I pull the photo off the fridge and turn it over, finding faded pen on the back that readsFort Bragg, 2019.Best squad I ever had. Five people in this photo are on my list, five out of six, and they're posing together, which suggests they not only know each other, but they probably worked together.
These aren't random civilians scattered across the Eastern US with no connection to each other. These are soldiers, operators, people who served together and knew each other well enough to smile for a camera while out on deployment.
And someone is systematically erasing them.
I've had hitlists before like this. The boss sends me out on all sorts of jobs—like the last one I fucked up pretty badly, though it wasn’t entirely my fault. No way I was gonna kill that little girl too just because she saw me. But this list felt fishy from the beginning.
When I took the job from a broker, it was immediately assigned to me with no question. I figured it was punishment—twelve hits before the end of the year on a deadline with a bullet for me if it wasn't finished. I screwed that last hit up, so now I'm expendable. It's not like I'm family to him. I got sucked into this as a kid, and honestly, if I had my druthers, I'd find my way out. I'm too old to keep doing this. I want something more in life than just murder for hire and taking someone's orders.
But I don't get a choice. When the Don gives you an order, you do it.
Though, I have a feeling my life in the Barone family has a timer that's nearing zero. All because I can't murder a child in cold blood.
I fold the photo and slide it into my jacket pocket before taking one last look around the kitchen. Blood drips from the counter edge onto the tile, and Dempsey's body has already started to cool in the spreading pool beneath his head. Someone will find him eventually, but I'll be miles from here. Still, I lock up on my way out because it's the sane thing to do.
There are killers out here, you know.
Then I head to my truck, where I climb behind the wheel and sit there for a moment with the engine off, staring at Dempsey's dark house through the windshield while my ribs ache and my knuckles throb. He really got me good. I may need to wait a few days before I move on to number six on the list—Sabine Hart.
As I drive off, I think about that photo and how very not coincidental it is that the people on it are connected. I have no clue who put this hit on their lives, nor am I supposed to ask. But it appears to me that someone is cleaning up a mess they don't want anyone to hear about.
That's the case most times, but most times, the people on my lists are criminals or their loved ones. Every now and then, it's a victim who knows too much but got away—like that witness in the State vs. Barone case three years ago. He'd have taken us all down, so he had to go.
But something about this feels just as wrong as having to look a little girl in the eye and say I'm sorry for murdering Mommy and Daddy, but they were bad people.
Don Vittorio took this job from someone the broker brought to him, someone who has connections and power, and probably a lot of money too, or they wouldn't be able to afford us. And here I am, murdering men and women who fought for our country. It just doesn’t sit right. But if I question the method, I'll end up joining the five I've brought down already, and the two very unlucky parents whose child will be raised an orphan. I have no wish for a death warrant to be signed in my name.
Because if the boss hasn't put out the order to have me offed at the end of this list already, that certainly would do it.
2
SABINE
The TV news anchor's voice drones through my apartment while the closed captioning scrolls across the bottom of the screen with updates on a traffic accident on I-90 and a fundraiser for the children's hospital downtown. My dinner sits half-eaten on the coffee table, chicken and rice gone cold while the remote rests in my palm and my thumb hovers over the volume button.
The local segment ends and transitions to the next story, and the anchor's expression shifts into something more somber as a photograph fills the screen behind her shoulder.
Marcus Tate's face stares out at the camera, frozen in a department photo from years ago when he still wore his uniform and his smile came easier. The anchor describes the scene as tragic—an accidental electrocution when he dropped his still-charging cell phone into the bath with him while he enjoyed his nightly ritual of a hot soak to lower blood pressure. Authorities said Marcus's wire had a short which sent the instant jolt to his nervous system, and an already-stressed heart couldn’t take the voltage.
My throat constricts and the remote slips from my hand onto the couch cushion. Then the world narrows down to that photograph as my vision tunnels. It's not a coincidence at all. I kept thinking it was, praying it was. But there’s no way.
Three of us dead in six weeks?
Daniel Whitlock over a week ago, a car accident that the news called an unfortunate accident before the holiday season. Then Ryan McAllister two days later, a fall down the stairs at his apartment building that left him with a broken neck. Still nothing suspicious about that.
If it had been just those two, I'd have said it was a coincidence too. Tragic, but nothing to worry about.
But then Luis Navarro died after that, a hit-and-run outside a bar in Gary that the police chalked up to drunk driving and bad timing. And Luis wasn't a drinker. Anyone who knew him knows that. Anyone who might be paying attention to this should know we're being picked off one by one.
And now Marcus?
Each death made the local news in small, disconnected stories that wouldn't mean anything to anyone who didn't know what connected them. But the connection exists, and it's written across my memory in the faces of the men who served under Captain Jason Bryan at Fort Benning almost two years ago. Rangers, all of us, operators who knew how to follow orders and keep their mouths shut when the orders started to smell wrong.
Someone's cleaning house, and the certainty that my name sits somewhere on that list makes my hands shake before training kicks in and forces them steady again. I'm not a wimp. I'm a trained soldier who can defend herself. But I still feel vulnerableknowing someone is out there hunting us. No doubt, it has to do with Captain Bryan and the shit he put us through, but the only person I still talk to whom I could call to warn about it went off grid months ago to put distance between himself and this life.
The television switches to another news segment and I grab the remote to turn it off, plunging the apartment into dimness broken only by the light from the clock. My reflection stares back at me from the blank screen, and the woman looking out has dark circles under her eyes and tension written across her shoulders.
I'm tired and I want to go home. I shouldn't even be here in Chicago. I should be down south where I belong, but this stupid task force and temporary relocation got handed down the pipe to me, and what was I supposed to do, ignore orders? I asked to be stationed stateside, and this is what I get, a desk job that has me at the higher ups' mercy, and it just landed me in the same city where at least three of my former colleagues have been found murdered—though the cops haven't called any of them murders.
