"So tell me," I said, trying to give Donovan Caine as much time as possible to come in behind them. "Of all the assassins out there, why did you pick me to double-cross?"
"Because you were the easiest to identify." "How?"
"What's the old saying? Loose lips sink ships? Or in your case, get your photo on the six o'clock news." Alexis chuckled at her seeming cleverness. "You might not know it, but my old friend Gordon Giles liked to visit hookers. Seems he needed a little help getting it up and was embarrassed by more traditional relationships." I'd seen exactly what kinds of relationships Gordon liked to have in his photo stash-ones that involved costumes.
"When I realized Gordon was suspicious about where so much of the company's money was going and was poking around, I made Stephenson follow him and pick up the women he was with to see what he'd told them, if anything," Alexis continued.
"Gordon was smart enough to keep his mouth shut to the whores, but Stephenson got some interesting information out of one of them. Information about an assassin called the Spider."
So that's how they'd found us. No good deed goes unpunished. Fucking pro bono work.
"It turned out you'd done some work for the hooker. Killed a cop for her. It took some legwork, but I managed to identify your handler and contact him. The rest was easy." Alexis smiled.
I flashed back to the file Fletcher had compiled on Gordon Giles. Fletcher had noted Giles's tendency to visit hookers. Not to mention all the kinky pictures I'd found along with the flash drive. So Giles had visited the woman whose daughter had been raped. The one who'd contacted Fletcher and asked me to kill Cliff Ingles. We'd come full circle with the irony and bad luck tonight.
Finn stared at Alexis. Hate flashed in his green eyes, making them burn even brighter than hers did. A muscle twitched in his puffy cheek, but he held himself still. Finn knew better than to make any sudden moves. He knew I'd take care of Alexis-or die trying.
"The old man was easy enough to find at the barbecue joint," Alexis continued. "But you, we never could spot you."
Of course they couldn't. I took great pains to make sure no one ever followed me from the Pork Pit back to my apartment. Besides, I was just another lowly restaurant worker. As Evelyn Edwards, the asylum shrink had said, someone like me couldn't possibly have been moonlighting as someone like the Spider in my spare time.
"So that's why you brought Brutus in," I said. "To take me out at the opera house.
Since you couldn't find me to do it yourself after the fact."
"Brains too. Aren't you the complete package?" Alexis smiled again. "But enough talk. Let's get down to business. Do you have the flash drive?"
I slowly reached into my jeans pocket and pulled it out. "I do."
"That's it?" she said. "That's the only drive? You haven't made any other copies?"
"I couldn't copy the drive. Gordon Giles encrypted it with some kind of weird software. You look at it the wrong way, and all the data gets erased." An easy lie. Just before I'd left the apartment, I'd used my laptop to send out a timed e-mail with all the information on it. At exactly six o'clock tomorrow morning, the e-mail would be sent to officials at the police department, the Ashland Trumpet newspaper, and Mab Monroe. Unless I was alive to stop it. Just a bit of added insurance. I might die tonight, but Alexis James's days would be numbered as soon as Mab got the e-mail. I'd feel that satisfaction even in death.
"What about Donovan Caine?" Wayne Stephenson spoke up. Alexis turned to him.
"What about Caine?"
The captain stared at her. "She had to be the one who saved him from those men you sent after him. They've got to be working together. So where is he? Why isn't he here?
You said it yourself. He's a loose end that needs to be tied off." Alexis dismissed his concerns with an airy wave of her hand. "We'll find the detective later. He can't hide forever. The assassin's here, and she's got the flash drive. You know what to do. Kill her. Now."
Stephenson didn't hesitate. He raised his gun and fired at me.
The bullet slammed into my chest, spun me around, and knocked me to the ground.
The flash drive flew out of my hand and landed somewhere on the rocky floor of the quarry. Stephenson might have been a crooked cop, but his aim was true. The bullet hit my heart dead on. It would have been a lethal shot-if I hadn't been wearing my vest.
I usually wore some sort of vest when I worked, especially when I knew I was going into a meeting that wasn't going to end well. Made it easier to carry certain supplies, like fake IDs and cash. But this particular vest was special because it was embedded with silverstone. The metal was tougher than Kevlar and would stop anything short of a missile. It would even absorb a fair amount of elemental magic before it started to soften and melt.
Funny, how it had come in handy already.
But the force of the bullet still hurt, like I'd been beaned in the chest with a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball. But I gritted my teeth and lay perfectly still, waiting for the inevitable.
The echo of the gunshot reverberated through the rock quarry, booming like thunder off the walls. It slowly faded away, replaced by an eerie quiet. The stone under my cheek muttered uneasily at the sharp retort, but I blocked out the noise. Ten ... twenty ... forty-five ...
I hadn't even counted to a minute when I heard the words I'd expected from Alexis James. "Get the flash drive," she said. "And put a couple more in her head, just to be sure."
I had to admire her thoroughness, if nothing else. Footsteps crunched on the rocky ground behind me. The tread was slow and even, and I couldn't tell which one of the three men she'd sent over. My hand curled around the knife I'd palmed. Didn't much matter.
A hand settled on my shoulder and turned me over. I looked up into the man's face.
Carlyle's friend from the Cake Walk. His eyes widened in surprise, and his lips pulled back, revealing a pair of yellow fangs.
"She's not-"
Last words he ever said.
I rammed my knife into his heart. The man stumbled back, and I used his momentum to pull myself up. The move surprised the others, and they stood there, not quite sure what had happened.
"Run!" I screamed at Finn and Roslyn. "Now!"
Finn slammed his shoulder into the second man, who stumbled back. Roslyn darted past him and sprinted away. Finn fell in step behind her, and the two of them ran as best they could with their hands cuffed behind their backs. They disappeared around an outcropping of rock. Stephenson and the other guy didn't know what to do -shoot Finn and Roslyn or come after me.