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  Widow didn’t even reenter the room. He had no reason to. He didn’t need to know what the message said. He was sure it was something like “I had a great time,” “I wish you luck,” or “Under different circumstances…,” and so on and so forth. It wouldn’t say anything he needed to know, nothing he cared to know.

  One thing that was difficult about Widow’s choice of lifestyle was that, from time to time, he felt loneliness. Most of the time, he liked being alone. He liked being a nobody to everyone—unimportant, no one’s friend and no one’s enemy, just a guy. He liked being a complete stranger, but from time to time, it did feel a little empty. But usually, he just shrugged it off and went on with his life.

  Widow turned and shut the door, drinking the rest of his coffee as he walked toward the street. He stopped at a trash can near the front office and tossed in the empty coffee cup. Holding the coffee that he had bought for Scarlet, he headed south along the road, against the traffic. He thought about going to the Strip and at least walking it. He thought since he was already in Las Vegas, he might as well see the famous Strip. He was, after all, essentially a tourist, but he was a little sad about Scarlet’s abrupt departure and decided to change course and head into Texas and not wait. He’d spent enough time in Las Vegas.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE KILL TEAM was smaller than the last one Glock had been a part of, but for their current assignment, it was way too large. Four team members for one target were three too many. He could locate and kill the target on his own. But this was the way the Principal wanted it. Waste of talent and waste of money was his opinion, but then again, he wasn’t paid for his opinion. He was only paid to handle the dirty side of the business.

  The Principal wasn’t a man he feared, but he wasn’t a man to be underestimated, either. If the time came to get his hands dirty, the Principal would be there to do it. The Principal was a man with two faces. He was partners with Glock and also had another job. Everyone knew the Principal. Everyone within a thousand-mile radius.

  The kill team consisted of four people—three men and one woman. One of the men was Hispanic. The Principal had probably thought he was valuable for his fluency in Spanish, but they could all understand and speak Spanish, including Glock. This was Texas, after all. A lot of white people understood Spanish.

  Glock didn’t have a problem with a Mexican on his team. He had worked in the SEALs and knew plenty of Mexican soldiers. But he did have a deep hatred for them. And, like the Principal, he kept it a secret.

  Each of the kill team members had had experience in special forces and counterintelligence. They were some of the best that money could buy, available on short notice. And the Principal had the money to spend. More money had been offered up by the Principal than Glock expected, but then again, they both wanted Hood dead—and fast.

  The kill team had been split up into two teams. Glock liked to think of them as the A team and the B team—A being his team, the alpha team, and B being the lesser team. Not that either team was less suited for this assignment. James Hood was only one guy after all.

  Right then, Glock and the Hispanic member were assigned to watch the wife. Which was a cake assignment because she was on her deathbed in a hospital in El Paso. Glock didn’t want to be watching the wife, but the Principal figured Hood would attempt contact with her before he ran. They knew the daughter had already been taken. They’d missed the opportunity to grab Hood before that happened. So now they figured he couldn’t help but see the wife before he left. So they waited for him.

  Glock looked down at his gloved hand and wondered if it made him stand out in the halls of the hospital. But without the glove, he’d be even more noticeable because his hands and arms were covered in tattoos. They traveled from his shoulders down to his knuckles, making it appear that he was obsessed with ink. And he wasn’t going to lie to himself—he did enjoy getting new ink, so much so that he was running out of canvas on his body for more.

  He still remembered his first tattoo. He had gotten it when he got out of prison. It was at the center of other newer tattoos, over his heart. It was a simple design, a tattoo in honor of his friend from prison—the skeleton of a frog holding a trident like Neptune, the brother of Jupiter and the god of the oceans. It was a symbol a lot of SEALs got after they left the unit—a tribute to a dead brother.

  He wasn’t happy about having to kill a woman who was dying in her hospital bed, but he wasn’t upset about it, either. Even when he used to be a soldier, he never questioned the targets he was supposed to kill. The way he figured it, there wasn’t much difference killing for money as a civilian contractor or killing as a SEAL. Both were jobs.

  The brass had booted him out. They’d shown their true colors. But the way he saw it now was that he used to kill for them, and they paid him. All that stuff about honor and brotherhood and duty was just lies. The way he saw it, it all came down to money. Everything was about money, and now he was getting paid a whole hell of a lot more to maintain his own region in the Principal’s network than he ever was as a Navy SEAL.

  He looked down the hall at his teammate, who was a short guy. Older, too. He didn’t look like he was part of a kill team, which might’ve been why he was so good at it.

  The teammate sat on a bench near the elevators and the vending machines. The hospital was a little busy today. Visitors walked up and down the corridors. It seemed there were as many visitors as there were hospital staff walking around. Then again, this was the oncology ward, and America had a lot of cancer patients.

  Lucy Hood had no visitors at the moment. No one noticed him standing in front of her hospital room. He wasn’t really there to kill her, but he may have to. And that was okay, too. Killing a dying woman in her bed was more about revenge than about killing her.

