T he sun went down over DJ’s right shoulder, but he didn’t notice. The sweat on his T-shirt channeled the cool, evening air to his skin, but it didn’t make him comfortable. He sipped his beer in a chair outside the bar, but it didn’t quench his thirst. The chair was probably meant for the bouncer. In the empty lot across the street, a gecko streaked from a sun-bleached plastic toy car to a wooden box. Birdsong rang out. Wouldn’t be long before one swooped down and snatched the gecko for dinner.

He took another sip of his beer. His duffle slumped over against his leg, and his thigh muscle twitched, ready to get on the move. So, DJ gulped down the rest of his beer. He held the last sip in his mouth, letting the slight aluminum tang settle over his taste buds, then spat it out.

He picked up the duffle bag, slung it over his shoulder and turned his eyes to the empty lot across the road.

“You’re on borrowed time, friend,” he said to the gecko, though he couldn’t see it. “Make the most of it, while it lasts.”

DJ started down Calle B, walking over the cracked, grass-spackled sidewalk. To all outward appearances he looked like a bum hunting for a good tree to sleep under. The houses he passed were built like shoeboxes and painted like birds of paradise.

He hardly saw a soul. Sure, a pack of kids played soccer in the street, and a plump woman beat the dust out of a rug draped over a fence, but no one gave him a second look. Bums probably weren’t out of place on Calle B.

The street was cracked worse than the sidewalk. More than one house looked abandoned, and more than one car parked street side was up on cinder blocks or a rusted-out jack, waiting for somebody to get a bug up their ass and finish the repairs.

Every boxy house had a security fence—some taller than DJ, most made from wrought iron. A handful were chain link, but others had concrete bases thick enough to shrug off a head-on with an ’84 Chrysler. Front yards were mostly sand, with palm trees providing sparse shade. Gardens popped up in raggedy patches where there was no shade at all.

DJ only noticed the houses because he was scoping the yards for good hiding spots, and at the same time, checking for house 99, which he found about a dozen lots from the intersection at the north end of the street where the bar was.

Like the others, 99 Calle B was a boxy house with a gravel driveway and a picture window on the front of the building, trapped behind steel bars.

Nobody was home. At least to DJ’s eyes. The front window was a black rectangle, and the set of four divots in the gravel said a car would be parked there. Or would be, whenever the right honorable Officer Adrian Dos Santos decided he’d had his fill of hanging fat hippies in their garages.

An image of the rope they’d used to kill Blunt, its strands coming off like split ends, swung through DJ’s head. He blinked it away as he stepped off the sidewalk in front of 99 Calle B and hunted for a place where he could observe the house without being seen.

A single lot northward, he spotted a place that looked abandoned. There was a rusty car in the yard, which was being overtaken by reedy grass. Broken windows. Rusty lock and chain hanging on the front gate. But most promising of all was a thicket of overgrown bushes around an old tree in the abandoned house’s front yard. From there, DJ would have a clear line of sight into Dos Santos’s driveway. All he had to do was get inside the security fence.

As he shuffled slowly northward, DJ kept his eyes ahead and his pace steady. He didn’t want to draw the attention of the kids down the street. The abandoned house’s front gate looked awfully suspect. One good push, and he might snap the chain apart. He had to walk up to it without any kind of cover or concealment and try his luck.

When he came to the house’s front gate, he checked to make sure nobody was looking his way. Satisfied, DJ examined the lock and chain. Now that he’d had a closer look at it, something jumped out at him; the chain rested on a horizontal cross-member at eye level, and there was nothing to stop him from shimmying the chain up the wrought-iron fence and slipping it off the top.

So, working quickly and quietly, he did just that. After he passed through the gate, sure that he was undetected, he put the chain back where it was.

DJ moved about halfway up the driveway, watching the house for any signs of movement inside. Darkness was quickly settling in. All the freaks would be out soon, and he didn’t want to get ambushed by some junkie squatter with a rusty needle.

After giving the place a once-over from the front yard, he went to the southeastern corner of the lot, to the old tree and the overgrown bushes. The bushes were prickly little things, snagging on his jeans and T-shirt, but so long as he protected his eyes, he’d be fine.

