| |
Meric
I hadn’t expected to receive the text.
It had come two days ago, just as I finished the last job I’d ever complete—one I’d assigned myself, to make sure there were no loose ends.
There were few—or there had been few—who could have tracked the Spectre. I hadn’t expected there would be more than a handful, but even one was too many.
The job I posted had exactly four serious takers.
Of them, only one had even come close.
It had taken him nearly six weeks and none of the fail safes I’d set, save for the one that led him to me, had been triggered. I realized how he’d found me once I had his face up on the battery-powered laptop where I’d been hiding, just under a quarter mile away. Back when I’d been younger—and stupider—I’d been unaware a client had hired several others, desperate enough to see a rival dead that he’d been willing to pay the retainers to three different hitmen.
That man, Rene Broussard, and I had both ended up in the same hotel, under the same guise—gambling, and maybe a quick fuck with one of the prostitutes who liked to flirt with the winners of the high stakes floor.
We’d noticed each other, but he’d written me off, likely because I looked so young.
It was a mistake he’d have reason to regret as I completed the job while he was still in his room, fucking the woman he’d hired for a few hours. It wasn’t until I’d collected my fee and was out of the country that I began to unearth his true identify, simply because he had noticed me—that had been another one of Sarge’s rules.
You can’t afford to be noticed, kid. Ever.
Broussard had set off a sensor alarm when he’d pulled off the main road onto the two ruts of dirt that led up to my home. Even though he’d left his vehicle behind and walked on foot, the alarm had picked him up and given me plenty of time to vacate the premises, all while setting up everything so he’d go inside.
It worked in my favor that Broussard had been a white man. He was ten years older than me, but nobody had any clue as to who I was, save for a select few, and only one of them had even a rough idea at my exact age. Even I didn’t know for certain.
Leo, however, was a man I trusted with my secrets.
Should anybody else ever come looking, they could find his remains—or what was left of them—and a carefully crafted persona I’d been building for years. It now had connections to several unsolved murders and other crimes in Boston, Massachusetts. Most of the electronics were left in the unlocked weapons vault, my biometric data erased. The vault would withstand the small bomb that had been rigged to go on my signal and all I had to do was watch from a distance to make sure there wasn’t any damage outside the structure. We’d have a great deal of rain and I had little concern there would be a fire, although I’d had a back-up plan if that hadn’t been the case.
But everything went according to plan. Broussard went inside, certain I was there, thanks to heat-sensing technology. That tech had proven useful to me in the past, but I’d known it could be problematic. The solution for it had been discovered while reading a book—a sex doll, with an internal heating system that warmed the doll to body temperature.
He’d gone inside the house, made his way up the narrow steps to my bedroom, all because of a silicone sex doll with a dick that would put a horse’s to shame.
After the debris had settled, I’d hiked back, checked to make sure Broussard was dead. When he was found, if he was found, evidence would tie him to an elusive assassin some people didn’t even think existed.
Spectre, effectively, was dead.
The only regret I had was leaving the cabin, the place where I’d first found some hint of life...with Tia. I’d had to spend hours eliminating the signs of her from the place, messy sheets that I’d burned out back, along with pages she’d torn from her sketchbook and left crumbled everywhere. It was like she’d wanted me to see signs of her everywhere when I returned. And I had. I’d slept in those messy sheets, streaked from dust from her pencils and smelling of her every night up until the last one. Watching the evidence of her presence in my life burn to ashes had torn at me even as I reminded myself it was necessary if I wanted to even have a chance at being with her.
Whether Meric had any chance at that was yet to be seen and the first hurdle lay directly in front of me.
I found him sitting by the entrance of the open-air café, sipping a beer, the sluggish breeze ruffling his hair. It might be nearing the end of October, but it was Atlanta and clearly autumn hadn’t come. He spied me approaching and lifted his beer in greeting.
I’d already done two trips around the perimeter and hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary, except Mac Bailey, here an hour early for a one o’clock meeting. I’d arrived more than two hours early myself and had seen him saunter into the restaurant exactly sixty minutes before he should have been there, but he hadn’t done anything more than place a thin, oblong object against the railing and order a beer. This was his third one.
As I sat down in front of him, he lifted the bottle in my direction. “You want one?”
“I think I’ll go with Johnnie Walker.” Giving him a thin smile, I added, “I’ve developed a taste for it.”
“Weird. I’ve lost mine.”
The server approached and I asked for bottled water, with the lid still on.
As she walked away, he asked, “Think I asked you here to poison or drug you?”
“Unlikely. But I’m not the trusting sort.”
He took another sip of the beer and watched me with eyes that cut clear through me. “You trusted my sister.”
“Yes.” I had nothing else to say to that.
“For some fucked-up reason, you decided to extend some of that trust to me—a fucking cop.” He drained the beer and put the bottle down. “I’m struggling to make sense of that.”
“Don’t overtax your brain. It was an action dictated by necessity, Detective Bailey, nothing more.”
A wry smile tugged up the corner of his lips. “You’re such a cold-ass piece of shit, but for some reason, there’s something about you that I can almost find myself...well, not liking, but...I can’t see myself hating you, either.”
He rocked forward suddenly and braced his elbows on the table.
“You chose not to kill Tia. Why?”
