Five
The day felt long. Like,reallylong.
Hammer sighed. He hated desk work. Put him undercover, in the middle of a brawl, running from a rain of bullets—he flourished. Shove him in front of a stupid computer looking for clues? He wanted to curl up and die.
The only thing keeping him sane right now was the small bundle of joy in his arm, cuddled up like his favorite football. “Yo, Little Dee. Is this boring the piss out of you too?”
The baby gurgled and wrapped tiny fingers around Hammer’s thumb. Such a cute kid. Hammer hadn’t wanted to learn he’d fathered a baby, and unless that woman in Mexico had been poking holes in his rubbers when he hadn’t been looking, there was no way could he have been responsible. Yet he felt warm when he looked at Little Dee. A sense of responsibility to take care of such innocence…who happened to lay at the heart of the problem they found themselves in.
Somehow Angel factored into this shit too. Her name engraved in the locket was no more a coincidence than some stranger dropping her kid off with Noel. By accident? No way in hell.
From the sources he’d spoken to in Philly and again in New York a few weeks ago, he’d learned that Angel was likely dead. Not missing in action. Supposedly, no one knew what the woman looked like, except that she had dark hair and brown eyes. Like Little Dee. And yeah, dark hair like all of them: Noel, Deacon, and Hammer.
But Hammer knew what Angel looked like. He’d known the young woman before she’d earned her contractor name. And he knew that code.
X6TFL.
He hadn’t said anything to the guys. But that letter/number combination felt oddly like it had been meant for him. He hadn’t put it together until something Violet, Noel’s nurse, had said struck him.
X6—the first time he’d met Angel, back when he’d been just twelve, five years her junior, and they’d been paired together on the X6 protocol, to learn destruction and termination sequences, the big D&T. Like Hammer, Angel had been trained to take things—and people—apart.
During their training, they’d made a joke out of some of their instructors and classes. OMGB—Oh My God Boring classes. SA—Suck-Ass students, as in, kiss-asses. PM—Pedophile and Moron, usually in reference to their worst instructors. And the real kicker? TFL—Too Fucking Lame. A code for the classes they’d hated most. Angel had loathed ethics. Hammer hated computer work.
Angel had been fun for a girl. She’d been a few years older than Hammer but sympathetic to his crush, and almost maternal when it came to helping him get through the program.
Then she’d gone on her first assignment without even a goodbye. He hadn’t seen her since, though he’d never forgotten her face. A face no one seemed to recall with any accuracy. Angel blended so well she’d become a legend, and then she’d quit the Business, tired of the structure, or so the brief note she’d sent him had said.
One note in the past eighteen years.
He’d always wondered what had happened to her. Big Joe thought she’d died. Hammer didn’t know. But when he’d learned her name had been found in a locket on an abandoned child, he hadn’t hesitated to travel straightaway to Noel’s place. Noel thought he’d have to bend Hammer’s arm to help out. Hammer would have insisted he stay even if Noel hadn’t asked him to.
A sketch artist had drawn the woman Addy remembered seeing with Little Dee, and she didn’t look like Angel. Which would be a good thing, since they’d found her body in the Sound.
Unless they had the wrong person. And the woman who’d died had nothing to do with the baby.
Could it have been Angel in disguise? Maybe, but the whole situation didn’t read like something Angel would do. Drop off her kid to a stranger? Not confront a problem head-on? The woman he’d known had taken the world by the balls. And when she hadn’t liked what the Business had to offer, she’d quit, said adios, face-to-face, to Big Joe.
Little Dee started babbling and took Hammer’s mind from the past. The kid needed help now. He needed a home. From what Noel and Addy said, they planned to adopt Little Dee if they couldn’t find his parents.
Assuming they were still alive at the end of it all.
Hammer sighed again. He had to figure this out. Noel and Addy had a life to share. And if he wasn’t mistaken, Deacon might have something going with Solene. The sparks between the two were enough to set a wet mop on fire.
He’d learned more about Deacon this last month than he’d known about the guy for years. A funny, complicated, slick actor who had earned the codename Shadow, Deacon Shaw had a core of integrity about him that he would be embarrassed to acknowledge. Like Noel, Deacon never killed for pleasure. He worked to better the world, ridding it of one evil person after another.
Collectively, he, Hammer, and Noel had made the world a better place, destroying drug empires, slavers, and gun runners. Angel used to do the same before she’d decided the whole Business was TFL.
He stared at the code he’d written down, circling it with a red pen. What to do with this information…? He wanted to discuss this with Noel and Deacon, to see if he was reaching, seeing things that weren’t there. But he shared a past with Angel. She’d helped him at a time when no one else had, and he genuinely liked her. So, before he dimed her out or made his suspicions known, he’d verify if she really was Little Dee’s mom.
If only Phantom had given him more to go on when he’d tried to meet with the information broker a few weeks ago. The elusive contractor hadn’t given Hammer much, but Phantom’s presence in this matter made the whole thing more than interesting. Phantom rarely involved himself in anything that didn’t come from the higher ups, higher even than Big Joe.
So why was Phantom sniffing around after intel about the baby? About Angel?
And why, when Hammer thought of the baby and Angel—an intriguing woman he’d once had affection for—did Violet Leon keep popping up in his mind’s eye? Noel’s nurse had come and gone too quickly to be of much notice. Yet the woman had packed a real punch. Sexy, lethal, and so much more than she seemed. Despite her clean background check and Big Joe’s insistence, he just knew she did more than slap bandages on guys and take temperatures.
In some ways she reminded him of Angel. Except Angel hadn’t laughed with the abandonment Vi did. And Angel had never been so gentle with anyone, not like Vi had been when holding Little Dee. Yet he could see Angel as being maternal. The way she’d been with him showed she had that in her.
“You know, dude, this is all giving me a major headache,” he told the baby. “All I want is a beer, some football, and a woman to warm me up. What’s so wrong with that?”