Once inside the heaviest part of the thicket, DJ noticed he couldn’t see a damned thing except a wall of green leaves and the dust under his shoes. Unless Dos Santos shouted out his name when he pulled into his driveway, DJ would never know he was there.

The lowest branch of the tree was about six feet from the ground, behind and above DJ. It stretched out over the fence and had plenty of leaves. In the darkness, it’d be hard to spot him, so long as he stayed low. DJ pulled himself up until he was sitting on the branch.

Chin-ups were a damned joke when a guy didn’t have to contend with the weight of half a leg. The titanium prosthetic, even with a sneaker on, didn’t weigh four pounds.

Straddling the tree branch, he could peer through the leaves well enough to see the entry to Dos Santos’s driveway. All he had to do was make sure he didn’t fall out and break his neck.

For the next three hours, DJ sat on that tree branch and sweated out the day’s beer in the dark, watching cars and stray dogs go by. Nobody looked up.

It wasn’t the first time DJ had sat perched in a tree to watch. Most people thought very linearly. They surveyed their surroundings at eye-level or looked down at the ground. So, rooftops and trees made for great observation posts.

Around 9 p.m., a car’s headlights slowed in front of Dos Santos’s house. They lit the front entrance as an electric motor kicked to life, and the gate moved out of the way.

A grim anticipation came over DJ. There was nothing like catching an enemy unaware—especially one who had tormented you.

The headlights disappeared up the driveway. The engine stopped as the gate moved back into place. A single car door slammed. Good. He was probably alone. Dos Santos was humming a little tune to himself, and his footsteps sounded uneven. Apparently, he’d been out drinking. DJ smiled.

When the front door slammed shut, and DJ saw a tattered square of light shining through the leaves, he checked the duffle bag’s strap on his shoulder, then scooted forward on the branch until he’d passed the fence beneath him. Then, he lowered himself down.

Not a soul up or down the street. Perfect.

DJ crouched low and scrambled to the nearest cover—the rear-passenger side of an old Chevy truck with a flat tire. He crouched on the sidewalk, then scouted Dos Santos’s front window once more. Satisfied, he hid again, then slipped the bag off his shoulder and opened the drawstring.

Aside from the money he kept in an outer pocket, a few entry tools, and a single MRE, there was a knit hat, a pair of latex gloves, a box of double-aught buckshot, and a short-barreled Mossberg 500. He brought the gloves and hat out, putting them on. Next came the shotgun and shells. The gun felt good in his hands, like justice waiting to bark out its judgment. He quietly opened the receiver, slipped a shell in, then inserted five more into the tube magazine.

He closed the box of shells, returned it to his bag, then tossed the duffle into the bed of the truck. If the truck’s owner came back, fixed the tire, and took off before DJ could get back to it, oh well. Lucky enough to find the cash, lucky enough to keep it.

Holding the shotgun, he stayed hunched over and went to the back of the truck. Nothing to see through the living room window of Dos Santos’s house. The light had been turned off, which raised the hair on the back of DJ’s neck. He needed eyes on his target. He needed to know if Dos Santos was cracking beers in his kitchen or pulling something out of his gun safe.

Lingering at the back of the truck, DJ watched for movement. No cars had passed for some time. He heard nothing except the tick of the car’s cooling engine across the street, and the faint sound of salsa music shaking through the muggy night air.

A concrete post at the corner of Dos Santos’s neighbor’s yard looked like the perfect entry point for DJ to hop the fence, so he darted across the street, staying low.

He leaned his left shoulder against the post, keeping his shotgun ready to snap upward and fire. Before he brought his eyes around and exposed himself to enemy fire, he listened. Bugs chirped a block or two away, a night bird cackled, and a dog barked far down the street, toward the bar.

When he darted a look around the post, he saw Dos Santos through the wrought iron fence. He stood at the kitchen window on the north side of the house, staring across his driveway at the neighbor’s wall, an empty shot glass in his hand.

Dos Santos couldn’t have been more than twenty yards off. An easy shot, even with the short barrel and the wide choke on DJ’s Mossberg. Might not kill the guy, but he’d have a hell of a lot to think about when shards of his kitchen window went flying into his face.

