10

10

We rush to Jason’s car and take off into the night. I want to get out of L.A. as fast as possible and head straight for Vegas, but Jason points out we should probably switch vehicles, just in case Agent Kern was able to figure out which car was ours and report it to the rest of Nick’s Minions. I really hate it when he makes a valid point.

Fortunately, Jason—as always—is prepared. Not only does he have numerous safe rooms around the city under various fake identities, but he also has numerous cars stashed around the city registered under various fake identities. I hate how organized the son-of-a-hamster humper is.

We visit a long-term parking garage in downtown L.A. where we switch out the blue Honda Civic for a gray Toyota Corolla. I swear, the man has a major hard-on for Japanese cars . . .  We also take the opportunity to ditch our current disguises and switch out. Even with Agent Kern dead, we can’t assume that somehow Nick’s minions didn’t see our current disguises through however it was their surveillance alerted them to us entering my house.

I swap the blonde wig for a dark brown one—closer to my natural hair color than the blonde wig, but dark enough to pass a cursory inspection. Jason swaps out his chestnut locks and beard to age himself up a tad with a black wig and beard, both with distinctive signs of early graying. A few latex prosthetics to his face completes the effect of aging him into his early forties.

Our car and identity swap completed, we begin our trek to Vegas. Jason sagely admits it would be safer to get out of dodge sooner, rather than go after the supplies in his last safe room in Orange County.

Fortunately, it being the middle of the night, means there isn’t a lot of traffic. Unfortunately, my radar-intolerance means we have to keep to the speed limit in order to stay under the radar. Ugh, I swear that pun was not intentional. Even with having to stick to the speed limit, we make the drive in just under five hours—the night sky just beginning to show signs of brightening as the infamous city rises out of the monotonous expanse of desert.

We find the seediest motel we can on the outskirts of the city—and let’s be honest, Vegas does not exactly have a shortage of seedy motels—and get a room so we can fully rest up before seeking out Jason’s possible contacts.

The desk clerk at the motel takes one look at us and, seeing the aged-up, early-forties version of Jason presented, no doubt assumes we are in a ‘sugar daddy’ arrangement. As usual, it’s easiest to play into other people’s assumptions, so we get a room with a single bed, and once we’re comfortably alone inside, Jason—ever the gentleman—offers to sleep on top of some blankets on the floor.

“Don’t be an idiot,” I snap, perching myself on the bed. “We’re grown-ass adults. I think we can stand to sleep in the same bed for a few hours without molesting each other. Besides, if you try anything, I’ve got my ‘oldest friend’ here,” I say, unsheathing Borden and placing it on the bedside table, giving it a loving pat.

Jason blushes again—curse that fucking adorable blush—and sheepishly crosses to the other side of the bed.

As we begin to settle in and remove our various disguise prosthetics, I ask, “So, these ‘contacts’ of yours . . .  Who are they and why should we trust them?”

“I already told you I don’t trust them, but I knew them before I worked for T.H.E.M., so I figure they’re about as safe as anyone at this point.”

“Wait, you were an assassin before working for T.H.E.M.? You never told me that?”

“T.H.E.M. may hold the monopoly on P.S.K.’s,” Jason replies with a shrug, “but they certainly did not invent the organized assassination profession. And Vegas has more than a few assassination syndicates. I started out working for one of the more prominent guilds in my early twenties and made a bit of a name for myself. I presume that’s how I drew Zeke’s attention. He offered me almost three times as much money as I was making here in Vegas. He made similar offers to some of my associates—the ones we’re gonna try and reach out to—but they turned him down; said they’d rather stay in Vegas. I suppose the fact they turned down an offer from Zeke makes them more trustworthy than anyone else I can think of who might have information on what’s going on.”

“Touché. So how do we get in touch with them?”

“I’ve stayed in contact over the years. I’ve never been one to burn a bridge that might come in handy later on.”

No, that’s definitely not Jason’s style. Myself, on the other hand . . .

“We’ll start with Chuck,” Jason continues. “We were recruited and went through training together. I suppose you could say he’s the closest thing to an ‘oldest friend’ I have.”

Aside from Borden, the closest thing to an ‘oldest friend’ I have is Jason. That fact pisses me off—not because of the lack of old friends, I could care less about that. No, just the fact that my douche-hat ex gets the title of ‘oldest friend’ rankles.

“Chuck? What, like the serial killer doll or the computer geek secret agent?” I snip.

And yes, I am turning to sarcasm to distract myself from my irritation about Jason being my oldest friend.

Jason just smiles. “Probably closer to the pizza-selling rodent. Anyway, once we’ve rested up, I’ll give him a call and see if he’s free to meet up.”

“Sounds like as good a plan as we’ve got,” I concur, and without further ado we settle in and pass-the-fuck-out.

***

I would love nothing more than to say that when I finally wake up in mid-afternoon, I feel rejuvenated and good as new. The toll the last forty-eight hours has taken on my system, however, will need more than a few hours of rest to fully recuperate.

Jason, on the other hand, has gone from zero to one hundred. He always was like that; a seemingly endless supply of energy, and always quick to jump back into action—even in bed . . . Stop it, Sarah!

