Otherwise Occupied.
By Shay Savage.
Chapter 1 Hired Relief.
It"s f.u.c.king raining.
Again.
It wasn"t that I minded the wet or the cold I really didn"t, but it screwed with my aim and I was still trying to get back into the boss man"s good graces. I couldn"t really afford to miss. Against my better judgment when it came to an easy escape, I had put myself a little closer than I liked to be for this sort of job. I had to be sure to be successful, and if it cost me my life...well, that was better than failure at this point.
With my left eye closed, I looked through the scope of my Barrett M82 rifle. The crosshairs focused on a set of double doors made of gla.s.s and metal. The doors led inside of an office building, and there was a large "s.p.a.ce available" sign over the entryway with a phone number to call if you wanted a thousand square feet, which was just right for your office needs. If you were to call the number, someone would answer, but you"d find there wasn"t really any available s.p.a.ce.
Not unless you had the right connections preferably Russian, quite probably illegal Caspian Sea caviar, and definitely heroin. Those connections might get you a little corner office, but they would not, however, endear you to Rinaldo Moretti my boss and sole owner of all the Moretti businesses. Some of those businesses were even legal.
Well, one of them was.
Sort of.
I shifted my hip and stretched my back a bit. I had been in the same position for a good seven hours, and I was hungry. I brought a couple of protein bars with me, but they were long gone. This job wasn"t supposed to take this long, and I was getting frustrated and annoyed. I forced my breathing into a slow, regulated pace.
Frustration and annoyance were not my friends, not when I was on the job. I needed to keep my s.h.i.t together long enough for my target to walk out the door and die.
Maybe the weather was causing a delay.
I reached up with my hand and tightened the cloth around my forehead. It was doing a decent job of keeping the rain from my eyes, but it wasn"t helping with the whole comfort level. I didn"t stop watching the door as I adjusted the bandana never that. I had to be quick, efficient, and deadly.
No f.u.c.kups.
The last f.u.c.kup nearly cost me my life and had ended with me exiled to the desert for months, and that was just for killing the wrong guy. Missing the right one would be a lot worse. Of course, I couldn"t hit or miss him if he didn"t show up where he was supposed to be when he was supposed to be there.
"Calm, Arden." I blinked as I realized I was actually talking out loud to myself. Not good. I didn"t like that s.h.i.t, so I clenched my teeth a bit to remind myself not to do it again.
Everything had been perfect up until this point. After a week of scouring the Chicago city skyline, I had found the perfect building with the perfect view of the front doors. No visibility from the street directly below and nicely shielded from view of both the Willis Tower and the John Hanc.o.c.k Observatory. I only needed to be patient until...
...there he was.
I had no doubt the man in the grey trench coat was my target, though I had never met him before. I had studied his picture for hours yesterday to be sure I wouldn"t make a mistake. I"d probably been through his family photos more often than his wife had.
I blinked once, placed the crosshairs in position, and smoothly pulled back on the trigger.
Only a muted thump could be heard as I sent the bullet down the barrel and into his left eye. Before he hit the ground, I was already back away from the ledge of the building and disa.s.sembling my rifle to shove it into a gym bag. I moved the clothes around inside to cushion the metal and make it undetectable from the outside of the bag and then headed swiftly to the rooftop entrance.
Three minutes later I was on the other side of the building, out the door, and then taking the stairs into the parking garage across the street. At the top of the garage was a gym where I held a membership, and I made my way to the locker room inside. With my bag padlocked into a locker, I hit the Nautilus equipment.
It felt good to work out a bit. I had been slacking.
All thoughts of Thomas Farmer, chief board member of Electro Industrial (now deceased), vanished from my head by the time I had done my third set of weights. If it sent the right message to others about which crime lord you should align with, I might get a bit of a break, and Moretti might put me back on my normal pay scale.
Probably not.
Sweat replaced the rainwater in my hair, and after I"d done a rotation on the Nautilus, I went for the treadmill. From the front counter, there was a chick there who kept giving me the eye. She even brought me a towel when I finally got off the machine. She"d done the same thing the last time I was here, but I didn"t see her do it for anyone else.
"How was your workout, Evan?"
"Fine," I replied. "Thanks."
Great she even bothered to look up my name.
She was twenty-four or twenty-five, five-foot-seven, blonde, and she had recently gotten a haircut the ends were crisp and blunt but she didn"t like how it had turned out. She was trying to pull off a little ponytail for a hairstyle that was far too short, using a rubber band from around a newspaper. She didn"t normally wear it that way, or she"d have one of those scrunchie things.
The first thought in my mind regarding her hair was to agree it was too short. It also wasn"t dark enough. She didn"t have that cla.s.sic Italian beauty look I preferred.
Preferred?
I wasn"t actually aware I had a preference, and I considered this as I gave her a smile, a quick thanks, and then headed to the shower. While the water poured over me, images of long, smooth dark hair almost black, but not quite and matching dark eyes flooded my mental vision. I could almost feel her smooth skin against my palms.
