I hope we didn’t miss anything and this little side quest of Noah’s doesn’t come back to bite us in the ass.
“Yeah. I know. Sorry.” To his credit, Noah sounds genuinely remorseful.
“I need you to stop going rogue.” I glance over at him in the passenger seat. “For your protection. And mine. You promised you’d be more careful, and we’d agree on targets and timing.”
“I know. But this guy was scum, Wes.”
I sigh. He’s right.
Noah and I both spend too much time on the dark web. He canvases chat rooms and message boards for targets, and has an anonymous contact who feeds him information. I’m on there searching for information and clues so we can vet the targets and locate them. He’s ideas, I’m execution.
The man Noah killed was named John Williams.
Williams fit all our criteria.
He targeted young women.
He was a rapist.
He’d already killed at least two of the women he assaulted.
Police don’t often prioritize solving cases of assault or murder of immigrants, sex workers, or homeless women. Because the women Williams targeted were so far from home, they didn’t have families here on the ground demanding attention to their missing person or homicide cases. Some of those families probably don’t realize their daughters are even gone.
The cops are fucking it all up, as they often do in these kinds of situations.
We pick up what the police drop. Usually in a more organized fashion than this. I wanted to wait for more information on John Williams, but Noah never wants to wait once he has someone on his radar. He gets hyperfocused on eliminating them beforetheycan eliminate anyone else.
Which, fair.
We’ve been doing this for a decade, but lately, Noah’s gotten sloppier. He doesn’t like that I try to slow him down.
My phone buzzes in the cup holder, and at the next red light, I click open a new notification on Gone, the highly encrypted app I use to communicate with clients.
CC95
Can you help me find someone?
The message fades and fades until it disappears completely within seconds. Screenshots are disabled within Gone, but obviously I’ve found a way around that when needed.
But I have no idea who this CC95 person is. Usually people find me through referrals. It’s not like there’s a directory of people who do my kind of people-finding work. I’ll respond to CC95 later, after we finish cleaning up the mess in our trunk.
“I got directions to a spot,” Noah says, staring at his phone.
“Yeah? Better be good.”
“We’re in Florida,” Noah says. “Lots of creepy places to ditch bodies.”
And he’s right.
Two hours later, Noah takes over driving as we leave the Everglades and head to Orlando to catch a flight back home. You couldn’t pay me to live in a state where you can toss a body into a swamp and reasonably assume that alligators will take care of the mess for you.
With Noah driving, I finally have a chance to open Gone again to respond to the message that popped up hours ago.
Noah and I both have multiple streams of income. I take cybersecurity project work for corporations via a freelanceagency. It’s boring as shit but I get paid well. On the side, I find people for significant sums of money. According to the IRS, Noah’s main source of income is renovating cabins in the spring and summer.
And we’re hobby serial killers, which I realize sounds a bit fucked up. No one pays us to kill people. We do it for the greater good.
Everyone’s fucked up in their own way, I guess.
