He looks me straight in the eye, not even blinking his dark brown eyes, the color reminding me of Whisper's. For her, I won't allow myself to become the killer I can so quickly be, but I can sure as fuck scare the shit out of Butch Cassidy.
“Don’t know who you mean?”
“Fair enough, probably been a few of them you’ve killed.” I take my phone out and locate the image and shove it under his nose. “Jog your memory now?” I talk louder than necessary. My damn ears are ringing.
I know the answer already, see it in his eyes.
"Yes." He doesn't look away from me because he knows how fucked he is. Dickwad's got balls… for the moment.
“Well, Cowboy, you’re fucked, and I think you’re smart enough to know when there comes a time in your line of business where there’s no point of return when you make a mistake and get caught. We’re currently your biggest mistake.
“Cowboy’s phone’s clean,” Joel comments next to me. I’m sure it is.
“Who do you work for?”
"Don't know his name; never seen him. He uses a burner phone. I do the job and get paid for it." Fucker isn't lying, standard set-up between a killer-for-hire and the contractor.
What fucks with my mind is he has no clue why he killed Adam, it was just a job—nothing more—a fat wad of cash.
I enforce for my club, and there's always a reason, and it's always a bad guy. We're not the bad guys. We don't deal in drugs; we don't use innocence for monetary gain. We deal in property. We get scum off the streets who have fucked with us.
The last people I killed, the nomads who took Santana and Ruby; the redneck necrophiles’ who were going to take Santana’s dead body and do sick things to it, deserved it. Homer may have won the rock, paper and scissors game, but I don’t doubt Ellwood would have joined in.
“Where were you going after this?”
“I had to report back via my burner phone and I would get the next instructions. It’s not personal.” Oh, that’s where you’re wrong, motherfucker, it’s very personal to me.
"It never is with you killers-for-hire, but that was my friend you killed." I'm disgusted with his inability to show remorse in his last moments, because I've decided, fuck it, he deserves no mercy. No handing over to the suits. "You have no clue why you're killing innocent people. It's the bastard you're getting your orders from who killed a woman recently and had his hand in killing many more." I know Filip gave him his orders. "He worked for a man this brave female killed to save other women from being trafficked. One of the women killed was my friend's sister—an innocent—like all the women before her. You stole the life of my friend, his mother's only other child. You take your orders blindly and don't want to know if you are killing a good or bad person, because it's all the same to you." I shake my head in barely contained rage. "I kill fuckers like you because you're not innocent, you're after easy money. Well, fuck you!" I open up No Mercy and find the melon baller. "You never see the good people so that you won't need your sight."
But first, I shove my phone close to his face. "Smile." He grimaces, and I take a photo. Then I pick up the cowboy hat lying at my feet and slap it back on his head. He tips his head back further. He's trying to save face. Pride keeps him from cowering. I take another pic for Boxer's suits. This is Adam's killer, and I want a face to remember.
Then Cowboy dips his head and hunches over. That’s not going to save him.
I hear a crunching noise.
What the fuck?
Boxer pushes the guy’s head up, but it’s too late. He’s foaming at the mouth and making gurgling noises, his eyes rolling backward.
What do you know? Cowboy had a Plan B.
“Christ!” Boxer growls out. “He’s bitten off one of the buttons on the embroidery of his shirt.”
Fuck-shit!
“Looks like he ingested cyanide,” he adds.
The guy’s dead.
FUUUCK!
"Okay, boys, leave this mess to me and get your asses on that plane while I give the manager a good talking to." Jerry-the-alphabet-suit has arrived back, and I for one am happy to leave him to sort the mess out. Better him than all of us being stuck here to answer questions when nobody is supposed to know we were here.
“You all go ahead.” Boxer isn’t gonna disagree with Jerry-the-alphabet. “I’ll just let him know what went down here and where the manager currently is. It can be staged as an attempted robbery that went horribly wrong.”
You don’t need to tell me twice.