by Tiya Rayne
After the first few rounds, we showered, ate, and spent the rest of the night talking. He told me all the things that Albany used to do with him. Simple things like watching movies, cooking, playing board games, and making him put together her furniture.
At that, I laughed because I always complained to my sister how much I hated putting shit together. We also compared notes and talked about the case. We are still no closer to figuring out the killer.
I woke this morning feeling refreshed and ready to start anew. His strong arms are wrapped around me. His legs are twisted with mine and that damn beast between his thighs is standing at full mast, pressed into my back. He brings his hand up to knead my breast.
“You might as well put that away, lover boy. I think my little pussy needs a break.” I gasp and laugh when he flips me over onto my back and climbs on top of me, he nestles his hips between my legs.
Walker smiles and plants a kiss on my lips. “You mean, my little pussy.”
Okay. I won’t take it from him. He earned that title. He kisses my lips again, lingering longer than two people that just woke up and haven’t brushed their teeth should.
“Let’s get some food and look at that flash drive again.” He gives me another peck before he climbs off of the bed. He reaches for the nightstand and then turns and looks down at the floor. “Have you seen my pants?”
I laugh as I come around the bed to join him. “They’re in the foyer, remember.” I pick up the dress slacks he had on the other night off the chair and hand them to him. He smiles and places a kiss on my lips.
“What would I do without you?” He laughs as we head into the bathroom to freshen up.
Thirty minutes and some naughty behavior in the shower later, I grab the flash drive out of the safe and we’re back in the living room of our suite.
“Walker, what’s this?” I ask, picking up the brand new shiny laptop off the table in the living room.
He comes up behind me, wrapping one hand around my waist as he looks over my shoulder. “Isn’t it obvious?”
I glare at him over my shoulder. “I know it’s a laptop, smart ass. I’m asking where it came from.”
“Is there a note?”
Sure enough, there’s one sitting beside where the laptop was. Written in the most masculine handwriting ever are the graphic words. “Stay out of her pussy long enough to get some fucking work done.” At the bottom, it’s signed by Priest.
I turn to a laughing Walker when I finish reading the letter out loud. “You need to talk to your old handler about popping up places. Does he not know how to knock?”
Walker takes the laptop from me and grabs my hand as he leads me to the couch. I flop down and he hands the laptop to me before sitting down beside me.
“Priest has never met a lock he couldn’t get into. I think he breaks in just to prove that he can.”
“His superpower is his ability to be a complete asshole.” I open the laptop and power it on before taking the flash drive from my pocket and sticking it into the side of the machine.
“Not everyone from the Church has such obvious exceptional gifts. Of course, Many’s is obvious.”
“And again, how does hearing voices aid in being an assassin?” I ask as he lifts my legs and places them in his lap. My back is pressed to the arm of the couch. I’m starting to crave his touch, like an addiction.
“It’s not only hearing voices. Many has a form of personality disorder. It seems weird, but the way his many personalities work together to help him see things is incredible.
“Each of his personalities links to a different function of his brain. Think of it like a group project, but everyone in the group is good at something different.”
Okay, when it’s explained like that it makes him seem not that bad. He’s still batshit crazy but in a savant kind of way.
“And what about Seth? What is his superpower?”
Walker laughs. “Haven’t you met Seth? What do you think his superpower is?”
“What did Michael Myers have?” I’m joking, but not really. That’s exactly what Seth put me in the mind of, like a monster from a horror movie.
His shoulders shake with his deep laugh. “He will get a kick out of that. No, Seth has an antisocial personality disorder. His empathy meter is set to low, like nonexistence low. Which is great for the Church. It’s easier to kill when you don’t feel bad about it. He also doesn’t play well with others.”
Oh, I totally agree with that last part. When I saw Walker and Many together, I could get a sense of their brotherhood. Even with Priest, I can feel that bond, despite how much of an asshole he is. With Seth, it was like you could feel their bond, but you also sensed that it was strained. There might even be a story there.
“What about you?” I ask, glancing down at the screen in front of me. The little pop-up to open the flash drive flashes and I hit open.
“I thought you enjoyed trying to figure it out?” he teases. I roll my eyes playfully.
“Fine. I’ll figure it out eventually.”
He laughs and shrugs. The laptop catches my attention again. The file opens.
“It’s a list of employees at Heimlich Resource Lab.”
This has Walker lifting his head from massaging my feet. “What are the names?”
“Dr. Evan Heimlich. Head scientist.”
“Deceased,” Walker supplies.
“Thomas Clampton. Assistant researcher.”
“Deceased.”
I go down the list of the twenty-five employees. Only three people on the list are still alive and not killed by Walker that night.
“Damn, Walker. You weren’t lying about killing the janitor,” I say, coming to the final name on the list.
He looks at me and smiles proudly. “They were all corrupt. The only reason those three weren’t killed is because they worked outside of the lab. Even still, had they been at that building that night I would have killed them.”
“Wait, all the employees were at the building that night?”
