Chapter 1 – Hired Relief
It’s fucking raining.
Again.
It wasn’t that I minded the wet or the cold – I really didn’t, but it screwed with my aim and I was still trying to get back into the boss man’s good graces. I couldn’t really afford to miss. Against my better judgment when it came to an easy escape, I had put myself a little closer than I liked to be for this sort of job. I had to be sure to be successful, and if it cost me my life…well, that was better than failure at this point.
With my left eye closed, I looked through the scope of my Barrett M82 rifle. The crosshairs focused on a set of double doors made of glass and metal. The doors led inside of an office building, and there was a large “space available” sign over the entryway with a phone number to call if you wanted a thousand square feet, which was just right for your office needs. If you were to call the number, someone would answer, but you’d find there wasn’t really any available space.
Not unless you had the right connections – preferably Russian, quite probably illegal Caspian Sea caviar, and definitely heroin. Those connections might get you a little corner office, but they would not, however, endear you to Rinaldo Moretti – my boss and sole owner of all the Moretti businesses. Some of those businesses were even legal.
Well, one of them was.
Sort of.
I shifted my hip and stretched my back a bit. I had been in the same position for a good seven hours, and I was hungry. I brought a couple of protein bars with me, but they were long gone. This job wasn’t supposed to take this long, and I was getting frustrated and annoyed. I forced my breathing into a slow, regulated pace.
Frustration and annoyance were not my friends, not when I was on the job. I needed to keep my shit together long enough for my target to walk out the door and die.
Maybe the weather was causing a delay.
I reached up with my hand and tightened the cloth around my forehead. It was doing a decent job of keeping the rain from my eyes, but it wasn’t helping with the whole comfort level. I didn’t stop watching the door as I adjusted the bandana – never that. I had to be quick, efficient, and deadly.
No fuckups.
The last fuckup nearly cost me my life and had ended with me exiled to the desert for months, and that was just for killing the wrong guy. Missing the right one would be a lot worse. Of course, I couldn’t hit or miss him if he didn’t show up where he was supposed to be when he was supposed to be there.
“Calm, Arden.” I blinked as I realized I was actually talking out loud to myself. Not good. I didn’t like that shit, so I clenched my teeth a bit to remind myself not to do it again.
Everything had been perfect up until this point. After a week of scouring the Chicago city skyline, I had found the perfect building with the perfect view of the front doors. No visibility from the street directly below and nicely shielded from view of both the Willis Tower and the John Hancock Observatory. I only needed to be patient until…
…there he was.
I had no doubt the man in the grey trench coat was my target, though I had never met him before. I had studied his picture for hours yesterday to be sure I wouldn’t make a mistake. I’d probably been through his family photos more often than his wife had.
I blinked once, placed the crosshairs in position, and smoothly pulled back on the trigger.
Only a muted thump could be heard as I sent the bullet down the barrel and into his left eye. Before he hit the ground, I was already back away from the ledge of the building and disassembling my rifle to shove it into a gym bag. I moved the clothes around inside to cushion the metal and make it undetectable from the outside of the bag and then headed swiftly to the rooftop entrance.
Three minutes later I was on the other side of the building, out the door, and then taking the stairs into the parking garage across the street. At the top of the garage was a gym where I held a membership, and I made my way to the locker room inside. With my bag padlocked into a locker, I hit the Nautilus equipment.
It felt good to work out a bit. I had been slacking.
All thoughts of Thomas Farmer, chief board member of Electro Industrial (now deceased), vanished from my head by the time I had done my third set of weights. If it sent the right message to others about which crime lord you should align with, I might get a bit of a break, and Moretti might put me back on my normal pay scale.
Probably not.
Sweat replaced the rainwater in my hair, and after I’d done a rotation on the Nautilus, I went for the treadmill. From the front counter, there was a chick there who kept giving me the eye. She even brought me a towel when I finally got off the machine. She’d done the same thing the last time I was here, but I didn’t see her do it for anyone else.
“How was your workout, Evan?”
“Fine,” I replied. “Thanks.”
Great – she even bothered to look up my name.
She was twenty-four or twenty-five, five-foot-seven, blonde, and she had recently gotten a haircut – the ends were crisp and blunt – but she didn’t like how it had turned out. She was trying to pull off a little ponytail for a hairstyle that was far too short, using a rubber band from around a newspaper. She didn’t normally wear it that way, or she’d have one of those scrunchie things.
The first thought in my mind regarding her hair was to agree – it was too short. It also wasn’t dark enough. She didn’t have that classic Italian beauty look I preferred.
Preferred?
I wasn’t actually aware I had a preference, and I considered this as I gave her a smile, a quick thanks, and then headed to the shower. While the water poured over me, images of long, smooth dark hair – almost black, but not quite – and matching dark eyes flooded my mental vision. I could almost feel her smooth skin against my palms.
I shook water from my head and quickly changed my thoughts.
I was probably going to have to change gyms even though I had only recently joined this one. I didn’t need anyone paying attention to me, remembering me, and hitting on me. It was too bad, really, since the place was big enough to have a short wait time for the machines. Oh well. I could always work out at the gym adjoining my apartment, but the wait time for a treadmill meant spending half the day there for a sixty-minute workout.
Home again.
My apartment was a high-rise building right near the Chicago River. My boss owned the place, and it came with the job, so I didn’t have to pay any rent or anything. It was a nice perk, though I would have preferred living in the country somewhere. I had never lived in the country, but I always thought I would like it – open spaces for target shooting and enough room for Odin to run around and chase squirrels and shit.
I nodded at Pete, the security guard, as I walked by. I had no idea what his last name was, but he was on Rinaldo’s payroll. He smiled back at me, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes like it usually did.
I glanced ov
er him and quickly took in other changes. He was usually dressed pretty nicely, but on this day his normally ironed shirt was wrinkled, and the tie didn’t match. His eyes were a little bloodshot from either lack of sleep or possibly actual crying – I couldn’t really tell the difference.