No one would have been able to save me from Ryker. His influence ran too deep. If I had denied him, it would have been Cassandra learning to kill for cash, and honestly, she pulled off a pantsuit better than combat boots.
My sister was way too smart to waste her life doing what I did. Every time I mourned the loss of my childhood, I just cried right into the big ol stack of money Damian paid me for each job.
The money that put a roof over Naomi’s head and sent Cass to Harvard.
Boo hoo. Poor Cal. Can do whatever he wants with no consequences and has the money and power to keep his family safe. Tragic.
Anyway, back to how scary Damian is… To give you an idea of how deep his influence runs, the number of dirty cops he has in his pocket would alarm me if it didn’t usually work to my advantage.
This is why I got away with being a little bit more,ahem,‘cavalier’about my activities than most of my colleagues tended to be. And, though Damian hated bailing me out of trouble when it had something to do with my hobby and not an actual job, he still would.
He had invested too much time and money into me to let me get lost in the system, and despite my reckless nature, you couldn’t argue with my success record.
You wanted ‘em dead? I would get ‘em dead. It just might be a bit messier than it needed to be… but hey. Love what you do, amiright? This wouldn’t be half as fun if I didn’t get to do fun little car chases like this from time to time, so fuck it.
Keeping close to the house so it would be more difficult to shoot me if therewasa guard detail inside, I made my way around the perimeter, peeking into windows and checking doorways. Places like this usually had security systems, and most dumbasses put the little sticker advertising what system was guarding their homes.
These could deter a casual B&E from a regular joe shmoe, but when you were fucking with professionals like me, it just made my job easier. Most security systems ran on embedded firmware that could potentially have known vulnerabilities.
If this home’s system ran on vulnerable firmware, Vox could exploit those weaknesses to gain control of the system.
Sure enough, in the bottom left-hand corner of this douchebag’s fancy French doors was a blue sticker that said: Property monitored by Silver Security Systems.
I snapped a picture and fired it off to Vox on our encrypted chat. He sent me a thumbs up again, and I made my way back to my car to get my wardriving laptop. Firing it up, I gave Vox remote access.
Once my cursor started moving on its own, I left the laptop in the front seat and started gathering all my shit.
I may be a hot mess when the action hits, but when it comes to being prepared for the main event, I’m insanely meticulous. Obviously, I had gone through my murder kit, like, forty-seven times before leaving the house the night before, but I gave it one more thorough tally before feeling ready to get to business.
I swung the black duffle over my shoulder just as my phone vibrated in my pocket. I slid it out and grinned behind my bandana at Vox’s fourth thumbs-up of the day.
I was in.
Buddy’s name was actually Kyle Bradshaw, and he was a fuckingjudge.
Classy.
Once Vox had breached the alarm system, I searched the home to find that there was no one else in the house, meaning I had free reign to do whatever the fuck I wanted with Judge Bradshaw.
Of course, there was always a risk someone would come home while I was busy with him, but that would honestly just be a bonus. If he had a wife, which seemed to be the case, considering he was wearing a ring, I would need to determine whether or not she needed to die, too. If she had laid one fingeron that boy, I was icing her ass as well, so hanging out till she came home just made sense.
If you kill them, they will come.
HA!I was on a roll with the pop culture references today.
Anyway, while waiting for Krusty Kyle to wake up, I hunted down his modem and sent a picture of the make and model to Vox. I got a thumbs down, which meant Kyle, or someone he had hired, had changed the default username and password.
This shocked me. It wasextremelyrare for people to know how to do this. Like, unless you’re in IT or do what I do, you wouldn’t know how to change the admin password. The fact that Kylehaddone that raised serious red flags.
I mean, I guess you could argue that he was ajudgeand would want a super secure network, but you would be surprised.
Since I was literallyinthe house and I had my wardriving laptop with me, it didn’t matter. I just connected directly to the network and gave Vox remote access again.
Voila.
All your secrets were mine now,Dishonourable Kyle Bradshaw.
Bwahaha!
