CHAPTER 1
MILO
The smell of industrial bleach hit the back of my throat like a shot of cheap vodka. It was a familiar burn, comforting in a twisted way. Most people associated the scent with laundry, or swimming pools.
I associated it with erasing people's lives.
Reaching into my bag, I pulled latex gloves over my hands, snapping them against my wrists. The sound echoed off the marble walls in the eerie silence of the penthouse bathroom.
Beneath my boots, the expensive Italian tile was slick with blood. It pooled in the grout lines, the porous material absorbing it like a sponge. The man in the tub—or the pieces of him, anyway—hadn't gone down easy. This was messy, unprofessional work. Careless. Unplanned. Done in the heat of passion.
Pro work is clean. You put a drop cloth down. You wrap the head first. You don't let them bleed out on a white rug that cost more than a mid-sized sedan.
Eyeing the area rug I'd rolled up and thrown in the tub, I cocked my head and studied it for a moment. Then I shrugged. Maybe it didn't cost that much. But I knew it was fucking expensive.
I didn't judge the killing. That wasn't my business. I honestly didn't give a shit who these assholes killed or why they did it. But I judged the mess they left for me. After all, everybody's got standards.
These were mine.
I sighed heavily, scratching my jaw with my shoulder to avoid smearing blood on my face.
Once again, I eyeballed the mess they'd left me. Italians were too hot-blooded for their own good sometimes.
Dad always said the hardest part of the job wasn’t the gore. It was the smell of shit when the bowels released. You get used to the blood. The brain matter. The age or sex of the victim. But you never get used to the shit. He told me that when I was nine, as I watched him scrub brain matter off a plaster wall in a Motel 6 after a suicide.
He was right about the smell and the gore, but he was wrong about everything else in life.
My jaw began to ache and I made a conscious effort to relax. Dad used to do the same thing—lock his teeth together so tight you could see the muscles jumping under his skin. It was his tell. The one thing he couldn't scrub clean. Now it was mine, and I made the conscious effort to unclench.
I reached for the bottle of specialized enzyme cleaner in my kit. The label was nondescript, but the contents inside could dissolve biological material in minutes.
As I carefully removed the cap, my cell phone buzzed in my back pocket. I ignored it. The client knew the rules. Don't call me while I'm working. I’d send a picture of the clean empty room when I was done. That was the receipt. Whoever it was would call back.
Moving my head from side to side to stretch out the tension in my neck, I caught my reflection in the mirror above the vanity.
Blonde shaggy hair fell over my forehead. Mossy green eyes stared back at me, devoid of anything resembling shock or disgust. The hoop in my left ear caught the harsh bathroom light. I looked like I belonged on a surfboard in Malibu, waiting for the swell. I looked like the guy who sold you weed at a concert and bought you a beer after.
I winked at my reflection. The guy in the mirror winked back, same easy grin he always wore. Same empty eyes.
Showtime, Milo.
I crouched, my knees popping. At thirty…something, the joints were already feeling the decades of kneeling on hard floors very similar to this one, doing the same thing I was doing now. I'd spent more time with the dead than the living in my short life. But that was okay with me. I tended to like the dead better these days.
Pouring the solvent over the largest pool of blood, I waited as it foamed white, fizzing as it ate the proteins. I watched the chemical reaction with the same detached interest I gave a weather report.
The phone vibrated against my ass again. With a heavy sigh, I peeled off a glove and answered.
"You know my rules."
"We have a situation at Silver Table," Viktor’s Russian accent sounded in my ear. "Alleyway. It's messy."
The Russians, although not as hot-headed as the Italians, could still be a bit temperamental. Yet they usually booked me for jobs ahead of time. This must've been an unplanned hit. Which meant the pay would be double. "Be there in an hour."
I hung up, finished the Italian job and gave it a final spray of bleach, then took a picture of the clean bathroom and sent it to my contact. Grabbing the trash bag, I managed to make it out of the building and into my car without being seen, shoving the bag into the trunk of my car to dispose of later.
Parking as close as I could to The Silver Table restaurant, I walked the rest of the way, passing a couple arguing on the sidewalk outside a bar. She was crying and holding one arm gingerly against her chest like she was hurt. He was trying to hold her hand.
I kept walking.
