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A clean slice.
I left him there to die, dancing away from the spray of crimson as it rushed to leave his severed carotid. I was gone before Billy Parker even finished choking on his own blood.
And I felt...incredible.
I sleptlike a baby after butcher butchering night.
Well, for the four hours I managed to sleep before the sounds of Becca moving around in our shared dorm woke me.
It’d been an entire week since then and only a couple days ago the stiffness and aching in my legs from the twenty-four-mile return trip to and from Parker and Sons finally leveled out to the normal daily burn. Really, I should’ve added two more miles to make it a murder marathon.
I kind of missed the ache if I was being honest.
It kept my mind off other things. Things Ishouldn’tbe thinking about.
Billy Parker’s murder hit the news just this morning. They found his body two days ago and the fact his wife didn’t report him missing and start an investigation sooner only served to cement I’d done the right thing. I didn’t know what it meant that I slept better after killing a man. That I didn’t lose my appetite. That I felt...good.
Not at all like the first time.
This time, I was certain there was nothing at Parker and Sons tying me to the murder. No prints, I’d wiped everything down that I touched. No camera footage, I was very careful to avoid the one camera in the plaza and honestly, I doubted it was even functional, judging by the antiquated look of it. There was nothing tying me to his death except for a very clean slit in a redneck bastard’s throat.
And that could’ve been done by anybody. More likely the same people who caught his fishy ass on a hook to be flayed. Though, I was fairly certain they hadn’t left any traces of themselves there, either.
I almost felt guilty when I finally secured the bug I’d been covertly trying to acquire on Monday night. And that same guilt ate at me when I planted it on Tuesday.
Ihatedthat I felt guilty. I shouldn’t. Not after the shit they’d pulled. Even if the self-proclaimed Queen of Briar Hall still hadn’t attacked, I knew they weren’t done toying with me. Once their meeting with the Aces and the other shit with the Mexicans was done, I’d be fair game again.
It was just like I’d planned. Easy in. Easy out. I didn’t go inside the Crow’s Nest to plant it. Not wanting to risk leaving so much as a stray hair behind to be found.
I’d had to settle for planting it just outside the kitchen window. It was strong enough to pick up conversations inside the house, albeit, not as clearly as I’d have liked. And the old wood siding gave me the perfect little knot to cram it into.
It wasn’t top quality and the battery needed to be replaced every three days, but barring a trip back to Lennox to visit my usual contact, it was as good as I was going to get.
They had exactly three things planned that I was now aware of:
In three days, on the holiday Monday, they were meeting with the Aces whom Corvus didn’t trust, but didn’t think was at fault for the death of some guy named Randy.
In two days, Sunday, they would be making some kind of exchange with the Mexicans. I had to assume guns or drugs but couldn’t be sure. They were all a little on edge about that one.
And tonight, in exactly three hours, at eleven, Rook would be up against some sorry sucker named Conor Jones in an illegal fight ring in the basement of a bar called Sanctum.
Two of those things, I was planning to attend as a ghost. The fight and the Aces meet.
The thing with the Mexicans was too far. I could jack a car, but from the sound of it, it was in the middle of nowhere, so they’d easily spot a tail. And the ride would be too long for me to be able to get away with climbing into their trunk. An option I was considering for the Aces meet to avoid the thirty-mile round trip run to what they liked to refer to as no man’s land. Which was basically just a fancy way of saying Spirit Lake, the all but abandoned village just east of Thorn Valley. The only place within a hundred-mile radiusnotclaimed by a gang.
Talk about a useful bug, am I right?
Though knowing all of this paled in comparison to the fact that I was pretty sure Corvus would shit an actual brick if he knew I’d one-upped him and was eavesdropping oneverything.The thought alonebrought me so much joy I’d been living on cloud nine all week.
I’d gotten evenmoreahead on all my projects, academic and extracurricular. Becca and I had a new routine of evening horror movie watching and popcorn when she or I weren’t out—which I actually enjoyed. Way more than I thought I ever would.
She seemed sad lately, and I didn’t feel bold enough to ask her about it, so I simmered in silence hoping that one day whoever made her upset would cross my path so I could cheerfully gut them.
But all good things had to come to an end.
I lowered myself behind the burgundy SUV across the street from Pop’s Midnight Cafe where the owner, a balding man in his late forties, would soon be exiting with his weekly cash deposit to drop off at the bank on his way home. Like he had done the last two Friday’s before this one.
It paid to pay attention. Literally.
