One more glance at her photo, then he stuck it back in the stack.
Time to begin.
Chapter Three
A city bus.
As Finley sat down on the thin, cheap cushion, he could almost feel the embedded grime work its way through his pants, the back of his shirt. The chrome pole beside him—which he refused to touch—was slick with the oils of a thousand hands, finger- and palm prints smeared into a wavy, blotchy mess. His shoes stuck to the floor.
The bright, ugly lighting revealed dust mushrooming up from his soft impact against the seat. And it also revealed a lot of ugly people. Fat people and smelly people and working people and happy people and sad people. More sad than happy.
But the only person who mattered was the one in the back, the one staring at him—Guzman, the reason Finley had found himself entombed in this rolling shithole cocoon of rotting humanity. The organization had offered Finley a second chance, and one that he was incredibly grateful for. But gratitude and humbleness weren’t equivalent to lowering oneself. Finley had worked damn hard to get away from things like city buses and dive motels and cheap discount stores with flickering lights, the smell of cigarette-drenched clothing, slightly damaged goods, and grimy floors.
He took his eyes off Guzman for just a moment, looked down, at his shoes, a nice pair of Doc Martens that he’d paid full price for at a nice store. Fashionable, trendy, but rugged enough for the sort of work he did. He moved his left foot. Crrrruff as the floor stuck to the thick rubber sole.
Finley sighed inwardly.
You’re here for a job. It’s not your life.
A job. A second chance. The best opportunity he’d ever gotten. He’d damn well better get his head on straight.
He looked up at Guzman. Found his eyes already staring at him.
Fear looking right into Finley from smallish, wide-set eyes. Guzman had surely thought he’d gotten free—Finley had kept his distance for twenty minutes after momentarily losing track of the guy back at the parking lot—and this bus was going to take Guzman to the depot and out of town.
That’s why Finley had strolled so casually onto the bus, as much as he detested doing so. That’s why he’d sat in plain sight of the man, locking eyes with him as he sat down. Guzman needed to see how easy it had been, how little chance there was of escape.
Guzman would no longer be getting off at the depot where the line terminated. He would get off at the next stop and try to escape into the darkness. Hell, Finley was surprised that Guzman hadn’t pulled the bus’s stop-request cord, thrown open the doors as they slid apart, and dashed off.
Guzman was the shape of a potato and short. Dark, thinning hair. A compressed face too small for his head, leaving lots of extra skin at the sides. Dirty sneakers. Jeans and a clever print T-shirt bearing an industrial-style warning sign—CAUTION: STAY BACK 25 FEET. HAVEN’T HAD MY COFFEE YET.
Hilarious…
Finley would enjoy this.
The metallic squeal of brakes, piercing, an unpleasant punctuation to an unpleasant experience. Everything shifted forward. Finley refused to grab the grimy pole beside him. He kept his eyes locked on Guzman.
The bus stopped. Several people stood. And, as predicted, Guzman bolted for the rear door. He shoved his way past a woman—who barked at him—and was the first person out of the bus.
Finley stood and waited at the front door. Two people in front of him. No rush. There was no need.
Outside. A less-than-wonderful area of town. A McDonald’s across the street. The smell of day-old grease. Steamy windows. Teenagers loitering by the doors. Laughter and shouts echoing in the distance, a few conversations nearby from the others leaving the bus, all of it sounding as hopeless as the surroundings.
Guzman would have considered going into the McDonald’s, losing himself in the late-night crowd, maybe going to the bathroom with the plan of hiding in a stall for a couple hours, sitting on the toilet with his knees pulled to his face, hiding his feet from view. But he would have decided against it, felt it foolish.
Finley had been dealing with Guzman long enough to know how the slimeball’s mind worked. Guzman would have gone for the dark alley behind the McDonald’s.
Finley walked past the reek of the overfilled dumpster, around a fence, and to the alley.
Yep. There he was. Crossing the backyard of one of the houses bordering the alley, clinging to a line of shadows that edged a patch of illumination from the floodlight on the house’s deck.
Finley whistled.
Guzman stopped. Looked back.
“Oh, shit!”
Finley dashed toward him, his Doc Martens gripping into the wet, overgrown weeds of the backyard, through the light and to the shadow. He caught Guzman by the back of his clever, sweat-soaked T-shirt and pulled him back.
Guzman took a swing, which Finley casually turned to avoid. He used the creep’s new position to his advantage, wrapping Guzman’s arm around his own body, tying him up.
A sound to the right. The sliding glass door at the back of the house. Opening.
With one hand on Guzman’s arm, Finley used the other to grab a hold of the man’s jeans and rolled him over the short wooden fence. Then he hopped the fence himself.
He crouched beside Guzman in the scraggly, forsaken plants running along the fence in the neighbor’s yard, which was perfectly dark, no exterior lights, no light coming from the windows.
He gave Guzman a shut up look. Guzman remained quiet, his tiny eyes looking up at him, having reached their full scope.
Footsteps in the yard beside them. They came a few feet away from the glass door, seemingly in Finley’s direction, but quickly went the opposite way, back to the house, followed by dumb-sounding muttering, “Gawd damn