  John Glock was happy to kill whomever to protect his interest in the Principal’s organization.

  JACK WIDOW had been burned in Las Vegas, like many of its visitors. Only he had been burned by a woman, which wasn’t a big deal. It hadn’t been the first time a woman had left him, and it wouldn’t be the last time. That was the very nature of being a single man. Lovers would come and go, and they’d lie, and they’d have secrets, and they’d disappoint. That was a fact as old as time, and it wouldn’t change anytime soon. But the second time Widow had been burned was when he was trying to get a lift out of Vegas. He’d ended up getting a ride with a nice Asian couple in a tiny SUV. They had seemed totally nice and like good people. They had come to Vegas as a live-together couple and had left as a married couple, against the wishes of their parents. They’d told him an abbreviated version of their story, and when they’d asked him about himself, he had been honest with them. He had told them he was ex-military and was now a drifter and nothing more. But they must’ve not liked something about him because they’d traveled about twenty miles outside of Las Vegas and then stopped at a gas station. They’d given him a ten-dollar bill and told him to grab them some bottles of water for the road, which he’d happily agreed to do. But as soon as he was at the register with three large bottles in hand, he’d looked out to the pump where they had been parked, and the car was gone.

  He looked farther, tracing the service drive with his eyes, and saw them at the stop sign. He watched them turn right and speed off back to the interstate. They had left him. Why? He didn’t know. That was life. Some questions would always remain mysteries.

  The kid at the register said, “Sir? You want to get those?”

  Widow looked back at him and said, “Nah. Sorry, my mistake. I’ll put them back.”

  “I can do it. Just leave ’em.”

  Widow put the bottled waters on the counter next to the register, and then he asked, “Where’s the coffee?”

  “We got some old stuff back there, but if you want the better coffee, we got a café. Over there.”

  Widow looked over at a tiny café attached to the gas station. He nodded and then asked, “You got any books or magazines here?”

  As a kid
, Widow had picked up a love of paperback books from his mother. Being on the road so much gave him plenty of opportunity to read. He hadn’t had a book in his back pocket in quite some time.

  “Sure. We got a few books back on the far wall. Near the oil and car stuff.”

  “Thanks.”

  Widow walked back down two aisles and turned on one and found the book and magazine rack. On the rack was the USA Today. No other paper of record to speak of, which he had expected. He saw on the cover of the USA Today an article about the building of a wall on the US-Mexican border. Just like the guy back in Vegas had said. Then down on the front of the paper, he recognized a name the guy had mentioned—Sheridan.

  Widow picked up the paper and folded it. He might as well buy it. He also sifted through the books, which was easy because there were only ten of interest. The rest were that romance crap. A few were authors he knew and liked. One was a book he’d read before but really liked. It was a mystery series about a guy like himself—a hero who was ex-military and all that.

  He bought the book and the paper and headed over to the café side and took a seat at an empty booth. Actually they were all empty. After several minutes, the same kid from behind the register came over and acted slightly different, like now he was wearing his waiter hat and not his gas station attendant hat.

  Whatever works, Widow thought.

  GLOCK AND the three other members of the kill team sat in Glock’s personal Chevy Tahoe on the street across from Claire Hood’s El Paso apartment building. They had been there for a few hours and realized her granddaughter had never come home from school. They had tapped Claire’s phone line and had listened in the entire night. Which had been easy, since the old lady still used her house phone for most of her calls. They weren’t even sure she had a cell phone.

  The woman on the team said, “He took the kid. We missed him.”

  Glock said, “No shit.”

  “What do we do now?” asked the oldest member of the team.

  Glock sipped the last bit of his coffee, which he had brought in a big thermos, and he said, “I guess we split up.”

  “How?” asked the woman.

  “Into two groups. You two stay on the old bird.”

  “But she’s called about everyone she must know already. If she knew where Hood was with the little girl, she’d have gone there already. Right?”

  Glock said, “Nah. She doesn’t have a car. I looked before. She doesn’t have a car registered in her name and no driver’s license, either.”

  “Why didn’t she call the cops?” the other guy asked.

  “She can’t call them. The kid is illegal. Like the mother.”

  The woman asked, “How’s that? Hood looks white from his photo.”

  “He is. He’s not the real father. He took in the little girl and her mother from Mexico. He brought them over illegal-like.”

  The older guy said, “I’m surprised the boss let you hire him. Didn’t you guys vet him?”

  “Just do your job!” Glock barked. It had been his mistake not to look closer at a new hire.

  The woman asked, “So what do we do?”

  “You two stay on her. If she goes anywhere, follow her.”

  “How the hell will she go anywhere without a car?”

  Glock said, “Bus maybe.”

  The woman nodded and asked, “What about you?”

  “We’re going to pay a visit to Mrs. Hood. His wife.”

  Silence fell over the SUV.

  The other guy asked, “Isn’t she dying?”

  “Yeah. She’s in the hospital.”

  “Are you guys going to kill her?”

  Glock said, “We might kill them all. The Principal warned Hood two years ago. We told him what would happen if he caused problems for us. They all die.”