I’m barely classified as conscious, and he’s already up, showered, changed, and is on the motel room phone with Chuck, making arrangements to meet up later.

I begrudgingly drag myself out of bed and into the shower. After I’ve cleaned and gotten dressed, we re-don our disguises and go to the motel front desk to get a Chinese delivery menu to order some takeout. The guy who was working the desk this morning is gone and has been replaced by a gum-chewing chick who looks like she might be older than eighteen. The look she gives us clearly states that she, too, is assuming Jason is my sugar daddy. Which is perfectly fine—we want as many people to get the wrong idea about us, so if someone comes asking questions, we won’t come to mind.

Rested, showered, and full of bad Asian food, I’m finally starting to feel like I might be getting back to normal. I’m certainly not at the golden retriever level of effervescent energy that Jason is always at, but then again, I’m never at that level. This is about as good as it gets for me.

As we box up our leftover Chinese food and stick it in the room’s mini fridge, Jason checks the time on his watch, and says, “We should probably head out. Chuck will be waiting.”

I grab Borden from the bedstand and sheathe and tuck it under the waistband of my jeans. I don’t intend to go anywhere from this point forward without my bestest friend on me.

Jason and Chuck had agreed to meet at a diner a few blocks from our motel—no doubt figuring that the less Jason and I have to travel, the better—so we walk to the diner. Almost as soon as we step into the diner, the first thing I notice is a seedy-looking guy in the back corner. Seriously, this guy looks like he fell straight out of a Sopranos episode. Slightly chubby, but not quite overweight, squeezed into an expensive suit. The half-unbuttoned shirt reveals a rather gross forest of greasy chest hair, where a gold medallion is embedded in said chest hair and hanging from an ostentatious gold chain around his neck, and his comb over attempt is semi-successfully trying to hide his bald spot. The man is a living, breathing, Jersey Shore mafia cliché . . .

“Please don’t tell me . . . ” I say, eyeing the guido at the back of the diner with disgust.

Jason just smiles and makes his way to the back booth, essentially confirming my suspicion.

When the man at the booth sees Jason approaching, a shit-eating grin spreads across his face, and he stands up, embracing Jason in a brotherly hug.

“Chuck and Jack, back in action!” the guido says—as if his look wasn’t cliché enough, he has the thickest Jersey accent I’ve ever heard.

Jason rolls his eyes with humor and says, “You can drop the act, Chuck. Sarah’s legit with me.”

Chuck smiles devilishly and says—now in the thickest surfer dude accent I’ve ever heard, “Hey, sorry dude, but ya know I gots to keep up my rep, right?”

It takes a lot to throw me off foot, but this fucker has certainly pulled the rug out from under me. Jason smirks at my apparent look of bewilderment, and explains, “Chuck grew up in San Diego, but realized before we started our training that no one was likely to take him seriously as an assassin with a So Cal surfer accent, so he decided to go for the opposite extreme and adopted his mafioso personality and accent. We’d been working together for almost two years before he let me in on his ‘little secret’.”

“First impressions are everything, dude, even in the murder-for-hire biz, my man,” Chuck says, settling back into the booth.

If possible, the surfer dude accent coming out of the guido look is even more unsettling than when he was just straight-up, pseudo-masculine guido.

“So, what’s up, my brother? I’m guessing this isn’t just a social visit?” Chuck asks, as Jason and I slide into the booth across from him, and resumes digging into his porterhouse dip sandwich.

“I’m guessing you’ve heard about the recent events concerning T.H.E.M.?” Jason asks.

“For sure, man. The whole murder-for-hire underworld’s talkin’ ’bout it. Not gonna lie, most of us ain’t exactly crying about the fall of our biggest competitor in the field.”

“Understandably,” Jason says, nodding. “As far as we know, Sarah and I are now the sole survivors of T.H.E.M.’s organization. We assume that anyone else who wasn’t at H.Q. when the bomb went off has fled south to the border.”

“Seems likely,” Chuck says with a nod. “Hang on, we got incoming.”

A waitress approaches to take Jason’s and my orders—as we’re both still full on Chinese food, we only order coffee.

Once the waitress has retreated after pouring two cups of coffee, Chuck resumes, “So, why aren’t you two ducking out of dodge with the rest of your T.H.E.M. amigos?”

“Let’s just say, we have personal business to settle with the people behind the bombing . . . ” I say, not wanting to get into all of the many, many reasons I want revenge on these fuckers.

Chuck nods at me appraisingly and says, “‘Personal’ can be dangerous in this biz, dudette—it’s a good way to end yourself up at the ultimate wipeout—but I hear ya.”

The last man to call me ‘dudette’ wound up getting his balls cut off, and then I discretely fed them to the alligators at the San Francisco Zoo to dispose of the evidence. Fortunately, alligators do not have nut allergies. I suppose, however, I should refrain from doing the same to Chuck, at least until we’ve gotten all the information we need from him.

“Have you heard anything about the bombers?” Jason asks.

“Just rumors, my man, just rumors,” Chuck replies with a vague shrug.

“Right now, rumors are more than we have,” Jason states grimly.

