Page 130 of Boardroom Ties
The door is unlocked. Why thefuckis the door unlocked? Cass locked it after the cleaning lady left at four, and confirmed it on the burner at 5:53. Raymond would never deign to use this entrance. We had a plan, a fuckingplan,and the plan is—the planwas?—
Fuck.
The Glock is in my palm before my brain catches up to my body. The suppressor is screwing on by feel; I don’t even have to look down at it.
When I’m armed, I nudge the door open with the toe of my shoe.
The kitchen is as it should be. Dishwasher humming. Glass on the drying rack—two of them, one bourbon, one water—washed and tipped neatly upside down. A dim under-cabinet light.Crème brûlée ramekins stacked next to the sink, scraped clean. The crystal decanter of bourbon rests on the counter.
Cass did everything right.
I move through the kitchen silently, weight on the outsides of my feet, gun at the ready. The dining room shows more mundane signs of a normal domestic life. Between two guttered-out candles, there’s a water stain on the walnut. Looks like someone knocked over a glass.
I float past it and down the hall. The guest room is on the right, the master on the left, both doors closed, except?—
Wait.
The master is not closed.
It’s cracked, half an inch, with a black seam of nothingness showing through. And emanating from within that nothingness is a smell I know intimately…
Blood.
All sound fades away. Using the suppressor, I push the door inward.
The lamp on Raymond’s side is on. I wonder if they did it for dramatic effect. Or was it more chummy, teasing, taunting? Like leaving on a porch light when you want the neighbors to know you’re home? Courteous, almost.
Look at our work. Admire it. Tell Lukas we said hello.
Raymond is in the bed. The duvet is pulled up to his chin, but there are two holes in the center of the white cotton, the size of dimes, perfectly placed an inch apart over the sternum. Above the duvet, between his collarbones and his slack lower lip, athird hole sits dead-center on the forehead, with the burn-ring of a contact shot smudged around it.
The pillow behind him is no longer white. It’s soaked red.
It’s beautiful work. As clean and professional as it gets. I’ll bet he never woke up.
Whoever did this knew what they were doing.
I stand there just long enough to take inventory and confirm that nothing’s been touched. This was not a robbery or an accident. For God’s sake, they didn’t even take his watch.
They.
Vainakh.
Vainakh got here first.
The why does not matter, not right now. That’ll come later, when I’m alone in the dark. So many little theories to consider. Maybe Raymond got careless. Or Bill’s whispers spooked him. Maybe Raymond kept thorough little files on his own bosses, hisrealbosses, and someone in the Vainakh hierarchy decided that the face they’d hired to smooth their entry into New York had developed an opinion of its own and needed replacing. Maybe Raymond was always going to die tonight.
But again, none of that matters.
What matters is what’s down the hall, deep in a drug-induced slumber of her own.
Under any other circumstances, I’d never charge blindly through an apartment that known enemies had recently infiltrated. I’d have cleared corners, checked hiding places, all that shit.
Right now, I don’t have time for any of that. I just turn away from Raymond’s corpse and start to run.
I don’t get far, though.
Because right then, I hear the front door.
