She jumped out with him and together they approached the truck. They both smelled blood long before they saw the bodies of Cruz, Fish, and Ocho. All three had been shot execution-style.
The corpses were cold. Whoever had done the killings had been gone for some time.
And all of the crates of liquid UV were missing.
“Oh, my God,” Devony murmured. “Do you think LaSalle double-crossed them?”
Rafe shook his head. “I don’t know. Fish said the crates belonged to an arms dealer. Apparently, LaSalle’s contact needed someone to play middleman.”
“Expendables,” Devony guessed.
Rafe nodded. “Yeah, but this seems more professional than payback from a local gun runner. I’ve seen this kind of carnage before. A few months ago in Montreal, after an Opus death squad took out a pharmaceutical tycoon and his entire estate.”
“There’s LaSalle’s yacht,” she said, pointing toward the marina. Light glowed from the windows of the massive white vessel docked at the end of a long pier. “He’s still here.”
Rafe didn’t like the look of it. Or the smell. If the area around the truck reeked of death, LaSalle’s yacht carried the stench of a slaughterhouse.
“Opus’s assassins have been here too,” he muttered.
He didn’t like the idea of Devony approaching the yacht alongside him, but she’d already demonstrated that she wasn’t the type of partner to take a backseat when faced with danger.
And thank God for that earlier tonight.
His skin still felt like hell, but it didn’t slow him down as they crept up on LaSalle’s vessel and cautiously boarded it.
The place was silent except for the chatter of a sports telecast blaring from somewhere in the main cabin. Armed bodyguards had been shot at point-blank range in the head. Crew members had suffered similar fates, some with their throats slashed. Rafe moved quickly through the cabin, his ear trained to the faint rasp of fading breaths and the slowing tick of a dying heart.
“It’s LaSalle,” Devony said.
The man lay in the main salon of the yacht with several other of his crew. Blood painted everything, including the large-screen TV on the other side of the luxurious living space.
Rafe hunkered down next to Judah LaSalle. “Tell me who you’re working for.”
All he got was a wet wheeze in reply. The human was too far gone to talk. He had seconds left, maybe less.
“What’s wrong, LaSalle? Opus decide you outlived your usefulness?” Rafe demanded. He grabbed hold of LaSalle, giving him a jolt of healing—just enough to extract a little sound from his drowning lungs. “Goddamn it, tell me who your contact is.”
“I don’t . . . don’t know.” Blood bubbled in the corners of the dying man’s mouth. “I don’t have . . . don’t have a contact. I just . . . just do what they ask me. Then money shows up in my . . . in my bank account.”
“Do you think he’s telling the truth?”
Rafe glanced up at Devony. “There’s one way to find out.”
Placing his palm over the human’s clammy brow, he tranced him and asked the question again. LaSalle told him the same thing. He never had direct contact with anyone—at least, until tonight.
“Who was it that did this?” Rafe asked.
LaSalle weakly shook his head. “I swear . . . don’t know. They said I . . . said I fucked up. They said . . . said you and the girl . . . said you both had to go.”
Rafe swung a look at Devony. “We need to get out of here.”
She wasn’t paying attention to him anymore. Her gaze was riveted to the blood-splattered TV screen. Rafe felt her shock in his own bloodstream, as cold as ice water.
The game had been pre-empted by a local news bulletin—a report of a massive explosion in a residential area of Back Bay. In the background behind the reporter, an inferno roared, ash and smoke billowing into the night sky as firefighters struggled to contain it.
Rafe let go of LaSalle. The man’s last breath rattled out of him as his body slumped to the floor again.
Rafe moved next to Devony. “Holy shit.”
