It was snowing outside and sitting in the café, Jasper sipped at her mocha latte with a flavor shot of vanilla. The Jazz band playing was the Deardorf Peterson Group. She really liked the sax. Behind blue eyes, she stared with envy at jazz band. She had always wanted to play in one, but she instead got hung up in the Syndicate.
With her freehand, she felt at her hip of the 9 millimeter handgun, somehow being reassured at the feeling of it.
She had always wanted to be in a jazz band, but she couldn’t play an instrument, unless you considered a gun an instrument. When most people think of instrument, they think of a guitar or a violin. Not Jasper. Not anymore.

It was snowing then too, only she wasn’t in a café. Inside her car, waiting for John Mays to leave his house, she listened to blues. John Mayer to be exact. She couldn’t remember the song, but it had something to do with friends and waiting on the world to do… something.
Sitting in her car, the only thing illuminating the streets was street lamps, which made the ambiance of her world perfect. Sitting in her car, the windshield wipers swishing every minute or so, she felt a chill. Her heater wasn’t working right, but she hadn’t noticed until now, when her thick jacket decided it didn’t want to keep the cold out anymore.
At night, the snow pouring down drowning out noises making perfect silent, with lights shining down onto the streets, Jasper felt depressed.
It never bothered her that much, the killing. Everyone she murdered was unmarried without kids, and generally bad people. Poor John Mays, he was married with two kids. A boy and a girl. The ‘perfect family. ‘Cute kids’ was what she thought when she first saw then three days prior at a preliminary scout.
She felt depressed because all this guy wanted to do was prevent his family from living on the streets. She felt depressed because all Poor old John Mays wanted to do was be happy with his family.
She got tired of listening to songs about women leaving and love lost, so she turned it to jazz.
She felt bad for poor old John Mays because this 46 year old man, with two kids maybe 17years old and a wife maybe 42, was going to be killed five days before Christmas. What a present.
The snow began to build up a little two much, she turned the wiper speed up just a little. The moon would have been full, if it weren’t for the snow and lights blocking it out.
Poor old John Mays who only wanted to keep his family in a house, was smiling and roasting marshmallows and making s’mores, was going to die because he cared about his family.
This was the only murder she was put up to do that made her shed a tear while she waited. In the cold of the car with the broken heater, she thought it would freeze as it hit her jacket. But it didn’t because the heater had decided to kick on inside her crummy beater car.
She had bought it from some crappy car lot. 147 dollars and 97 cents without tax. The cost to fix up some of the engine problems and patch the oil leaks was more expensive than the car by a grand and a half, but it worked for what she did. She had removed the license plate so she could sit and no one have any connection to her after she killed poor old John Mays out in the snow. Afterward, she’d sell the car to some chop-shop for some quick non-traceable cash.
Poor old John Mays had taken a loan from the Syndicate to pay the heating bill for two months and rent for three. The reason why John Mays had to die because he never returned the favor. That was basically sending an F.U. to the boss, or slapping his sister in the face.
John Mays took the loan, and never repaid the debt he owed.
On the corner a block away was a homeless man who she gave 50 bucks to. The poor guy only had a ratted tee-shirt, torn jeans, a crummy jacket and a blanket that couldn’t warm a thing it was so thin.
She had given him 50 dollars and a spare jacket she had in her back seat. There was her charity for the day. Maybe in a few days she’d give some bills or unload a few jars of spare change to those bell ringing Santa dressed people on a street corner.
It was close to one in the morning, and everyone was still awake in the house. She knew that because lights were on and she saw people moving around. She was betting on him leaving the house to go and grab some of the firewood that was stacked outside the porch.
Jasper took out her pistol and screwed on the silencer. She was maybe fifty feet from the wood pile, and at that range, she couldn’t miss.
She was right on her bet. Aiming at the door with her window rolled down, it was 1:27 AM when he walked out and grabbed an armful of the logs, picking them up one by one.
With such a close distance, she was aiming her pistol for maybe a few seconds before the man turned, opened the door, and fell to the ground with an explosion of blood from the hollow point round, slamming just below his neck. It was an instant death, but extremely painful.
She waited a moment to make sure he wasn‘t going get back up, knowing that one of the family members was going to go outside in a few minutes to see what was taking him so long. When she was sure he was dead, she drove off, rolling up the window and replacing the gun in it’s holster inside her coat.
She drove off, turning the wipers up higher to combat the snowfall and was careful not to drive fast on the icy road.
She drove off, all the way back to her house. Back to her house, to call the Boss and tell him that the job was done. Back to the house to make the call and cry herself to sleep because she killed a man who only wanted to keep his family off the streets and alive and warm.
Her house, it was an apartment. Cliché, she had thought. An assassin living alone in an apartment. But she didn’t have a boyfriend or a husband or kids, so she didn’t care. Rent was a cheap 300 dollars a month, and she wasn’t complaining.

The flashback made a tear fall from her eyes, down her chin to fall into her vanilla mocha latte. She was 29 then, and she was 39 now. It felt like a full circle.
Listening to the Deardorf Peterson jazz band, crying into her coffee in winter, she pulled out her gun. Pulled out the gun, finished the coffee and placed the barrel of the gun to her head, and pulled the trigger. It happened so fast, no one even recognized that a gun had just fired and a woman fell from her seat.
Jasper’s last thoughts were, “Poor old John Mays with his cute kids…” and she pulled the trigger, dying instantly. All the ways to end her depression, she wanted to do it listening to jazz music with her back to the window as snow silently fell, blanketing the city in cold silence, the same way it did Poor old John Mays…