That was the only thing that made sense. The assassin could have shot me any time I’d been close to the storefront windows. But he hadn’t. Instead, he’d sat in this apartment for almost an hour, waiting for her. She’d been sitting in a booth in the back, out of sight of the storefront windows, so he’d had to wait for her to finish her lunch. When she’d paid and started for the front door, that’s when he’d taken his shot.

My mind processed the information and moved on to the next question. Why shoot her inside the restaurant?

Why not wait for her to step outside onto the street? Why not just do her in some back alley?

The answer came to me. The robbery. The assassin must have seen the story in the newspaper about the botched robbery at the Pork Pit.

Maybe the assassin had realized that if he took out the girl in the restaurant, there was a good chance her death would be connected to Jake McAllister and the robbery last night. No doubt the cops would have had the same first thought as me—that Jake or whomever he might have hired had been aiming at me, not the girl. That I’d been the target. That Jake had wanted to silence me and make all the charges against himself just disappear. Given all that, the police wouldn’t be inclined to look too hard in other directions, to consider other theories. Like the fact the girl had been the intended victim all along.

And if laying the blame on Jake McAllister didn’t work, well, there was another option. The Pork Pit wasn’t officially located in Southtown, but it was only a couple of streets over, which meant the whole area had its share of crime. Drug deals, shootings, domestic disputes. One or more of those happened every day of the week.

Given the rough neighborhood, the girl’s death today might have just been chalked up to random violence in the area, if the cops were feeling particularly lazy. Some sort of drive-by or gang shooting that she’d been unlucky enough to get in the middle of. A ten-year-old kid and his younger sister had gotten caught up in one of those last week, less than a half mile from the restaurant.

Either way, nobody would think it had been a planned hit. The best assassinations were always the ones that looked like something else. A nice, neat, easy plan all the way around.