Of course, that’d make it impossible to get information out of him. DJ had a few questions burning in the back of his head.

Unaware that a violent death was just outside his window, Dos Santos boogied away from it, swinging his shoulders, and bobbing his head to music DJ could just hear coming from the house.

DJ couldn’t lose sight of him. He slipped his shotgun through the iron bars of the fence, into Dos Santos’s yard. Then he pulled himself on top of the short concrete post. From there, he had no trouble swinging his legs over and sliding down the vertical bars of the fence.

Once he had his feet under him, DJ picked up his Mossberg and hurried toward Dos Santos’s car—a very nicely kept late model BMW i5.

Snuggled up against the front left tire, D. J. was suddenly aware that the skin under his goatee itched like hell. As he scratched it and smacked his lips, the air took on a copper flavor, and the low thuds of salsa music bleeding through concrete seemed to knock around inside his ears. In that moment, DJ felt his eyes could pierce the darkness, that he could see the birds sleeping in trees and he’d be quick enough to catch a possum with his bare hands.

Been a while since he’d felt like that. Maybe since he’d helped McDermitt pick off those acid-brained cultists. No, there had to be a couple times since then. Maybe Port-Au-Prince.

Mark Antony’s famous phrase popped into his head: “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.” It felt good to be let off the lead. To be the invader. To not have somebody wagging a finger at him while he did the things that took courage to do. It wasn’t DJ’s fault that the world was a violent, chaotic pit full of folks eager to shove their fingers in somebody else’s eye. The only thing that might be his fault was ensuring that anybody who tried to poke his eyes out instead pulled back a bloody stump.

DJ focused himself. He had to stay on the mission. He got down on his hands and knees, peering under the car and across the backside of the house. He saw the patio table lit from a yellow glow spilling through a frosted window.

Dos Santos was in the bathroom.

Not wasting a second, DJ sprang up. He ran around the front of the car, but as soon as he did, something else caught his eye. A length of rope. The same kind of rope they’d used to kill Blunt. It lay on the car’s dash, for anyone to see. The son of a bitch had balls the size of Jupiter, DJ had to give him that.

Instead of running to the back door, DJ made a short detour. He walked over to the passenger side of the car and checked the handle. The door opened.

How could anybody leave their car unlocked at night in a neighborhood like this? Then again, DJ would bet that everybody on the block knew Adrian Dos Santos was the kind of cop that’d cuff you before he bashed your head into the wall.

He grabbed the rope off the dash. Must’ve been ten feet of it. DJ coiled it around his chest so that it ran from his left shoulder to the opposite hip.

That done, he aimed himself toward the back door. Seeing it there, knowing what he was going to do, made his nerves hum and his lungs gulp for air.

DJ was a door kicker again. Just like every other time, this might be the last time ever. He felt charged, energized.

He stopped a few feet from the door, then pivoted so that his left shoulder propped against the wall closest to the knob. He held the Mossberg out from his body, left hand on top of the barrel, right hand gripped tightly to the pistol grip, fingertip on the forward part of the trigger guard. He aimed where the door met the frame, just beside the doorknob, and his finger moved to the trigger.

The shotgun roared and swung backward in his arms like a battering ram on the rebound. Buckshot hammered the door, the sound bouncing off the neighbors’ houses and cars, startling a yappy dog next door. The door stubbornly held fast. DJ pumped the shotgun, then adjusted his grip on it once more, and squeezed the trigger. This time, the door reared back and the knob cracked clean off.

Salsa music blared out louder than the last Megadeth concert DJ had gone to in Fort Lauderdale. He wondered if Dos Santos even heard the gunshot, but it was smarter to work on the assumption he had.

Before entering, DJ glanced around the corner. Ahead was a small kitchen, and beyond it the front of the house. To the left, a doorway to another room. No Dos Santos. Every moment DJ hesitated gave advantage to his enemy. So, he rushed in, took the doorway left, and found himself in a small hallway. The only light came from a door to his left. He opened it up.

Dos Santos was naked, leaning halfway out of the shower. He’d been caught completely unaware and unprepared. Probably the music inside the house was so loud, he either didn’t hear the shotgun blasts, or mistook it for something else.