  “But we don’t even know if he’s told anyone,” the other guy said.

  Glock said, “We don’t pay you to think. We pay you to follow orders. You got a problem killing a kid?”

  “No.”

  “An old lady?”

  “No.”

  “A dying woman?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  Glock said, “Good.”

  The kill team didn’t share Glock’s motivations, but they liked money, and this was a well-paying job. That was all that mattered.

  The woman said, “We need a vehicle.”

  “Let’s go rent something. You stay here,” Glock said to the other guy.

  The other guy nodded and got out of the Tahoe. He walked over to a park across the street and sat on a bench and watched the apartment. Glock and the rest headed out to rent a second car.

  WIDOW ORDERED a coffee and sat in a booth in a makeshift café, one of those generic things with stale muffins and day-old cakes and scones wrapped in plastic bags and two flavors of coffee—nothing fancy, just black, caffeinated, and decaffeinated, and that’s it. And that was fine with him. He only drank black coffee. No sugar. No cream. No milk. None of those artificial sweeteners, not the pink ones or the blue ones or the yellow ones, and not even the white ones with the tiny green leaf on the package that indicated to lesser minds, Hey, use me. I’m natural. I have a leaf. I’m better for you than sugar. Those sweeteners were worse for people than the mountains of sugar he had witnessed coffee drinkers shoveling into their cups. The thought often made him grimace, but only a little because Widow’s opinion was basically live and let live. It was your life, your body, your choice, not his. So why judge?

  He hadn’t even cracked open the book he bought because he had ended up educating himself on the presidential candidates and their positions on the issues. Finding out their positions was actually very hard because most of the news was about them attacking each other. Widow had never seen anything like it before. Both candidates were under investigation for different crimes, and both were hated—a lot—by the majority of Americans. The whole situation was really a big mess. And the more he read, the worse it got. Widow tried to stay out of politics, but this was such a mess that he could easily see every American getting sucked into it. Even those who lived far away in the mountains could be affected by these two very different administrations.

  The thing that was really of interest to him was the proposal by one side to build a giant wall on the border. The whole thing was a serious proposal, but it seemed like the stuff of fiction. Forget about the morality of the wall and the reasoning for it. Logistically and financially, it just seemed farfetched.

  Widow moved on to read about this senator named Sheridan.

  John Sheridan—sounded like the hotel chain, only no connection—was a two-term Texas senator who used to work with the DEA and had had quite an impressive rise there. Now he was a senator in Texas. The biggest takeaway about him was that he was the strongest advocate for the building of the border wall. In fact, the article traced the idea of the wall to his creation many years ago. It went as far as to say that he was the one who had pushed the new presidential candidate on the idea. They were of the same party and were aligned on the whole issue of immigration—nothing surprising to Widow. Texas politicians had been screaming about illegal immigration for decades. The irony here was that most illegal immigration of undocumented people was from people traveling by air, not crossing the border. They simply came over with a visa and then overstayed. There was little enforcement of penalties for overstaying.

  Things were different now than in previous decades because there was a real possibility of a wall. Widow didn’t live in a border state, but he had been to Texas and had even crossed into Mexico before. The terrain was beautiful; he couldn’t imagine sullying it with a big, monstrous wall. Then again, the Great Wall of China was pretty magnificent. Of course, that was apples and oranges. He couldn’t imagine the same being true with a US-Mexico wall because the governments of today were all about saving money and cutting corners. Thousands of years ago, China was all about using the best materials to make a wall that was really impregnable. Which proved true be
cause that wall was still in large part standing and magnificent today. That’s why it’s called the Great Wall.

  John Sheridan was an impressive guy to read about. He was wealthy, successful, and had a law enforcement background. He had gotten rich after leaving the DEA. The article didn’t go into too much detail on how. It only said it happened through a series of investments and holdings etcetera. Apparently, John Sheridan had aligned himself with all of the right people in the public and private sectors.

  Widow drank three cups of the generic but tolerable caffeinated black gas station coffee, then stood up from the booth and left five bucks in cash on the tabletop for the waiter who doubled as the gas station stock boy. At first, Widow had felt bad for the guy as he’d watched him come over and serve him and then go back to the gas station to stock and rearrange the candy bar aisle. But on second thought, Widow’s sympathy retreated because he thought maybe the guy had originally been a stock boy, making minimum wage, and the café gave him the opportunity to make tips on top of his wages. That didn’t seem like such a bad gig. The guy looked like he should’ve been in high school instead of working at a gas station. Maybe he was eighteen or maybe he had dropped out of school or maybe both. Tips plus a decent wage wasn’t bad money for an eighteen-year-old. Widow had worked for much less when he was this kid’s age.

  Widow guessed that refills were free, as they always are for gas station coffee, and he guessed at most that the coffee was two dollars plus tax, which was about eight percent. It was probably more like seven and some decimal point, but it was always better to round up. So eight percent seemed right. Five bucks meant the guy got a generous tip for serving only a coffee, even though it had been three trips.