I shook water from my head and quickly changed my thoughts.
I was probably going to have to change gyms even though I had only recently joined this one. I didn"t need anyone paying attention to me, remembering me, and hitting on me. It was too bad, really, since the place was big enough to have a short wait time for the machines. Oh well. I could always work out at the gym adjoining my apartment, but the wait time for a treadmill meant spending half the day there for a sixty-minute workout.
Home again.
My apartment was a high-rise building right near the Chicago River. My boss owned the place, and it came with the job, so I didn"t have to pay any rent or anything. It was a nice perk, though I would have preferred living in the country somewhere. I had never lived in the country, but I always thought I would like it open s.p.a.ces for target shooting and enough room for Odin to run around and chase squirrels and s.h.i.t.
I nodded at Pete, the security guard, as I walked by. I had no idea what his last name was, but he was on Rinaldo"s payroll. He smiled back at me, but the smile didn"t reach his eyes like it usually did.
I glanced over him and quickly took in other changes. He was usually dressed pretty nicely, but on this day his normally ironed shirt was wrinkled, and the tie didn"t match. His eyes were a little bloodshot from either lack of sleep or possibly actual crying I couldn"t really tell the difference.
It made me wonder if the wife had left him or if he left the wife, and then I decided it was probably the former. He had a kid, too a young one not yet in school. I wondered if she found out about who he worked for and walked out. I wondered if I"d have to kill him.
Or her.
Maybe the kid.
Nah, probably not. Rinaldo was a businessman, and killing a kid rarely achieved anything that couldn"t be achieved just as well by killing the parent.
The elevator dinged, and I pressed the b.u.t.ton for the seventeenth floor. My apartment was the perfect location as far as I was concerned right on the corner of the building, up high enough for my rifle to be very effective from a distance, and just two stories above the adjoining building. If I needed to get out via the balcony, I could. I usually took the elevator up and the stairs down but not for any particular reason. I was used to doing little things like that to keep myself in shape, and it was just a habit.
My eyes traveled over the door to my apartment, automatically looking for any signs of forced entry. There were none, but you couldn"t be too careful. I slipped the key in the lock and opened the door.
"Hey, bud."
Odin jogged his way across the living room to greet me, and I rubbed his s.h.a.ggy head. It was good to see his hair growing back in again he looked better with it longer. Well, he at least looked more like a giant mop, a.k.a. a Great Pyrenees. When we had been out in the Arizona desert all that time, I had to keep it closely clipped to keep him cooled down. His buzz cut had been nearly as short as mine.
Maybe dogs did end up looking like their owners. Or was it the other way around?
Whatever it was, if dogs were man"s best friend, Odin did his best to live up to the job. He had been with me for years and was about the only living thing around me I felt like I could actually count on. He would always be there when I got home from whatever I was doing. He never judged, never asked me a bunch of questions about why I was the way I was, and he never looked at me with fear.
He was my buddy, and it was one of the few things that scared me. I kept quiet about him because making it known I had something to care about even a dog was enough to bring those who had something against me out of the woodwork and into my private life. I didn"t need that s.h.i.t, and I couldn"t always be around to protect Odin. As big and ferocious as he could look to some people, he was an easy target to others.
I started up my netbook computer before heading to the kitchen for some orange juice. It was the good stuff fresh squeezed. I had been splurging on little things like that since returning to Chicago from the cabin in Arizona. The little things were so much more important than people realized when they had to go without.
Not that I had taken any of the small creature comforts for granted beforehand, either. It had been like that in the Iraqi desert, too, even at our base. Ration everything was the rule. It sucked, but it beat being left for dead in a hole.
Odin rubbed up against my leg, and I realized I had been lost in thought for a moment. I patted him in thanks and wondered for the hundredth time how he knew to do that. Like those service dogs that would get epileptics to lie down on the floor before a seizure starts to keep them from hurting themselves, Odin always seemed to know when I was thinking too much about the past.
He worked better than the drugs the doctors had prescribed.
I finished the OJ, took Odin out for a quick walk, and checked my email.
More lotto winnings.
Amazon would like me to review my purchase of a new set of headphones. I hadn"t actually tried them out yet, but I"d be hanging out with Jonathan tomorrow and would probably need them. The dude smoked a lot of weed and usually started babbling when he was stoned.
A dating site called Lost Connections wanted to hook me up with an available woman in my area. I licked my lips and thought I was going to need a little company for the weekend but not from a f.u.c.king dating site.
Lost Connections.
Before I could stop it, expressive and soft brown eyes in the center of a heart-shaped face invaded my thoughts. Long, dark hair and a f.u.c.king luscious a.s.s came next, but I pushed the rest of the memory away before it could really take hold and turned back to my email.
Pizza Hut had free cinnamon sticks with any large pizza.
"That"s what I"m talking about," I muttered to myself. I clicked on the pizza link and quickly ordered a large stuffed crust with mushrooms and pineapple to be delivered.
