But he had heard something, and it must have been something pretty significant to wake him up when he was this drunk. He wanted nothing more than to close his eyes and drop his heavy head back onto his pillow, but Blake Standiford had been a member of the Mercadante crime family for a long time and he knew better than most how dangerous this time of day could be, when potential victims were sleeping and unaware, ripe for the taking.
So he squeezed his eyes closed in concentration and listed, and was almost ready to assume he had been dreaming when he heard it again.
Another thump, this less obvious than the first but still clear.
Someone was inside his house.
Someone was inside his fucking house.
Holy shit, his situation was even more perilous than he had thought. Big Tony was cleaning house prior to Shotgun Sammy’s men arriving in Vegas. That had to be it. He had sent one of his guys to take Blake out while he slept. The assassin was downstairs right now, getting the lay of the land, making sure there were no potential witnesses and familiarizing himself with an escape route as he prepared to put two slugs into his sleeping victim’s head.
Suddenly Blake wished he had had nothing more to drink tonight than soda water or, even better, several cups of good, strong, hot coffee. His head pounded and his vision swam and he felt suddenly like vomiting, but his thoughts were surprisingly clear.
There was still a way out of this if he kept his cool.
He knew Big Tony’s man—he wondered somewhere in the back of his mind who it was, not that it mattered, really—was here, and much more importantly, Big Tony’s man didn’t know that Blake knew he was here.
That fact gave Blake a small advantage, drunk or not. It wasn’t even a small advantage, it was a tiny advantage, but it might be enough. If Blake could take out Tony’s assassin, he should still have time to ambush the drug courier on its way into Vegas later today before hitting the road for parts unknown.
After all, if Blake was supposed to be dead, no one would expect him to rip off the family. It would be the perfect cover.
But he had to move fast, hangover or no hangover, drunk or sober, because Blake’s advantage of surprise would evaporate quickly. He had to get downstairs and hit the hitter before the guy got his shit together and came up to finish the job.
The self-righteous anger began building, burning through Blake’s alcohol-addled brain. Who the fuck did Tony Mercadante think he was? Did he not know by now that Blake was smarter and quicker and more devious than the rest of Tony’s crew combined?
Well, he would damn well find out soon enough.
Tony felt for his gun. It was right next to his pillow where it had fallen out of his hand as he slept. He wrapped his fingers around it and grabbed a flashlight he kept next to his bed.
Then he began creeping slowly and quietly down the hallway toward the stairs. He held his gun in his right hand and his flashlight in his left. For now, the flashlight was off, held next to the barrel of the Ruger SR9 pistol, ready to snap on when the time was right. His heart was pounding and his mouth was dry, still filled with the cotton his incipient hangover had deposited while he was sleeping.
He didn’t encounter the assassin coming the opposite direction on the stairway, and for that he was thankful. His goal was to get the drop on the man while the stranger was still getting his bearings in the first floor darkness.
The lack of light didn’t bother Blake. He knew this house like the back of his hand. He’d grown up here, inheriting the home when his mother died in a household accident several years ago, when Blake had engineered a fall for the elderly woman down these very stairs after deciding he could no longer put up with her constant hectoring, her self-righteous judgment of him for his choice of career field.
The stairs were solidly build and carpeted, which meant they were quiet, and now that he had a plan, Blake moved with a sense of purpose that came close to matching his nervousness and fear. It seemed to take forever, but eventually he reached the bottom of the stairs.
Then he hesitated. Where would the assassin likely be?
Blake guessed the hitter was clearing every room on the first floor. The guy was being careful. It was what Blake would have done.
And if that was the case, Blake decided the hitter would clear the living room and dining room first. Then he would move through the kitchen and, once satisfied, climb the stairs to the second floor. It made the most sense, given the layout of the house.
And since at least two minutes had passed since Blake heard the sounds down here, the odds were good that the hitter was even now padding softly through the kitchen.
Moving this way.
His decision made, Blake wasted no more time. He moved to the swinging door that separated the kitchen from the foyer hallway, hesitated just long enough to take a deep, steadying breath, and then burst through the door and flicked on his flashlight.
And found himself face to face with a large man. The man looked young and was dirty and disheveled, like he had been rolling around on the ground, with dried blood crusting one side of his pockmarked face.
And the man was holding a gun.
His eyes were wild and red-rimmed he looked every bit as surprised as Blake felt, and he wasn’t anyone Blake knew or even recognized and in a corner of his mind, Blake thought, Where the hell did Tony dig this guy up? and then he squeezed the trigger of the Ruger as the man was taking a step backward and the gun roared and the man staggered sideways as the surprised look on his face turned to shock, and then Blake fired again and the man went down in a heap on the kitchen floor.
He thrashed and kicked his heels, struggling to breathe through a chest with two 9mm slugs imbedded inside it, and then he coughed up a wave of blood and lay still.
Blake realized he was holding his breath, and he released it in an explosion. His hands were shaking and he felt sick to his stomach and his already pounding head felt like it might explode. He had killed before, many times, most recently the departed but unlamented Kathy Saldana, but in every instance he had felt totally in control, unthreatened personally.
