Page 25 of Lulu

This was why I didn’t get close to women. They made life messy.

I opened my door and was halfway out when my phone went off. I reached for it and fell back onto my seat with one leg out the door and a boot on the ground.Caller unknownflashed across the screen, but I answered it anyway. “Yeah?”

“It’s Crazy.”

I frowned. Why the hell was he calling me?

“Have you heard from Sanford?”

There was something in his tone that I didn’t like. It was unusual for any of us to have contact with one another unless we were working together. “You talking about the job he gave you that was supposed to be mine?”

“No, man. Spider was killed last night.”

Fuck!I hadn’t expected that. Spider was another one of us who worked both sides of the law. I hated to hear that he’d been killed, but it was one of the hazards of the job. We were assassins because we liked working off the grid, alone, and some of us enjoyed killing. Most of us were ex-military who returned home so fucked up that we didn’t know how to acclimate back into normal society. The pay for what we did was good, but it was at the cost of our souls. Some of the men had gone so far over to the dark side that they were barely recognizable as human beings.

I exhaled a harsh breath to let Crazy know how I felt about that news. “Shit, man. I hate to hear that. Spider was a good man. The last one I’d expect to get taken out on a job. He was good at covering all his bases.” I’d worked with him more than once.

Crazy pulled in a sharp breath. “He wasn’t killed on the job.”

Now that surprised me, and also explained why I was hearing this from him and not from Sanford.

“Someone snuck up behind him when he was walking out to his car after leaving a nightclub.”

“Shit,” I exclaimed. “Were there any witnesses?”

Crazy’s snort came across loud and clear. “A couple of kids making out in their car saw it go down. Told the authorities they couldn’t ID the killer. It was too dark and he was dressed all in black, but that he shot Spider in the back of the head and ran off.”

“A hit,” I murmured thoughtfully.

“Sure as fuck sounds like it, but who knows? Spider was a player. For all we know he pissed off some woman’s husband.” If Crazy really thought that, he wouldn’t be calling me right now.

What he’d said about Spider was true. I’d heard that about him a long time ago. Just because we didn’t have a lot of interaction didn’t mean that we didn’t know some of each other’s habits or secrets, and there were ways of finding out information about people if you knew where to look on the web. Spider was good at what he did, and I was surprised that he’d let his guard down enough for someone to sneak up on him like that. Of course, if you weren’t expecting it…

“I can almost hear you thinking, man,” Crazy quipped.

“Yeah. Just surprised. To hear Sanford talk, Spider was the most experienced, lethal bastard he knew.”

“At least he’ll have a funeral.”

I didn’t bother commenting. That was at least something, I supposed. If Spider had been taken out while on assignment his body would have simply disappeared, leaving behind family and friends to forever wonder what had happened to him, while having nowhere to go but to the cops with their questions. Law enforcement wouldn’t have the answers either. After a while, the missing person’s report would end up buried in a box somewhere and forgotten.

At least this way his family would have a body to bury.

“I called Ghost and Wolf, too. Don’t know the others. Sanford didn’t seem too worried about letting anyone know what happened, but I wanted to give you a heads up just in case you notice something or want to beef up security or something.”

“That sounds like Sanford,” I snarled. “He can be a cold motherfucker when he wants to be. It’s all about the fucking job with him, and we’re dispensable. How the hell did you find out?”

“By chance. I was filling Sandford in on what went down on my last assignment and he mentioned it.”

I frowned. That was surprising in itself. Usually we only had contact with Sanford at the beginning. Once the job was complete, we went to an encrypted online file to report, and then the money showed up in our accounts a few days later.

I had a call coming in and pulled my phone away from my ear to check it out. “Speak of the devil, he’s calling now,” I told Crazy. “Look, kid, appreciate the notice. Watch your back. I’ll do the same.”

“Will do.”

He hung up and I took the call from Sanford. “About time you fucking called,” I snapped into his ear, none too happy with what I’d just learned.

He didn’t bother playing dumb. “You heard. Goddamn that Crazy! I told him to keep this between us. He’s a loose cannon.”