He nods. “Yeah. They were having some kind of staff meeting. It made it easier for me. I cleaned my entire plate in one place.”
“Cleaned your plate?”
“It’s what we call it when we finish a hit. The Church calls hits menus. When you finish your menu, you’ve cleaned your plate.”
I stare back at him for a second. “Is it fucked up that that makes sense to me?”
Walker laughs. “No, baby. It’s a pretty basic concept.”
I don’t answer because he’s right.
“What’s next?” I say, looking down at the screen. “This seems a bit anticlimactic. This thing destroyed an entire city block and I could have gotten this off of a Google search.”
“No, you couldn’t have. This information is top secret. There are no public records of this side of Heimlich’s research lab or its employees. The research he was most famous for and that people knew him by was under EHL. The people in this building were strictly for his terrorist work.”
Go figure.
“Okay, what do we do with the info?”
“Now we need to locate those three employees that are still alive. There’s a reason Albany left this information for us.”
I get to work on the laptop. I do the easiest thing first. I google the three living employees. The first one is a dead end. They died a few years ago in a drunk driving accident. They were the drunk driver.
The other employee was on the payroll as a realtor. She’s a middle-aged woman that has an active Facebook page. She has three children and is going through a divorce—at least that’s what her Facebook post suggests. She seems like a pretty straight-forward person, but I’m learning that no one is what they seem in this situation.
However, when I research the last person to survive that night, my brain comes to a screeching halt when his picture pops up.
“Oh, hell no,” I shout. “Look at this shit?” I flip the screen of the laptop around so Walker can see what I’m seeing.
“What about it?” I forgot he never saw the front of the guys face.
“The asshole from the night at the club. The one I slammed into the table, he was an employee of Heimlich’s. Apparently, he was his lawyer.”
This gets Walker’s attention. His body goes rigid. “Get me his address.”
I flip the laptop back around and go through a few different avenues, but lo and behold I get his address. The moment I read it out loud, I start to smile because the address is the same as the fourth one in my sister’s book.
Walker lifts my legs from his lap and gently places them on the floor. “Get dressed. We’re going to pay this guy a little visit.”
“Wait, I know that look in your eyes. You’re going to kill him, aren’t you?”
He lifts his lips. “I should’ve done it when he disrespected you. I let him off easy, he won’t get that chance tonight.”
“You do know we need to question him, right? You can’t kill everyone that’s mean to me.”
“Like hell, I can’t. Hurry up and get dressed.”
Chapter 20
Hound
Brooklyn
Three days later and we still haven’t been able to talk to the lawyer. That first night Walker and I sat outside his house for hours, but he never showed. We ended up having to call in Lucien again.
He found out that our lawyer friend was out of town on a business vacation but wasn’t sure when he would be getting back. Lucien told us the moment he had something he or his brother would get back with us. I hope it will be him.
I slam closed the cover to the laptop in my lap and toss it down beside me on the couch.
“You do know that’s borrowed, right?”
I cut my eyes over to Walker. He sits on the floor in front of the couch, wiping down his guns while being OCD about the order they go in the bag.
“I’ve searched out every social media page the lawyer has. I even looked through his Tinder profile and trust me that shit was horrifying. I don’t see anything or anybody that stands out or looks suspicious. Not one person on any of his pages screams murderer.” I sigh and lean my head back on the couch.
He laughs placing the 9mm down at his feet. “Baby, I don’t think anyone looks like a murderer.”
“Have you looked in the mirror lately, hell, or at your brothers?” He barks out a laugh.
“Come here,” he says when he sobers up from laughing. I lift to my feet and lower myself to straddle his lap. “You’re stressing yourself out.”
“I feel like we should be doing something. We have four days left.”
“Brook, babe, we are doing something. We’re doing what we are supposed to do, following the breadcrumbs. If Albany wanted us to do something before talking to this lawyer, she would have put it in the notebook. There’s a reason she wants us to follow that order. Didn’t you say that?”
I roll my eyes. “What do I know?”
“How about we do something else to take our minds off of it?” He wiggles his eyebrows suggestively.
“Hell no,” I say shooting to my feet. My lady parts need a break and a soak in some Epsom salt.
He grabs my hand and tugs me back down to his lap as he laughs. This time I sit with my legs sideways across his. My side pressed to his chest and my head on his shoulder.
“Well, maybe you can help me. I’ve always wanted to know certain things about Red but could never ask. And now that I have the real Red, you can answer them.”
I snort. “Okay, like what?”
“Why the hell do you like IKEA furniture? That shit is hard to put together.”
I burst into laughter. “First of all, IKEA furniture is reasonable and when you get paid in play money like I do, you need to make it stretch. And besides, I like testing my skills and seeing how talented of a builder I am.”
“All right, and can you seriously only cook breakfast food?”
I lean up and turn slightly to stare at him. “She did not tell you that?”
He laughs. “Every time I visited her she cooked the same thing. She said it was my favorite, but I never told her it was. After a while, it became my favorite.” He casually lifts his shoulder before dropping it back.
