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I wasn’t happy that my phone had gone off right as Fletcher had texted to let me know he was arriving on our street. I had snickered though, when he askedwhat in the American Horror Story place I lived in?
Funny that he’d see it this way. Yes, most places here were abandoned and half finished, but some of the homes were quite beautiful, sporting Victorian touches. Personally, I found the place peaceful, like my own little slice of an oasis.
One I was glad to come back to now.
I’d spent a good twenty minutes on the phone with Reuben. In the network, he was the one we liked to call the Disposer. Once a job was finished, if we didn’t have the means to clean it up as sufficiently as I’d liked, he’d sweep in after us and do a controlled burn, or something equally as useful.
Once, we’d ran out of time on a job in Louisiana and had to leave the scene when the neighbors started to get nosy and poke around. Not ideal, and not a mistake we ever made again. But Reuben came behind us and made it all go away.
Strategically busting the water lines so the house flooded, cleaning away any evidence accidentally left behind. Which, there was none, but better to take precautions at every turn.
He’d even brought a few gators out and opened the door. As the body washed out into the yard, the gators had a good dinner. It was also pure luck the house was relatively close to the swamp.
Earlier, Reuben had been hysterical. Something of a shock to me, given the man was six-foot-four, two hundred and forty pounds, and with about a twenty word vocabulary. As a man of few words, I’d always found him more interesting and more trustworthy than the others in the network. Not that that was saying much.
But on the phone, Ruben sounded like any minute someone was about to break down his door. Swore someone was after him, now that Dion was dead.
I chuckled to myself as I turned off the car. Ridding myself of that infectious disease, I hadn’t intended to start mass pandemonium, but I can’t say I wasn’t happy with the result.
According to Reuben, no one knew who killed him. There were too many to suspect, not surprisingly. The man was a snake in the grass, not even attempting to hide his stripes. But one thing that was on everyone’s mind, especially after the death of Daddy—I couldn’t even think of it without gasping for breath—who was out to get the network?
Pushing the images of that day out of my head, I focused back on Dion, and how satisfying it was to rid the world of one more monster. He wasn’t the typical man that we targeted, but there was no denying he wasn’t good. And his liability, and out of network connections, had made his death worth more than his life.
Dion had only been one link in the chain, but I suspected there were others, and some group was always working to take down the Network. Which was exactly what Reuben was afraid of. The network was worse than playing telephone, with the way rumors flew and morphed into bigger than life stories.
Reuben regaled me with an entertaining tale about how an outside faction was gunning for our group, and whoever it was had more information on the network and its associates than he liked.
Rick opened my door and held out a hand to help me out. I didn’t need his help to climb out of a car, but I took it all the same. With Rick, I’d learned really fast that I enjoyed his brand of calming touch. It was never handsy, unless I invited it to be, never aggressive.
I was starting to think I needed his steady affection.
“How was the job?” He pitched his voice low and didn’t make any moves to shuffle me toward the door. That could only mean he hadn’t been waiting for me by himself.
Grinning, I stepped forward, shut my door with my hip, and wrapped him in a loose hug he immediately returned. “Pointless.”
He didn’t ask any questions, he never did. But I was feeling a fair amount of irritation for wasting an entire evening, so I gave him a little more. “One of my associates thought he was being watched. Apparently, he’d had a run in with another group and thought they were trying to track him down. I went to look at the evidence.”
The key to surviving this world was to always keep a clear head, and unfortunately, Reuben had lost his cool. The information he wanted me to check out seemed highly unlikely to lead me further down the chain or toward Red Death, but I needed to see that for myself.
Turned out, it was a group called Carnage, out of South America, on his ass. Apparently, Reuben liked to gamble on the underground fights, and owed them quite a bit of money. The stupid man had asked me to take care of them for him.
Let’s just say I gave him a friendly reminder that neither I, nor my father, were assassins for hire.
“And he’s just paranoid?” He wasn’t prying for more information, merely trying to understand what I was sharing with him.
“Oh, he wasn’t paranoid, someone is after him, it just has nothing to do with anything related to our association and more his own poor decisions.” Stepping back, I kept my gaze on his as I headed toward the few steps up to the door. “How were things with Fletcher?”
“Mind numbing,” he grumbled, then winced as if he shouldn’t complain to me.
I laughed anyway. “It wasn’t that bad, was it?”
Shaking his head, he placed a hand on the small of my back. His warmth bled through the thin material of my shirt, making me all too aware of how close he was standing against my back.
“He’s just very chatty.Verychatty. About random unimportant things.”
I couldn’t contain the snort of amusement as I stepped inside the house, and right into Fletcher.
He steadied me with hands on my hips as Rick plowed into my back. “Drew!” He acted like we were long lost friends who hadn’t seen each other a few hours ago. He was also weaving on his feet.
