The Blonde

lawyer.

Poison me?

Sweetheart, I wish you had.

9:59  p.m.

Adler and Christian Streets, South Philly

One squeeze. One hell of a mess to clean up.

But that wouldn’t be Mike Kowalski’s problem. These days, it wasn’t even up to the police. No, this pleasure would fall to one of the crime-scene cleanup outfits. For fifteen dollars an hour, they’d hose down the blood, mop up the bits of bone and tissue, return things to normal. Or back to normal as possible. In Philadelphia, crime-scene cleanup services were a booming industry. Thanks, in part, to guys like Kowalski.

And right now, he had his night-vision sights trained on a nice little head shot. Yeah, it’d be messy.

In fact, depending on how the bullet impacted and exploded, it could mean an extra couple of hours’ pay for the crew that worked this part of South Philly.

Which would be the Dydak Brothers. Couple of nice, strapping, blond Polish guys based in Port Richmond. They’d been cleaning up a lot of Kowalski’s scenes recently. Weird that they worked South Philly, traditionally an Italian stronghold, now full of mixed immigrants and twenty-something hipsters priced out of downtown.

But whatever. Kowalski liked seeing some of his own people get theirs. Sto lat!

He’d make this one a gusher. Just for the Dydaks.

See ya, cheeseball.

The guy whose head was covered by a professional assassin’s sights had absolutely no fucking idea. He was eating a slice of white pizza—uh, yo, dumb-ass, it’s the dough and cheese that make you fat, not the sauce—and sucking Orangina through a clear plastic straw.

Savor that last bite of white, my friend.

Steady now.

Index finger on the trigger.

Set angle to maximize blood splatter.

And…

And Kowalski’s leg started humming.

There was only one person—one organization—who had the number to the ultrathin cell phone strapped to Kowalski’s thigh. His handler, at CI-6. When they called, it usually meant that he should abort a particular sanction. He would feel the buzz and immediately stop what he was doing. Even if the blade was halfway through the seven layers of skin of some poor bastard’s neck. Even if his finger had already started to apply pressure to the trigger.

But this sanction was personal. There was nothing to abort. Only he could abort it.

This was capital V—Vengeance.

Still, the buzz troubled him. Somebody at CI-6 was trying to reach him. Ignored, it could mean more hassle. More explaining to do, which was bad, since he was supposed to be on extended leave of absence. No operations, no sanctions, no nothing. The last thing an operative like Kowalski needed was to explain why he’d been systematically wiping out what remained of the South Philadelphia branch of the Cosa Nostra. That was seriously off-mission.

The Department of Homeland Security kind of frowned on the idea that their operatives—even supersecret ops, like Kowalski— would use their training and firepower to hunt down ordinary citizens on a mission of vegeance.

They might secretly applaud it, get off on the details, but approve? No way.

So okay, okay. Fuck it. Abort.

Your lucky day, cheeseball. I’ll get back to you later. In the meantime, go for some sauce. Live it up.

Rifle down, glove off, roll over, pluck the cell phone from the thigh.

“Yeah.”

The voice on the phone gave him another cell phone number. Kowalski pressed the button to end the call. Added six to every digit of the new cell phone number. Dialed the result. A male voice said, “You mean to say you’ve got a thirst even at this time in the morning?”

Kowalski said, “It’s so hot and dry.”

Wow. It’d been awhile since a relay used Rhinoceros. Kowalski had almost forgotten the reply

The voice gave him another number, which Kowalski memorized—after adding a seven-digit PN (personal number, natch) to every digit. He packed up, stashed the gear in a nearby warehouse, then made his way down from the rooftop and walked six blocks before catching a cab. A $3.40 fare took him to the nearest convenience store, a 7-Eleven, where he purchased three prepaid calling cards in the amount of twenty dollars each. He wasn’t sure how long the phone call would take.

Kowalski stepped outside the 7-Eleven and found a pay phone. He punched in the toll-free number on the back of the card, then dialed the number he’d memorized. By using a prepaid card and a pay phone, the call was untraceable, buried under a sea of discount calls being placed across the United States. Nobody had the technology to sort through all of that. Not even CI-6—a subdivision of Homeland Security they didn’t discuss much on the evening news.

A female voice on the phone told him to fly to Houston. Kowaiski immediately recognized the voice. It was her. His former handler. They hadn’t worked together in months; they’d had an awkward falling-out. But it seemed they were to be paired up again. Ah, fate.

Kowaiski thought he should say something friendly to break the ice, but she didn’t give him the chance.

A university professor named Manchette had died earlier that morning, and Kowalski’s employers needed to check something. She wanted Kowaiski to bring back a biological sample.

“Some skin?”

“No.”

“Blood?”

“No, no. We need the head.”

“The whole thing?”

But of course. Pity was, Kowaiski didn’t know any crime-scene cleanup crews in Houston. It would be a new city for him. Shame it couldn’t have been in Philadelphia. The Dydak Brothers would have had a field day with a head removal.

“We need something else.”

“Anything for you,” said Kowaiski, but immediately he regretted it.

Keep things professional.

“We’d like you to pin down the location of a woman named Kelly White. Want me to spell it?”

“White as in the color?”

“Yes.”

“What do I need to know about her?”

“She may have come in contact with Professor Manchette within the past forty-eight hours. We’d like to know if this is true.”

Kowalski said fine, and thought about asking his handler to meet for dinner when he got back. Just to catch up. He wanted to say, Hey, it’s not as if I’m tied down to any broad. Not anymore. Nope, not as of a few months ago.

And I’m not going to be a father, either.

But he let it drop.

Kowalski caught another cab and told the driver to take him to Philadelphia International Airport. The interior was blue vinyl. It smelled like someone had sliced a dozen oranges and then baked them to mask the aroma of