That could wait. Clay made eye contact with Taser.
“You can just walk away from this,” he said. “None of us are going to the sheriff’s department, are we?”
Taser made an annoyed sound. “I’m here to do a job, not take a walk,” he said. “Where the fuck is the laptop?”
That was unexpected.
There had been eyes on them earlier in the park. Clay had assumed they’d been Fisher’s backup plan, just in case Clay went with that bad decision after all. He’d not even been mad. It was a fair enough concern. Clay had a rep for going rogue, even before Grade came on the scene.
It was like that old proverb, though. When you had too many enemies, any of them could be the one fucking you over right now.
Something like that, anyhow.
“Last chance to just back off,” Clay said. “No harm, no foul.”
Taser twisted his mouth into a reluctantly admiring smile as he shook his head. “You’ve got balls,” he said. “But we both know that you’d come after me. Because you think you’re a crazy fucker, and that’s what crazy fuckers do. Right?”
Clay shrugged one shoulder. “Multiple doctors have diagnosed me as a crazy fucker,” he said. “There’s no ‘think’ involved. The rest of it… you’re not wrong. It turns out I like Grade’s face unfucked up.”
“Don’t feel too bad,” Taser said. “The boss said no loose ends. This is always how it was going to go down. You just have to decide how hard it’s going to be.”
The fourth member of the team kicked the slashed chair over. “It’s not here,” he said. “Sundance checked downstairs, but he didn’t find anything either. He said that Cisco was in a bad way, though.”
Code names. Clay doubted they’d lead anywhere—who’d be that stupid?—but he made a note anyhow. Taser nodded his acknowledgment of that and stalked over to Grade. He grabbed a handful of hair and yanked Grade up until he could press the gun against the nape of his neck. What color there was in Grade’s face had drained away, the stray freckles over his cheekbones stark. His eyes, the socket of one shadowed in bruise tones, were flinty green.
“Tell me where the fucking laptop is,” he said. “Or your cleaner ain’t going to be able to clean his own ass.”
Grade swung his arm back and drove the knife he’d pulled out of the floorboards into Taser’s arm. The blade hit the body-armor greaves and skidded but caught in the gap between sleeve and cuff. Grade twisted the knife before he yanked it free, gagging at the sight of blood, and Taser fumbled the gun, then dropped it.
Clay threw himself forward. He grabbed the gun out of midair, just before he landed shoulder first on the wooden floor and rolled back up onto his knees. The gun settled easily into his hand. Mass production meant it felt familiar even though he’d never held this one before. He pointed it at Taser for a heartbeat, then pivoted on his knee and shot the fourth man in the head as he went for his gun.
The man gawped at Clay for a moment, his eyes wide and mouth slack as blood dripped down his forehead and into his eyes. Then he went down like a puppet whose strings had been cut, limp and awkward.
Clay got to his feet and turned in one smooth motion to point the gun at Taser.
“Who do you work for?” he asked.
Taser held up one hand to ward him off. His other arm was tucked in close to his body, the fingers on his hand curled into his palm like dead spider legs.
“I can’t tell you that, even if I wanted to,” he said. “We don’t take names, just money and the job. Look, like you said, we can walk out of here. You won. Fair play.”
“Shut up,” Clay said. He pointed at the bed with the gun. “Sit down.”
Taser licked his lips and glanced at the door, then at his dead friend. He sat down on the edge of the bed. Clay looked over at Grade as the other man scrambled to his feet and grabbed his discarded jeans to pull back on.
“You OK?” Clay asked.
Grade nodded, thought about it, and turned it into a shrug. He reached up to gingerly poke at his cheekbone with his thumb.
“Nothing broken,” he said.
“See?” Taser said. “Looks like you two fuckers came out ahead. I’m down two members of my team, and all you’ve got is a split lip.”
Clay ignored him.
“Take the taser off him,” he told Grade.
Grade did as he was asked. With the gun pointed at his head, Taser didn’t try anything funny. He handed the blocky plastic gun to Grade, who brought it back over to Clay. He tested the weight of it in his off hand.
