If Smith died, nobody from Kit’s past would know his new name.
“Where was the party?” Bishop asked.
“San Corvo? I think?” Kit furrowed his brow, pretending to think, as he switched into a private text with James.
Kit:whatever you do, don’t let him escape
Sexy:you got it, babe ;)
The warehouse yard swam with shadows. James waited until the target entered the warehouse to dart behind a mountain of rusted pipes. He crouched there, twenty yards away from the warehouse back door. All his energy coiled into a state of readiness. A deceptive calm. Darius and Bishop called him hotheaded, but James knew how to wait for his prey too.
“In position,” James murmured. Barely audible, but the earpiece picked it up.
“Coast is still clear,” Darius replied over the comms.
James wasn’t going to kill the target. Really. He agreed with Darius and Bishop that they needed to find out if this guy was working alone. As much as he liked to fuck with Darius, James was going to follow the plan. He was absolutely certain of that as he watched his tablet screen, following the target’s every movement.
The warehouse was a dusty, poorly lit cavern. A single set of footprints led from a side door to a table in the middle of the room. Then back to the side door—marking Darius’s path as he set the bait.
Re-dusting the rest of their footprints as they set extra cameras had been annoying. But James hadn’t wanted to rely on the cameras he already installed the last time he used the warehouse for extracurricular crimes.
The effort was worth it, because the poor lighting wasn’t an obstacle now. James easily swiped between different angles, each camera showing crystal-clear footage of the target approaching the table. He could zoom in on the man’s stubbled neck or the worn patches on his leather jacket. The target was middle-aged. White with dark brown hair. Soft features and patchy eyebrows. James hated him at first sight.
On the table was an open shoebox. In the shoebox was a simple viewscreen with a flash drive inserted. The target would be able to view the photos before he took them away.
If he was smart, he would disable the tracking software James embedded in the drive. The software was just a “might as well” measure, in case they got lucky with the target’s incompetence.
James and Darius didn’t count on getting lucky, though. The primary plan was following him home through the city’s CCTVnetwork. They could develop their next steps once they had his identity and address.
The target set a device on the tablet. Something like a phone. He tapped it with gloved fingers, waited ten seconds, then picked up the viewscreen.
James couldn’t see the viewscreen or the target’s phone screen from any of his camera angles. But he knew what was on the viewscreen. The photos he retouched for Darius: Kit’s body, pale and blood-stained, sprawled like a broken doll.
What did the target think now as he looked at the photos? Was he satisfied? Happy? Did he feel any regret or guilt?
Or did he feel nothing more than the dull acknowledgment of a completed task?
James shook his shoulders and counted his breaths, striving for calm. He’d asked those questions too many times before, wondering how his family’s enemies felt when they learned the job was complete. The Rat King, whoever that was. Did they plan to kill the little girls too, or were Crystal and Iris just collateral damage?
They’d never returned to finish James off.
The target only flipped through the photos for a few moments. Then he removed the drive—and snapped it.
“What the fuck,” James breathed.
The target set the viewscreen and the broken flash drive on the ground, then stomped both with his heel. James’s adrenaline spiked with each vicious crack. The cameras didn’t pick up the sound. But James could hear the glass breaking the regular way, from the warehouse twenty yards away.
Stepping back, the target took a visible deep breath. Then he tapped his phone.
A few seconds later, Darius’s voice crackled over the earpiece. “Second half of the payment just came through.”
“Seriously, what the fuck,” James repeated. The ruse worked—because the target wasn’t going to take the fake photos back to analyze? James couldn’t wait to break into this guy’s home to see how he lived. Did he also leave his beer to warm in the pantry?
How did someone this incompetent manage to hire Darius for a hit?
The target tapped his phone again, and James’s tablet went dark.
“Fuck,” James muttered, tapping the screen. Then he pressed a button. No response. “Darius, I’m blind here.”