But now that he and DJ were eye to eye, Dos Santos put it together.

“En serio?” His lip curled at DJ.

“Oh, I’m serious, man. Believe that.” DJ motioned with the shotgun, signaling him to step out of the shower.

He did. One heavy leg at a time, his eyes transfixed by DJ’s shotgun, as if he’d spot the buckshot flashing out and sidestep it in the same instant. He raised his hands until they were even with shoulders the size of cannonballs.

Funny, as big of a guy as he was, having him stand there completely naked, alone, and dripping with water, he looked more like a scared kid caught out in the rain.

“That’s a good start,” DJ said. “Now, I want you to take this rope, and put it around your neck.”

Dos Santos shook his head. “You’re making a mistake, acho . I’m not some nobody you can roll up on and rob. I’m connected.”

DJ smiled at him.

“What a small world it is. Turns out I’m connected too, acho . I’m connected to the guy you strung up last night.” DJ tossed the rope at his feet.

It didn’t take long for Dos Santos to connect the dots.

“Wait a minute.” He backed into the wall. “That wasn’t my idea. I’m a working stiff, bro, and your buddy was unlucky, and I was doing what I was told—man, you don’t know the whole story.”

“Tell it to me,” DJ said. “Let me hear the whole story, and maybe I won’t blow your ass through that wall behind you, and you can get back to getting squeaky clean.”

The color blanched out of Dos Santos. He looked like he was going to throw up.

“Go on, friend. Tell me your story. You asked me to wait a minute, and I’m waiting.”

“I’m sorry about your buddy, okay? I never wanted to hurt nobody. But man, I got a job that needs to be done. All right? It’s nothing personal. I’m just trying to survive like everybody else—like you, right?” He kept his hands up, but Dos Santos would’ve gotten down on his knees, kissed DJ’s rings and paid for an indulgence if he thought it’d get him out of his bathroom alive.

“I got bills to pay. I got alimony, child support—I gotta think about retirement. I gotta hustle and do everything I can do to make ends meet. Okay, man? I’m sorry about your friend, I truly, deeply am, but he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I had business to do. Plus, you know he wasn’t clean. We knew that too. He’s with Garner’s people. He knew the risks.”

“Garner?” DJ’s hand squeezed the shotgun’s stock. “Did he put you up to this?”

By his expression, Dos Santos knew he wasn’t getting his point across to DJ.

“There’s all kinds of madness in this world, man,” Dos Santos said. “I know I’m a bad person. But you ain’t clean either, right? What’s the difference between what I did and what you’re doing? You don’t think I got friends that’ll miss me?”

DJ only stared at him.

“We were just gonna shake your boy down—keep a felony over his head to make sure he stayed quiet—that was the plan from the start, but she said she didn’t—”

“Who said?” DJ said, as softly as he could over the salsa music.

The tips of Dos Santos’s fingers nervously bobbed in the air. He’d blurted out too much, and he knew it.

“Let me go, and I’ll tell you,” he said.

DJ laughed. “You know I got a few double-aught shells in this thing, right? And they’re pointed right at your gut. How about you tie yourself a noose and put that thing on, then we’ll talk.”

The dynamic of their negotiation must’ve finally hit home with Dos Santos. Because he slowly bent over, checking with DJ whether or not he was moving too quickly, then picked up the rope at his feet, and tied it into a perfect hangman’s noose.

When that was done, Dos Santos seemed to have lost the inches of nerve he’d built up. He looked at DJ, silently begging for him to stop.

“Did you have something you wanted to ask me, Officer?”

“Man, we don’t have to go this far. You got a problem? Let me pay you for your troubles, okay? Nobody has to know—”

DJ squeezed the trigger of his sawed-off. Buckshot turned a handful of white tiles on the wall behind Dos Santos into ringlets of dust, and the man’s entire body clenched up. Having never shot at a naked man, DJ had never seen how the muscles from a man’s feet to his neck rippled and tightened when they were energized with fear.

“I won’t miss next time!” DJ roared. “Count on that.” He racked another round into the chamber. The spent shell fell into the open toilet. “Now put that rope around your neck.”

