s all. It was my first and that’s a major milestone in my family. My unreasonable thinking that this would be the stuff of legends ended with the pathetic fffft from my silenced 9mm.

      My situation with the squirming bastard now improved dramatically but created a new problem - I was in the large, single men’s room of a Quik Mart gas station/convenience store with a dead body and no exit strategy. The minutes ticked by like hours as I ran through a dozen different scenarios, but all of them ended with me getting busted while struggling under the weight of this corpse.

      There was a knock at the door. Fantastic.

      I’m going to need a while, I disguised my voice, dropping the pitch to hopefully sound like a man.

      The knob was jiggling. I knew that sound. That was the sound of someone picking the lock. Instinctively I trained my gun on the door and tried to think. I didn’t want to shoot an innocent person. But how was I going to explain the dead, bound and gagged body at my feet?

      The door opened slowly and I’d decided to wave whoever it was in here and figure out what to do about it after. Why not? I’d already made a mess of my first job.

      Louis! I shouted as my cousin slipped inside and closed the door behind him.

      Louis Bombay was Uncle Dak’s son and the same age as me. Blond with blue eyes and an adorable space between his two front teeth, he was smarter than I was. Smarter than most people, to tell the truth. He’d made a particle accelerator the first week of his freshman year…and I didn’t even know what that was.

      My relief faded as I realized something, Wait…how did you find me?

      I created an app to pinpoint a person’s cell phone within two feet of their location.

      I scowled. You can do that? And you did it to my phone?

      He gave me a gap-toothed smile. You were kind of my beta tester.

      Louis’s eyes grew wide as he saw the body. "You’re working? Like working working? How did you get an assignment? I want an assignment!"

      Maybe I should explain. My name is Romi Bombay and I come from a family whose business since 2000 BCE was assassination. I say was, because our parents quit - putting an end to two millennia of tradition. Instead of using the skills we’d been trained for since age five, we had to go to college and find regular jobs. Our parents couldn’t understand why we weren’t happy about that.

      I had majored in botany in protest and now had a degree I had no idea how to use. Louis got his degree in physics, which was good because he liked to invent stuff. Our other cousin, Alta, wanted to write novels, and her brother Woody majored in business. And we all lived at home, because we didn’t know the first thing about getting ‘normal’ jobs.

      My mother, Gin, was a Bombay and an assassin, who’d racked up dozens of kills in her thirty-odd years of wet-work. Like her Bombay cousins, she’d worked for the family business. That was – before they shut it down and went legit. We all went legit…whether we liked it or not.

      Until now.

      It’s a long story. First, I need help getting Vic here out of the way. We referred to our targets as Vic, as in short for Victim. Not exactly subtle, but that was family tradition. Other family traditions included our motto in Greek which translated to KILL WITH NO MERCY, LOVE WITH SUSPICION, and the fact that we all were named after cities, states and countries. Mine was really Roma for Rome. Louis was short for St. Louis, and with their mother big on social injustice, my mother’s cousin Liv named her kids Altamont and Woodstock.

      Does Aunt Gin know about your assignment? Louis said as he pulled a large, unusually thick black trash bag from his jacket pocket.

      My mother thought I was out applying for jobs, not doing one. Let’s get out of here and I’ll explain.

      I was starting to reach for the bag in Louis’ hands when there was another knock on the door.

      Come back later! I’m washing my hair! Louis sang in a high-pitched, girly voice.

      That was an odd choice of words. Then I knew why as our cousins Alta and Woody walked in. Liv (short for Liverpool) Bombay, was beyond gorgeous with a tendency towards love and peace and all things recyclable and organic. Like her mother, Alta had thick, glossy black hair and huge, hypnotic eyes. Woody favored his dad (who was not a Bombay) with curly brown hair. Unlike his father (or any of us) he had a constant, nervous manner that could be very annoying.

      Ah. You were using code, Now, I understood the weird lingo.

      You got an assignment? Woody squeaked.

      How did that happen, and why didn’t you tell me? Alta asked as she bent down to examine the body. Head shot. Very messy. And very unlike you.

      I ran out of time. And ideas.

      Alta and I had trained together and were, like our mothers, the best of friends. We even went to the same college and joined the same sorority. She knew me too well. Because of my botany degree, I was interested in plant-based poison. And I’d tried that first. But this wasn’t the time to explain.

      Woody rummaged through the cleaning supplies in a cupboard and with bleach and paper towels began cleaning up the blood. He even got the spray pattern on the walls. I wasn’t sure it was clean enough to stand up to a Luminol challenge, but then, anyone taking a black light to a gas station bathroom was likely to see horrors they wished they hadn’t.

      I spotted a piece of cardboard and after pulling a pen out of my purse, wrote OUT OF ORDER. Very carefully, I slid out of the room and using some yarn from the socks I was knitting, hung it on the doorknob. I slipped back into the bathroom with the others.

      Alta stood up, pointing at the body that was now in the black bag. "We’re going to say the toilet overflowed, we cleaned it up, and we’re taking out the garbage. There’s

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