This was different. This was a violation. This was some nameless scumbag breaking into his home to do him harm. He didn’t recognize the guy, but Big Tony obviously possessed resources far beyond what Blake had given him credit for and was willing to plumb the depths of those resources to eliminate him.
He edged forward, shaking, cautious. The intruder was no longer moving, but Blake wasn’t taking any chances. He stood over the motionless man, gun trained on him.
Bent down to pluck the hitter’s gun out of his hand.
And froze as a second man rounded the corner from his living room and stepped into the kitchen.
The man had a gun.
And he was pointing it at Blake.
32
The look in Blake Standiford’s eyes was one of utter, alcohol-and-adrenaline-fogged confusion. He was bent over, unmoving, hand extended toward Joel Stark as Jack rounded the corner. It was obvious the last thing he expected to see was a second intruder.
Jack closed the distance between them quickly, leveling his weapon at Standiford. The confusion in Standiford’s eyes lasted a split-second, and then was replaced by a kind of calculated cunning.
And then the mobster started talking, speaking rapid-fire, saying anything he could think of to try to delay the inevitable. “”Don’t shoot. We can make a deal. Whatever Big Tony’s paying you, I can pay you more. I’ve got a big score planned for later today and I’ll split the take with you, it’s gonna be millions, it’s gonna be enough to keep both of us rolling in dough for the rest of our lives, it’s gonna be . . .”
As he babbled, still bent awkwardly over Stark’s unmoving body, the mobster eased the barrel of his pistol steadily upward. He was moving slowly, raising his left hand in surrender, presumably to divert Jack’s attention from his other hand, which still held a lethal weapon. The angle of the gun was still wrong to present any danger to Jack.
Yet.
But that would change soon.
“ . . . the delivery is just outside the city, and it’s in just a few hours, and all we have to do is ambush the Mercadante guys with the money, take them out and then get out of town and we’ll both be rich and we can split up then and we’ll never have to see each other—”
Jack squeezed the trigger and a jagged crater opened up in Standiford’s skull. A surprisingly delicate spray of liquid crimson flew right as the body tumbled left.
Jack fired again.
Standiford’s body jerked as it dropped to the floor next to Stark and then lay still, surrounded by blood and tissue and bits of pulverized grey matter.
Jack moved quickly. His weapon had been fitted with a sound suppressor, but Standiford’s had not, and while he doubted the neighbors were close enough to have heard the sound of the gunfire—doubted they were even awake yet—there was no point in taking unnecessary chances, either.
He stepped outside the ring of devastation and leaned over, pressing two fingers lightly to Standiford’s wrist, feeling for a pulse.
Nothing.
He waited a moment to be sure, then repeated the exercise.
Nothing.
Checked Stark in the same way.
Twice.
Nothing.
Both men were dead.
Jack lifted the unloaded Smith and Wesson off the floor next to the fallen Joel Stark and slipped it into his ankle holster. He wiped the Walther clean on his shirt and then pressed Stark’s right hand around the grip, taking the time to manipulate the dead man’s pointer finger to leave prints both on the trigger guard and the trigger itself.
Jack had fired the gun twice earlier in the day in anticipation of the two slugs he expected to put into Blake Standiford here tonight. A serious investigation would reveal pretty quickly that Stark had not been the one to shoot Blake Standiford, but Jack doubted any such serious investigation would take place.
From a law enforcement perspective, this crime scene would be nothing more than a deadly display of cosmic karma—two slimeballs getting what they deserved at each other’s hands. The New York rapist breaks into the home of the Las Vegas mobster for reasons unknown. Maybe a drug deal, maybe a robbery; nobody knows and they don’t much care. Violence ensues and both men end up dead on the floor.
The fact that one of the dead men was the son of a New York cop might complicate matters for a while, but the investigation would quickly reveal Stark’s despicable criminal history, and that history would likely outweigh the family law enforcement connection in the eyes of the local cops.
And even if it didn’t, there was no way to tie the events to Jack, or—per the terms of the contract he had just fulfilled—to the Mercadante family. Investigators might have their suspicions; they almost certainly would, in fact. But in lieu of evidence to the contrary, the official line would have to be a robbery/home invasion gone bad. And that’s more or less true, Jack thought, except for the “gone bad” part.
Jack released Stark’s grip on the Walther and let it tumble to the floor. Then he dropped the man’s unresponsive arm and it thumped down onto the tile next to the weapon. He thought about gathering up some cash or jewelry and filling Stark’s pockets with it, then decided not to bother with what would be an unnecessary bit of overkill. So to speak. Time was ticking and he had already been here too long.
The authorities would either buy into the scene or they wouldn’t, and in the long run it didn’t matter anyway. Standiford was dead in a murder case that would be closed after a perfunctory investigation, and in the process Jack had managed to free Victoria Welling from a decade’s worth of unrelenting of terror, giving her at least the chance for a happy—and safe—life.
He flipped on the kitchen light and looked over the scene one last time, and then shrugged. The gruesome sight should have horrified him, particularly given the fact he had orchestrated it.
