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Moreover, driving his truck might make them think his guard was down, that he wasn’t expecting a move on him. Felice would know better, and so would Al: his guard was never down. But the men she’d hired wouldn’t know, and that was to his advantage.
He spotted the eyes as soon as the garage door lifted and he drove out: a white Chevrolet Malibu, parked five or six units up, opposite side of the street. One guy.
Dumb asses. How obvious could they get? Okay, rephrase that: maybe not dumb asses, but definitely civilians. He shouldn’t underestimate them, but react as if they were seasoned veterans of black operations.
Less than a mile from the condo, he picked up a tail. Not the guy in the white Malibu, but a gray truck, a Dodge. Smart move; the truck would put the shooter on the same level with him if he attempted a shot while speeding down the road, the two trucks side by side. Risky way to do something, but a possibility they should consider, and on a perverse level he appreciated that they’d covered that base.
Two men, he noted as the gray truck drew a car length closer. He didn’t spot a backup, not even the guy in the white Malibu. Just two? Fuck, he felt insulted.
But now he could deal with the team on his own terms, in his own way. He swerved in and out of traffic but drove smoothly, easily, not as if he were trying to shake a tail, but as if he were in a hurry to get somewhere. They fell back, but not too far.
As luck would have it, the empty stretch of road wasn’t empty; a couple of cars and a semi came barreling past, spaced just far enough apart that the gray truck couldn’t pull even with him. Shit, now he had to string them out. He could easily have taken them off the road with his heavier, reinforced vehicle and handled the problem there, but now they were entering a more populated neighborhood and the chances for either of them to act had just gone down.
In the meantime, what was Lizzy doing? His secure phone had buzzed a couple of times, but he kind of had his hands full at the moment.
He hit a stretch with a long string of traffic, preventing the shooter from moving in on him, and grabbed the phone. Yeah, yeah, don’t text and drive. He did what he had to do.
The texts made him laugh out loud. “She mugged me and stole my car.”
“Cool.”
His guys were the best. The muggee would take a lot of teasing over the coming months. He thumbed a reply: “Got 2 on my ass. Will handle. Can you tail her?”
“No can do,” came back the almost instant reply.
“K. I’ll pick up her signal once I handle these 2 bozos.”
He put the phone down, relief coursing through him. Lizzy was not only okay, she was functioning in a way none of them had expected, not even him. She’d mugged one of his guys? Okay, so not one of them would lift a finger to her, but still … yeah, it was cool.
And he still had the two on his ass to deal with.
His favorite park for running was one that would be perfect for him now, partly because he knew every inch of it. It was the right terrain for serious runners who liked some challenge in their workouts. The lunchtime traffic was thinning, but it still took him almost ten minutes to reach the park. The last of the lunchtime runners were just finishing up their routes, and there were several places to park. The jogging trails would be most crowded early in the morning and late in the afternoon, when the weather wasn’t so brutally hot, so with a little luck he shouldn’t have to deal with any witnesses.
The men following him might wonder what the hell he was doing here, but what they thought didn’t matter as long as they followed him. They could reasonably look at his stop at the park as a godsend, allowing them to corner him in a secluded area. He repressed a snort. Yeah, right. Dream on, buddies.
If they wanted him in a place where there were no cameras, no witnesses, their wish was about to come true.
He parked his truck near the head of the dirt trail and bolted for it, disappearing into the heavy cover as the gray truck wheeled into the parking lot.
To his left, the stand of trees thickened; limbs hung over the trail. The location he had in mind was a thickly wooded portion of the trail, where it wound back and forth in sharp curves that created blind spots, with boulders and thick bushes providing additional cover.
He plunged off the path, behind the cover of some big tree trunks, drew his weapon, and waited. The position was a good one, allowing him to see the running path as well as the most likely route if they decided to play it safe and stick to the woods beside the trail.
Best tactic was for them to do both: one coming up the trail, the other in the woods.
Right on cue, he heard footsteps pounding on the path, then slowing, moving ahead more cautiously. Through a small break in the trees, Xavier saw a man move past. Mid-thirties, just starting to lose some hair along the temples, the guy looked like thousands of other men in the area—casual clothes, nothing threatening about him at all.
Xavier knew where that guy was. He switched his attention to the wooded area, straining to hear a rustle, a snap, the clatter of a rock. Where was the other one?
The first man moved into view, his head swiveling. Xavier stood motionless, his drab clothing blending into the background. The human eye, particularly an untrained one, saw motion more than detail. He waited, studying his prey through a tiny opening in the brush and trees, noting the noise suppressor on the weapon in the guy’s right hand.
Thank you, buddy, Xavier thought as the man passed him by, and he silently stepped onto the path behind him.
He took him down with a massive punch to the back of the neck. The guy grunted as he went down, the only sound he had time to make as Xavier wrenched the suppressed weapon from his hand, pressed it to the back of his head, and fired.
The man twitched once, and that was it.
Even a suppressed shot wasn’t silent; the other man on the team might have heard, depending on how far away he was. Xavier assumed he’d be close; otherwise they were piss-poor tacticians. Likely he’d think the shot came from his partner’s weapon—which actually it had—but he had no way of knowing whether or not Xavier’s weapon was also sound-suppressed. Only a complete idiot would yell, “Did you get him?” and these guys weren’t idiots. Too inexperienced to be playing this game with him, but not idiots.
