Jennings had slowed to a walk as he reached the end of the trail. He was in cooldown mode and sweat poured from his body as though a minute creature stood atop his shoulders with a bucket, furiously attempting to prevent the man from drowning in his own perspiration. He removed a small towel from his front pocket, opened it up from its neat folds and wiped his brow. The jog had taken more out of him than he expected, given the circumstances. Training for a marathon will do that to even the most experienced runners. He longed for the lukewarm bottle of water in his car and the nourishment that would accompany it.
The footsteps grew louder as Micah unsheathed a four-inch tactical blade. It was completely black, chosen with purpose so that it would appear as nothing more than a crude extension of his arm to the watchful eyes of any cameras in the area. Only one of which could even see the scene unfold. The Mercedes beeped twice, and its hazards flashed, announcing its owner’s presence. Micah peered around the side of the car and saw Jennings reaching for the handle.
In an instant, he was behind Jennings, blade out. Jennings grabbed hold of the handle and opened the door, but never made it further. Micah immediately grabbed the side of Jennings’s head with his left hand while raising his right arm, the blade pointed inward. He thrust his right arm quickly to the opposite side. The blade entered Jennings’s neck, sending a sudden burst of crimson onto the car’s door and the ground below. Micah had plunged the knife with so much force that it nearly went through the Jennings’s neck.
The body of his target tensed upon impact, as though Jennings realized briefly what was taking place, that his hold on life was fading before he fell limp. Micah let the body drop and grabbed the towel that had been in the man’s hand. The gloves wouldn’t leave any fingerprints, but one could never be too careful in his line of work. Looking around, he saw the keys to the Mercedes on the ground next to the body. He grabbed them, stepped over Jennings, sat inside the plush leather seats, and fired up the engine.
Chapter 2
Ross Sheridan arrived home with a Kool-Aid smile on his face, following a successful blind date. One that found him consuming far more alcohol than he had planned on initially. It was his first actual date since his marriage had ended a few months earlier. Their marriage had lasted just three years and, so far as he could tell, things had been going great. Until he walked in on her and a coworker doing the birthday suit shuffle. Sheridan could never hope to clarify how the rage that seethed through every part of his body at that moment didn’t explode into an act that certainly would have helped his chances of landing on America’s Most Wanted.
His lawyer’s theory was that, subconsciously, he had suspected her of doing it all along, and the blatant affirmation of that idea produced no shock since it simply reaffirmed what he knew to be true at a subconscious level. Sheridan didn’t pay his lawyer to talk to him while he lay on a couch, though. He paid him to get positive results in the custody battle. Positive results were the type of line item his lawyer prided himself on being able to gather. He proved his worth by gaining full custody of the couple’s daughter for his client.
Sheridan had hired a babysitter for the night. He hired her to watch his daughter, Madeline, until midnight. He extended that by a couple of hours once the signals his date sent him finally broke through his slightly drunken stupor. After several embarrassingly unsuccessful attempts to awaken the beast while inside the confines of his date’s bedroom, he arranged a second get together with the lovely lady and hailed a ride share to take him home.
It was one thirty in the morning when he strolled up to his house. As expected, no one else in the little cookie cutter neighborhood they lived in was up at such a late hour. He reached the door and noticed that it hadn’t been closed completely. This struck him as odd, but he quickly resigned himself to the notion that they may have had a pizza delivered and forgotten to secure the door before sitting down to enjoy the feast. She should’ve known better. Unless… the fog that had settled over his brain vanished and he reached for the pistol he kept holstered on his back.
The safety released, Sheridan slowly chambered a round and drew the gun up to eye level. With his free hand, he nudged the door open and listened for some reassurance that this was all a big misunderstanding. Nothing. He stepped inside and walked forward two feet before he heard the sound that would haunt him for years to come. Madeline let out a gut-wrenching shriek that would make a banshee sound like it simply whispered its evil. The wail came from above. Adrenaline instantly consumed every particle of Sheridan’s being and he barreled up the stairs.
The floorboards creaked loudly, announcing his presence to even the hardest of hearing individuals in the vicinity as he came closer to the second-floor landing. He felt like he was running through a river of molasses, but the jaunt only took a couple seconds. He reached the top and froze. There was a man standing five feet in front of him with a tiny ball of white underneath, and a blade on the floor beside it. The man
