Loitering With Intent (Stone Barrington 16)

L o i t e r i n g w i t h I n t

e n t

want Japanese blowfish? You want Iranian caviar? It’s all on the Internet, for delivery the next day.”

“I never thought of the Internet for food.”

“Oh, you can order all your groceries on the Internet,” she said.

“The freshest foods, all delivered to your door.”

“I wonder if you could order a hit man on the Internet?” he mused.

“What?”

“A hit man, an assassin.”

“Oh, I’m sure. I’ll bet there’s a website called hit man dot com or something.”

“If there is, you can be sure it’s operated by the FBI or a police department.”

“Why?”

“Don’t you see all these news stories on TV where somebody, a husband or wife usually, tries to hire a hit man to off the spouse, and he turns out to be a cop?”

“Yes, I have seen that story, now that you mention it. How can people be so stupid?”

“What’s stupid is trying to murder someone,” Stone said. “Even if you got lucky and found a competent pro, it would always come back to bite you on the ass.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean that people in jail solve an inordinate number of homicides.”

“How do they do that?”

“Let’s say you want to have me knocked off …”

“Knocked off what?”

“Knocked off my perch, capped, murdered.”

“Okay, let’s say.”

“Let’s say you wander into the right bar and somebody offers to buy you a drink, and the evening passes and you learn that this 133

S t u a r t W o o d s

guy is willing to do unusual work for a price. You hire him to kill me …”

“How much would that be?”

“Almost anything: five hundred, ten thousand, whatever the traffic will bear.”

“Traffi c?”

“The free market.”

“Okay, I hire him to kill you, then what?”