Dos Santos clenched his eyes shut as he brought the rope over his head. He let it rest on his shoulders.

“Good boy. Now tell me about that lady you mentioned.”

Conversation wasn’t coming so easily to Officer Dos Santos now. His eyes were wide and his chest was heaving like a dying buck. DJ had never seen a naked man piss himself, but he might yet.

“What do you want to know?” Dos Santos barked.

“Who is she?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know her name, man. I swear to Christ I don’t know it. She pays good, that’s all I need to know. Names stay out of my head.”

“Then who in your crew knows her name? The leader? The white guy with the slicked-back hair?”

Dos Santos’s muscles tightened across his body as soon as DJ asked about the leader—he was right on the money. Questioning a naked man apparently had its advantages.

“Okay, so he’s the point man,” DJ said. “How do you know he was dealing with a woman?”

Dos Santos hesitated. He thought he could get away with teasing DJ with tidbits of information—like DJ would let him go without finding the things worth knowing. So, he aimed the gun at Dos Santos’s foot and pulled the trigger.

The man collapsed to the floor, writhing silently. DJ walked closer to him.

“I didn’t come to your house for the tunes,” DJ said as he racked the shotgun again. “Tell me who wanted my friend dead.”

“Some executive!” Dos Santos hissed. “I don’t know her name, man, I swear to God! She’s a CEO or something! She works at Hildon!”

Hildon.

That word put DJ’s brain in a chokehold. A pharma company wanted Markel dead. They used one of Blunt’s boats to get to Markel’s house, then, after the deed was done, they snipped Blunt to cut off any loose ends. He shut his eyes and saw Blunt’s purpled face, the corners of his mouth stretched back in mute horror, eyes bulging from their sockets.

Before he realized it, his emotions had roped him. They’d pulled him forward until he could see the broken vessels in the end of Dos Santos’s nose—until DJ was standing over him with the shotgun inches from the back of Dos Santos’s hand, cradling his head in fear.

“Did you kill the doctor?” One word had put DJ into a frenzy. Spittle came off his mouth, leaping onto Dos Santos’s forehead. “Who else did they pay you to kill?”

“I had nothing—”

DJ jammed the gun against Dos Santos’s head.

“Don’t lie to me! Don’t you lie to me, I’ll blow your brains out, I’ll kill you right here, and I won’t—”

A hand clapped across DJ’s chin. He’d let his emotions get the better of him, and they’d led him into making a fatal mistake by getting too close—why did he need to be this close to Dos Santos? He had a shotgun; he should be across the room. What was he thinking?

Nothing.

And that left him open to getting this whole thing turned around on him.

When Dos Santos struck him, DJ’s body tensed in shock. Including his finger on the trigger of his shotgun.

That was the end of Officer Adrian Dos Santos. He would not have an open casket.

DJ stumbled back, nearly falling, except for the sink and cabinet behind him.

Whatever information Dos Santos had in his head was now spread across his bathroom wall.

While DJ stood with the Mossberg in his hands, his brain struggled to take in all the carnage.

Then one neuron connected with another, and he pumped the shotgun in a daze, ejecting the last shell. He bent and picked it up, dropping it in his pocket. He picked up the empty shells too, even the one in the toilet, and put them all in his pocket.

The shotgun itself was unregistered; serial numbers scratched off with a Dremel tool. Bought from a guy who knew a guy for about ten times its value. He left the shotgun on the bathroom floor.

DJ retraced his steps through the house. When he stepped out to Dos Santos’s backyard, he scanned to his left and then his right. None of the neighbors were outside. Either they didn’t hear the shots or didn’t want to get involved. Possibly they knew who the shot was for and didn’t want to stop a good thing from happening.

DJ stooped and picked up two more shell casings before moving quickly to the corner of the yard. There, he climbed the fence, bracing his good foot on the concrete post. He ran back to the truck across the street and grabbed his sea bag, removing the shells from his pocket and dropping them inside. Then he pulled the string and put the strap over his shoulder. He’d call a cab from the bar he’d hung out in this afternoon.

Then, he’d find Hildon Pharmaceutical’s CEO.