But it didn’t. He had no reaction to it at all, which he took as one more sign that maybe he it was time to begin considering a new line of work.
That was a concern for another day, though. Right now it was time—well past time, in fact—to leave. He retraced his steps to the back door and then eased through it, pulling it closed behind him. He hurried to Stark’s Monte Carlo and retrieved his things, then disappeared into the night.
He had some walking to do.
33
Victoria stretched and yawned, blinking rapidly as the early-morning sun fought its way through the cheap shades of the Tumbling Dice Motel. For the first time in what seemed like forever, she actually felt refreshed in the morning, having benefitted from a full night’s sleep, free from her usual nightmares and paralyzing fear.
She propped herself up on an elbow and glanced toward the door, expecting to see Harry Carson stretched out on the floor like he had promised he would be. Instead she saw a thin motel pillow and a couple of blankets in a pile, evidence Harry had been there, but he was currently nowhere to be seen.
She wrinkled her forehead in confusion. His strange post-two a.m. trip notwithstanding, he had struck her as dependable as a Swiss watch. If she hadn’t felt that way she would never have considered allowing this virtual stranger to drive her to his motel, no matter how frightened she had been.
The old familiar fear began to build. The luxury of a good night’s sleep, as refreshing as it was, didn’t change the reality of her situation. Joel Stark was still out there, prowling Vegas and waiting for the opportune moment to do her harm.
Harry Carson had been a true gentleman, offering her the gift of one night’s shelter from the unrelenting terror, a gift she had gratefully accepted. But Harry was here on business and he’d be leaving soon enough, maybe as soon as today. And when he left, Victoria would be no better off than she had been before meeting him. She would leave Las Vegas—probably today as well—and face a future of loneliness and fear, and of looking over her shoulder every minute of every day for the rest of her life.
The prospect was horrifying, and tears began to well up in Victoria’s eyes. Dread lurked in her belly. She took a deep, cleansing breath, which helped almost not at all.
One day at a time. Get through today before worrying about tomorrow. It was a mantra she had been using for years, one that had prevented her from suffering a nervous breakdown at the thought of the maniacal rapist chasing her around the country. She prayed it would help her now, because she could feel the terror growing inside her like a metastasizing tumor.
Victoria tamped down the fear and slipped out of bed. She was so small inside the shorts Harry had given her to sleep in that she held the waistband with one hand to ensure they didn’t simply slip over her hips and down her legs. She trudged to the window and pulled the curtain a couple of inches to the side, squinting against the glare.
Her heart skipped a beat as she spotted the now-familiar figure of Harry Carson crossing the lot, balancing a molded foam cup carrier in one hand, two lidded coffees jammed into it, and holding a paper bag in the other. She realized with a jolt of sudden surprise that she felt an uncomfortably strong attraction to this older stranger—a man she barely knew and who was clearly at least a decade her senior. It was a feeling she had not experienced in years and one she had given up on ever experiencing again.
Harry glanced toward the room as he approached and saw her peeking out the window. He gave her a wink and she felt a flash of embarrassment, like a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar. She let the curtain go and hurried to open the door.
“I’m not sure how you take your coffee,” he said as he entered, “so this bag is filled with sugar packets and single-serving creamers. I took so many I thought the coffee shop was going to charge me extra.”
Victoria accepted her cup with a grateful smile. She couldn’t quite fathom Harry’s ability to make her feel so at ease, but the fact was that he did. The sense of calm emanating from him was undeniable. They took seats across from each other at a small, round table and she pu
lled the lid off her cup, greedily inhaling the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee.
“I really needed this,” she said. “I would have taken it any way you wanted to give it to me.”
Harry grinned and she blushed. “You…you know what I mean,” she added weakly.
“Why, yes, I think I do,” he answered, refusing to let her off the hook. “But for now, at least, I think we should stick to breakfast and conversation, not that I don’t appreciate the sentiment.”
Victoria wished she could turn off the redness. Her face felt like one of the neon signs hanging in the windows at Tequila Mockingbird. She wondered whether her slip of the tongue was completely random or a manifestation of the attraction she was feeling.
“Anyway,” Harry continued, “thanks for making my day. If you’ll check inside the paper bag you might find a couple of cinnamon rolls. Not the healthiest of breakfasts, probably, but they’ll give us something to munch on as we discuss your future.”
Those simple words reminded Victoria of how silly she was being. Schoolgirl fantasies about the damsel in distress being rescued from by the mysterious stranger were appealing, but they weren’t going to accomplish anything in terms of keeping her safe. Or even alive.
She shook her head. “I already know what my future holds,” she said. “I’m going to leave Vegas as soon as I possibly can—hopefully by the end of the day—and head somewhere totally random. If I don’t know where I’m going to end up, there’s no way Stark can know, either. Once I get there—wherever ‘there’ is—I should have a few months of relative safety before he tracks me down again. When he does, I’ll run. Again. If I survive.”
Harry had started shaking his head when she was halfway through her statement. He had something to say, that much was clear, but rather than interrupting he waited patiently for her to finish.
Victoria raised her eyebrows. “What? Why are you shaking your head?”
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