Damn it, Albany. She didn’t have to tell on me like that. I turn back around and lean back against him. “I can cook other things if I want to.” I gripe. His body shakes with laughter.
“One more,” he says sobering up. “Why do you burn Vetiver and Clary Sage?”
I tilt my head to the side as I look at him in confusion.
“What are you talking about?”
“Red always burned those two oils whenever she knew I was coming.”
That’s weird. “I actually hate the smell of Clary Sage and would never dream of mixing those two together. I’m afraid that was all Albany.” I shake my head at the thought. I push it away as curiosity catches me. “Since you got so many questions about me, what about you? Can you honestly not recall a joke?”
His brows draw together. “What are you talking about? I’m fucking funny.”
I glance up at him from his shoulder. “Okay, tell me a joke.” I lift my head and sit up to face him.
He pauses for a minute. “All right.” He immediately starts to laugh even before he tells the joke. “When did…. No, no…” He laughs again. “How, it’s how did Taco Bell meet… no wait, I think it’s Taco Bell, or is it Dairy Queen?”
How the hell can he confuse those two? They don’t even serve the same thing. He continues to try.
“No,” he says again then bursts into laughter. “How did Dairy Queen get Burger King pregnant?”
My mouth opens but nothing comes out. From the half-contained smile on his face and that expectant gleam in his eyes, I’m going to go out on a limb and say he believes this joke—that I’m damn near certain he is telling wrong—is going to be funny.
“I don’t know.”
Before I can finish the sentence, he blurts out the punch line and starts to laugh his ass off. I stare at him. Eyes wide, trying to figure out how a man this damn fine can be so bad at jokes.
“You’re not laughing, don’t you get it. He forgot to wrap his whopper.”
“You better be glad your sex is good,” I say, leaning back into him with my head on his shoulder. He tickles my side and I squeal like a stuck pig. He stops and plants a kiss on my forehead.
“This is all I ever wanted as a kid,” he says, wrapping his arms around my waist and pulling me into him.
“Me too.” I exhale and take comfort in being here in his arms. “Albany and I had it all planned out. We were going to have houses right beside each other. We would get married and have a bunch of kids.” I snort at the memory.
“Even after how jaded our lives were, we never got turned away from the prospect of having a family. We stopped thinking about being adopted by a nice family and started thinking more about having our own.”
“How many kids did you want?”
“Twelve.”
Walker starts choking and I laugh as I pat his chest, trying to help him out.
When he finally gets control, I tell him, “Don’t worry, I’ve changed that number now. One or two is fine with me.”
A beat of silence surrounds us.
“You know what’s funny?” I ask rhetorically. “When we talked about our husbands, all Albany ever said she wanted was a man that understood her. She only wanted someone that got her.”
“I can believe that. That’s like most of us from the Church. It’s also why she was so popular, she got us.”
I think over his words. I can understand the simplicity in that desire. Especially for someone like my sister, who oftentimes was not her true self.
“What about you?” Walker asks as he toys with the ring on my finger. “What was your desire? I need to know if I’m adding up as your husband.”
“You mean my fake husband?”
“I take my job seriously.”
I roll my eyes, but I don’t argue with
him. “For the record, I had a laundry list of requirements.”
“Now this I have to hear.”
“Well, he needed to be protective, respectful, and a great kisser.”
“So far I’m checking all the boxes.” I laugh. “What else?”
“He needed to be funny,” I say, making sure I point that one out. “Smart, and a Kung Fu master.” I went through a Karate Kid phase.
Walker laughs. “There you have it, I guess I’m your perfect match.”
I shrug. “Five out of six isn’t bad.”
“Whoa.” He moves his shoulder, causing me to sit up and look at him. “What am I lacking?”
“Babe, did you not hear that joke?”
He stares at me open-mouthed for a moment. “Hold on, let me try to tell it again.”
“Oh dear god, no.” I plead then laugh.
We spend another hour talking about our youth. Walker never mentions anything that happened after he was taken by the Church, but I do learn that before he started to get sick, he was good at baseball and basketball.
We are on the verge of calling it another unsuccessful night when all of a sudden the hotel phone rings twice and then stops. Walker turns to me and smiles.
“Get dressed, the lawyer is back.”
***
Although I didn’t want to, we leave Steven behind. Instead, we take two trains to Russell Silver’s—or asshole as I like to call him—home.
His house is exactly what I assumed a rich douche would have. Large, gaudy, and excessive. The home is snugly protected behind a large metal fence that surrounds the entire property.
The back side of the house runs up against a forest of trees. Of course, that’s the side we opted to come up through. Lucien gave Walker a rundown of the layout of the house and all the safety measures he would need to bypass the security. He’s been going over that information for the last three days. As we make our way to the back gate from the dark forest, Walker finds the perfect spot right outside the range of the motion lights.
“Come on, you go up first.” I swing around to face the man that clearly doesn’t understand my climbing capabilities.