“Fair enough,” Chuck nods. “Word on the underworld is that these cats are an organized front with a huge vendetta against T.H.E.M. Rumor is they were headed up by Nick Jin after he broke out of the slammer last year. I assume I don’t need to tell either of you who Nick Jin was.”

“Yeah, we’d met,” I say tersely, definitely not wanting to get into my complicated Nick Jin back story with this surfer guido.

“Well, cats are saying Nick kicked the bucket within the last couple weeks, though in this biz I’ve learned not to count my corpses until I’ve seen with my own eyes that they’ve croaked.”

“He’s dead. Trust me. I put the bullet in his brain personally,” I say.

Chuck whistles appreciatively, and gives me a new appraising look. “You took out the Ninja? Damn dudette, mad props to you.”

“Thanks . . . ”

“Anyway, word is these cats call themselves the Marching Tides. I guess they see themselves as marching to turn the tides against T.H.E.M.”

I may hate the bastards with every fiber of my being, but I must concede that ‘Marching Tides’ is definitely a cooler name than ‘Nick’s Minions’ as Jason and I have been referring to them up until now.

“Well, they’ve pretty successfully dismantled T.H.E.M.’s operations,” I say, “so is it Mission: Accomplished for them?”

“Nah, dudette, not from what I’ve heard. Dismantling T.H.E.M. was just part one of their bogus operandi. Ultimately, they want to expose what T.H.E.M.—and their government benefactors—had been doing in the shadows all these years. Step one was to dismantle T.H.E.M. so that they couldn’t interfere. Step two is to start slowly revealing the evidence of T.H.E.M.’s operations to the press. But they gotta be super smart about how they do that part ’cause most people would probably just call them crazy conspiracy theorists if they came straight out with it, even if they had plenty of evidence to back it up.”

“Fair point,” Jason concedes with a grim nod.

“Goes without saying that lots of other cats in the murder-for-hire biz ain’t exactly thrilled about part two of their plan. Taking out T.H.E.M. was all hunky-dory and all, but exposing to everyone that organized murder-for-hire syndicates exist and are largely funded by the government—that won’t be good for anyone’s biz.”

“Yeah, I would expect not,” Jason agrees.

“We have reason to believe Nick was working with someone else before I put a bullet in his brain. Any idea who that may be?”

“No idea, dudette, though it doesn’t surprise me to hear it. Clearly, the Marching Tides are still going strong without Nick at the helm, so there must be some other cat pulling the puppets’ strings in his absence. Though . . . Nah, it’s a long shot . . . ”

“Long shots are all we’ve got right now, Chuck. Spill it,” Jason said.

“Fair enough,” Chuck says with a shrug, as if to say, ‘It’s your funeral if I’m wrong’. “I was just thinkin’ I could take ya to the dude who gave me most of this intel. Can’t promise he knows more than what he’s already told me, but ya never know.”

Jason and I share a glance, and Jason replies, “We need to follow any lead we can. Who is your informant?”

“Another pro assassin,” Chuck says through a mouthful of porterhouse dip sandwich. “He came onto the scene after you went over to work for T.H.E.M. Worked his way up to the head of his guild—a different gang than our old crew, but you remember how it is here in Vegas; all us assassin guilds are relatively friendly with each other, as long as we don’t tread on another guild’s territory or contracts.”

Jason gives me another glance to confer, and I nod my agreement to this plan. It’s the best we’ve got right at this moment.

“All right, we’re in. When can you take us to him?” Jason asks.

“Lemme make a quick call—should be able to go right over, if he’s not busy. Most of the guilds are trying to lay low right now until we get a better feel for just how much of our operations the Marching Tides are planning to expose.”

Chuck squeezes out of the booth and pulls out his cell phone as he heads out of the diner.

“Whatcha think?” Jason asks once Chuck is outside.

“Your friend is quite a character.”

Jason laughs. “He’s definitely certifiable, but who of us in this business isn’t?”

“Good point,” I concede. “We haven’t learned anything we didn’t already guess at, though I suppose it’s good to know what to call these douchebags and what they’re after. Hopefully, this friend of his does know more, but I feel like we’re chasing after haystack needles.”

“Gotta start somewhere,” Jason says with a resigned shrug.

Chuck returns to the table and reports, “Good news, Mike’s free. His place is just a ten-minute drive from here. I paid our tab, so let’s get cruisin’.”

Not entirely surprising to match his faux-mafia persona, Chuck drives a black Mercedes Benz. At least it makes for a comfortable ride through the outer slums of Las Vegas.

We pull up to what looks like an abandoned warehouse in a dilapidated industrial area—I swear, these Vegas assassins have absolutely zero originality. I suppose organized crime is so prolific here that they don’t feel the need to stay under the radar, but if I were a cop trying to hunt out a crime boss, this building is the first place I’d start scoping out.

Chuck gets out and leads us to the warehouse’s front door, choosing a key from the extensive collection on his key ring to unlock it. We follow Chuck into the warehouse, which is completely dark.

“I know how cliché this sounds,” I whisper to Jason, “but I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

Right on cue, Chuck turns around holding a gun on us, and says to Jason, “Sorry bro, but times are a-changin’.”