Page 35 of Necessary Evil

Chapter 8

Evil couldn’t put two thoughts together in his head for a good five minutes.

What the fuck had just happened?

He managed to buckle up his pants, so when Sentinel poked his head in, he didn’t ask any questions Evil would have had to bust his lip for.

“You ready to roll?”

Breathing hard, Evil nodded. If it had been anything else, on any other night, he wouldn’t have let her walk out that door, no matter how cute her ass looked swaying as she strutted away from him.

“You sure you’re all right?”

“Fine,” he bit out.

Sentinel had done recon on Barton, the bomb maker. Turns out the guy was also breeding dogs, and his basement was filled not only with detonators and caps but also with puppies.

Fucking puppies.

Luckily, Sentinel had been able to hide when Barton came downstairs to check on all the noise, but there was no way in hell he could stealth his way in again without ten dogs going crazy. And Ryder had threatened to cut his balls off if the puppies were harmed in any way. So the plan was to stake out the bomber’s place and take him out as soon as he stepped out of the house, all without anyone noticing. Needless to say, the whole crew had been called in. It was going to be a long fucking weekend. Longer now that he couldn’t get the image of Lucy on her knees in that silky red dress out of his mind.

Ryder sat in the back of an unmarked van with a laptop as Warden drove them two streets down from Barton’s house. Ryder and Evil were sitting in the back as well. Not for the first time, Evil wondered if they needed more support on this one.

“Do you think we need to call in backup?” Evan asked.

Warden shrugged. “Who?”

It was a fair question. Not everyone had the ability to kill.

The Sentinels of Babylon had started out as a group of kids protecting each other, but after Sarah’s death it had morphed into a different type of protection. When they’d all met up at Sarah’s funeral—Sentinel out of control with grief, Warden on disability and still recovering from the collapsed lung he’d suffered after being shanked by a prisoner, Ryder needing a place to call home—they’d sworn they would find out who killed her. Sentinel was sure his brother-in-law, Stan, had killed his sister. To this day, though, her murder was unsolved; the police had cleared Stan of wrongdoing, and after that he had gone to ground.

Unable to fulfill their promise to find Sarah’s killer, they vowed to provide justice for other victims whose predators had slipped through the cracks. Evil couldn’t do that as an officer of the law, so he’d retired. With the help of the Judge, the SOBs had put a dent in the criminal population and made Long Island a little safer. “Taking out the trash,” Ryder called it.

Above the law.Evil heard that thought in Lucy’s voice and gave a grim smile. He wondered if she’d be his attorney if they ever got caught. He shook his head. No. There would never be a trial. Each of the SOBs had a bullet to use if it ever came to that. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

“Don’t need more than the four of us,” Ryder said now. “More people means more chance of screw-ups. I trust you three. I don’t trust some SQUID with my back.” They all knew that the acronym stood for “stupidly quick, underdressed, imminently dead.”

“We wouldn’t ask a SQUID,” Evil reassured her.

Ryder was ex-CIA—or at least as much as anyone who’d ever been with the Company could be ex-CIA. She was damn near beautiful, but took great pains to disguise that fact with baggy clothing and an ugly attitude. It hadn’t always been like that. When they were kids, Ryder Brooks had been the girliest girl Evan knew. Then the CIA had cherry-picked her out of Georgetown because of her skill with languages, but instead of becoming a translator, she’d become an agent. The girl who’d gone off to college was not the same woman who’d come back after quitting the Agency. Fast, deadly, and almost inhuman when she worked, she scared the shit out of Evil.

“We need the help,” Sentinel argued. Sentinel would always back Evil’s play, even if he didn’t agree with it. Sentinel’s pretty-boy looks got him into a lot of fights, but the former Green Beret didn’t lose many. Fed up enough with the army not to continue his career after Afghanistan, Sentinel had come home to Long Island. It wasn’t the military that had changed him, though. It was his sister’s death that had turned the charming wiseass into a shell of himself. Because there hadn’t been enough evidence to convict, her murderer was still at large. For now.

Ryder snorted. “Maybe you do.”

“Shut it,” Evil said before the two of them started bickering.

“Aren’t the neighbors going to get suspicious about us being parked here?” Warden asked when Ryder directed them to pull over.

“We’re just going to be here long enough for me to get a signal to jam his IEDs.”

“He’s got military-grade hardware in there?” Warden’s voice went up a notch.

Sentinel shook his head. “No, it’s all homemade stuff—at least the stuff I saw.”

“But she said IEDs. Isn’t that what you had in Afghanistan?”

Sentinel made a pained face.

---