Hey it"s what I like.
f.u.c.king sue me.
When the pizza showed up, I sat on the floor of the living room with my back against the couch and dug in, tossing bits of crust to Odin as I ate. It was a good thing I had gone to the gym today because I had eaten a s.h.i.tload of pizza since returning to the city.
More thoughts about the simple things spun around in my head. Pizza, beer, coffee even a gym where I could work out properly. For some reason, my pleasure at the thought of the mundane alarmed me. My tongue moistened my lips, and I grabbed the remote to find something to watch on the television.
I was definitely thinking too much. I had to stop.
Television wasn"t a necessity; it was a luxury and a way to pa.s.s the time. I never really liked television much as a kid but found it was good for helping me relax now.
This History Channel was always good for a few z"s, and it was playing something about dinosaurs. I tossed the half empty pizza box up onto the coffee table and lay down on the couch. The throw pillows picked out by Luisa were soft and comfortable, and I wondered how Rinaldo"s youngest daughter was doing. I hadn"t seen her in a while.
Not that I would go too close to her I wasn"t stupid. You didn"t date the boss"s daughter unless the boss told you to. He hadn"t done that, though she was my age and I was considered one of Rinaldo"s favorites.
Had been, anyway.
If he ever gave his blessing, I"d do her. She was hot and had a smart mouth that made me laugh. It didn"t seem too likely now, not with me on the s.h.i.tlist indefinitely. It was enough to make anyone paranoid, and I was already a little bit on the unstable side.
An animated T-Rex took a bite out of a Stegosaurus as my vision blurred.
Head throbbing...and the taste of dirt in my mouth. On my stomach, coughing, trying to get the dust from my lungs...but only inhaling more of it. Hands bound behind me, and I can"t turn enough to the side to get my face off the ground...
I woke, startled, and glanced up at the television to see a bunch of World War II footage on the screen. I quickly shut the d.a.m.n thing off. I sat up and put my head in my hands, trying to clear the memory-dream from inside.
A large wet tongue against my forearm centered me, and I reached over to scratch the base of Odin"s ears.
"I need a better distraction," I muttered to myself.
Odin huffed at me as I grabbed my jacket and keys and shoved a Beretta down the back of my pants. He was probably looking at the clock and a.s.suming I was going to work, but I"d gotten my job done earlier. Now I needed to spend some of my cash.
My parking s.p.a.ces in the garage held two vehicles a used black Mazda hatchback I had purchased on my way back from Arizona about an hour after my old Chevy truck died and a silver Audi R8 convertible that I rarely ever took out unless it was one of the high-end social occasions I sometimes felt obligated to attend.
The public transportation in Chicago was awesome, and I was a big fan of it ninety percent of the time. Every once in a while there was a need to get from one place to another door-to-door, though, and that was what I needed on this night. I slipped behind the wheel of the Mazda and headed south to the area where the gentlemen"s clubs tended to spill out onto the street corners.
There were a hundred reasons I loved Chicago. Someone could live here for twenty years and still have new stuff to do. Jobs were everywhere, despite what the dudes sitting in the doorways of rundown buildings holding out cups and signs claimed. They might not have been good jobs, but there was s.h.i.t to do and ways to make money. I loved the buildings the most the whole concrete jungle idea. I loved figuring out how to get to the top of them and look down over the whole city. The Skydeck on top of the Willis Tower was an awesome place to relax.
Okay, maybe not to everyone, but I loved it.
I slowed the car as I approached the corner, and a half dozen girls and one guy took a few steps closer to the pa.s.senger side door. One of the girls actually came around to my side and laid her b.o.o.bs over my windshield, smiling and grinding away at me. She was way too skinny though and had that junkie look about her. I checked the rest of them out quickly, and it didn"t take me long to decide on the one with the biggest a.s.s. My finger depressed the window b.u.t.ton, and the guy placed his hand on the roof of the car to lean it.
"You lookin" for somethin" special tonight?"
"All-nighter," I told him. "Gimme the dark-haired girl with the round a.s.s."
The dude leaned in a bit more, and I tilted my head a bit so he could get a good look at me.
"Yeah, I know you," he said. "One of Rinaldo"s guys. Arden, right?"
"You got it."
"You sure you want that one? She"s new and givin" me a bit of trouble." He snickered. "Nothing you couldn"t handle. f.u.c.k, might use you to make an example out of her, ya know? You do side jobs?"
"Yeah, sure," I said with a shrug. "She won"t give me no trouble, though."
"Well, you give her a little discipline if ya need to, kay?"
""Kay," I repeated. Like I was really going to f.u.c.k up a girl I was f.u.c.king. Pimps were a.s.sholes, no doubt about it.
"Employee discount!" he announced with a laugh and a wink. "Come over here, Bridgett."
The black-haired girl walked over to the side of the car, and the pimp opened the door for her. She looked up at him with a bit of concern.
"You"re gonna be taking care of Mister Arden tonight," he said as he gave her a little push inside. "He"s a good customer, so you be good to him."