“Nice shootin’.”
“You ain’t supposed ta smoke in here,” I told Jonathan. I cringed as I realized his accent was being extra contagious today.
He laughed out loud and made a grand gesture as he looked around for some stupid motherfucker to argue with him about it. I rolled my eyes and squeezed the trigger again. I was pretty sure Terry’s face would look pretty nice with a little round hole between the eyes.
At least thoughts of killing him were keeping my mind occupied. It seemed every time I wasn’t thinking about killing someone, thoughts of a brunette riding my cock in a hot, stuffy cabin in the middle of the desert kept coming back into my mind.
Terry Kramer’s little appearance at my apartment building at three in the morning hadn’t been a coincidence. He had spent his whole life in Chicago and wouldn’t have gone the wrong direction from a bar to the train, no matter how much he had to drink. Aside from that, he had been perfectly sober enough to lie to my face about why he was there. If he just happened to be at my apartment as two thugs decided to take advantage of a drunken idiot, there were only a couple of ways that was possible. I never considered coincidences to be possibilities.
One, he had been following me.
Two, he hung out around my apartment a lot but kept out of my sights.
Three, he arranged for the thugs to be there.
For a dozen reasons, I was going to go with all of the above.
Various thoughts, considerations, and scenarios occurred to me as I continued researching Brad Ashton’s movements via the internet. Most of the thoughts started with Terry being a little too power hungry for his own good and ended with a bullet in his brain.
First things first, though – Terry wasn’t on my kill list. It wasn’t that he had to be on an official list approved by the boss, but if I went off on a tangent before hitting my target, Rinaldo wouldn’t be overly pleased about it. I needed to take care of Ashton, which meant I needed to figure out everything I could about his Atlanta trip.
I took a few more shots, packed up my rifle, and sat down in the lobby area with Jonathan and Nick. No surprise at all, Nick had found the one and only woman at the shooting range and was telling her some bullshit story about being a makeup artist who specialized in painting women’s boobs.
She was totally buying it, too.
“You wanna hit the bars tonight?” Jonathan asked. “Looks like I’m gonna lose lover boy over there early.”
“Nah, I still got work to do.”
“You got a big job,” he agreed. “Terry keeps asking me about it.”
“That little fucker needs to stay the hell away from me,” I muttered.
“He does push yer buttons, don’t he?”
“Doesn’t,” I corrected.
“Wha?”
“Nothing,” I replied. “I’m outta here. Gotta let the dog out.”
“Sweetwater later?”
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “I’ll meet ya there.”
“Want a ride?”
“Nah, I’ll take the L.”
“You’re the only fucker I know who has a choice and still takes the fuckin’ trains.”
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I gave him a wave and a shrug as I headed off. Nick was already feeling up the chick’s tits, saying something about how he thought he could paint her whole chest as a butterfly or something. I wondered what he did when the chicks he conned called him out.
Maybe they never did.
Maybe he really could paint a titty-fly.