Canting my head to the side, I watched him from under my lashes. “Is this being recorded?”
“No.” His mouth turned down in a scowl and he looked away. “If I was the cop I thought I was, the answer would be yes, although I’d lie about that, too.”
“And that is supposed to reassure me?”
A muscle pulsed in his jaw and after a lifetime, he looked at me. “If you had taken that job, my sister wouldn’t be alive. And if I’d properly done mine...” his lids swept low and a hard sigh escaped him. “If I’d done what I should have, you’d be dead. Not because I did it, but because you would have had a sniper take you out, all so you could spare my sister the knowledge of knowing her brother had killed the only guy she’d ever really fallen for. That would have destroyed something inside her. And you knew that, didn’t you?”
Drumming my fingers on the arm of the chair, I eyed him narrowly.
He had a smug look on his face and his gaze dipped to my hand—and the incessant beating. “Odd. I wouldn’t have taken you for the sort of guy to fidget.”
My hand froze. I tried to cover by shifting in my seat, but I did a piss-poor job and I knew it.
“Is there a reason you wanted to speak to me, detective? Or am I here for shits and giggles?”
“Yeah, there’s a reason. I—” He stopped speaking, a slow smile curling his lips as a woman appeared. “Hello, Natalie.”
The server was Chinese, a pretty and petite woman, about five foot five with dark hair and large, dark brown eyes. Clad in a snug red T-shirt, she balanced a pizza that looked almost the same size as the table. As she put it down, she flashed a friendly smile at Bailey.
“Thanks, smells delicious.”
“Did you expect anything less, detective?”
“Not from you, Nat.”
“I aim to please.” Natalie winked at him before shifting her attention to me. I wasn’t surprised when her smile started to dim. It returned fast, but her polite expression lacked the warmth she’d directed at Bailey. “Is there anything you need, sir?”
“No, thank you.”
She left in a hurry. Across the table, Bailey chuckled. “You make friends like that all the time?”
“Everywhere I go, as luck would have it.” I eyed the pizza, then flicked my gaze to his. “What’s this?”
“An extra-large pie. Double pepperoni. Their specialty, and yes, it tastes as good as it smells. I figured with all the prowling you did earlier, you hadn’t eaten lunch yet. Dig in. I can’t eat the whole thing myself.”
The feeling that settled in my belly was one I’d felt several times over the past few weeks, but never this acutely. It was uncomfortable. No, I corrected myself. I was uncomfortable.
“Why?”
Bailey lowered the slice in his hand, a peculiar look on his face. “Why what?”
When I didn’t answer, the perplexed expression shifted to one of speculation. “Let me guess...you haven’t spent much time just sitting down to lunch with a big pizza, a couple of beers, just shooting the shit with somebody, have you?”
“My life doesn’t lend itself to such...pastimes.”
Bailey put the pizza down, the expression on his face making that uncomfortable feeling expand.
“I guess that makes sense. If you had a father who saw teaching you how to kill as family time, seems the rest of your life is going to be pretty damn fucked up, too.” He grabbed the beer in front of him and took a sip, then put it down and lifted his pizza once more. “Eat some food...Casper. That, at least, is something you know how to do, unless you are a robot like I first suspected.”
Moments ticked away while I watched him eat and he ignored me.
Was this some sort of test?
If so, I couldn’t figure out the parameters or anything else. Bailey went for his third piece and gave the pie a pointed look.
Annoyed, I put a piece on the plate in front of me and scowled. The last time I’d eaten pizza had been with Sarge. He’d dragged me to a ballgame and insisted I have a beer, some pizza—the experience, he’d called it. Feeling Bailey watching me, I picked up the slice and took a bite. My diet consisted of food that was healthy, simple...and typically bland. The explosion of flavor that filled my mouth caught me off-guard and I had to work to blank my features. I ate one slice and had the urge to get another, but Bailey had settled back in his chair and the look in his eyes had me reevaluating.
“Why didn’t you kill my sister?”
Involuntarily, I clenched the fist that rested on my knee. It took considerable effort to keep my voice level as I said, “There was no reason to kill her.”
“You’re an assassin. You’ve admitted as much. To an assassin, the reason is simple, isn’t it—money.”
“I don’t need money.”
Bailey’s brows shot up, disappearing under the wavy fall of his hair. Leaning back, he gave me a pensive stare. “What do you need?”
Tia. I managed not to speak her name aloud.
But judging by the smug look on his face, he heard it anyway. He didn’t say anything, though. Instead, he nudged the wrapped package on the floor with his foot, pushing it close to me.
I looked at it, deliberating, then finally picked it up.
What I found when I opened it left me struck dumb.
There were smears and splatters of paint across it, but the image—and the resemblance—was unmistakable.
“Tia did this.”
“Yeah. She’s damn good,” Bailey said, pride in his voice. “Even if I don’t care for the subject matter. Can’t blame her that it got a little fucked up. I sort of pissed her off.”
Looking away from the image—the painting of my face that was so perfect, it could have been taken with a camera—I stared at him. “Why?”
“Because I wanted to know how she felt about you, Dr. Psycho.” He sipped his beer and leaned back in his chair. “Now...let’s try this again. Why didn’t you kill my sister?”