Texts begin to ping through. Murray. He wants me to send him more images—all the images I have so far. We have the contract, now he wants me to deliver.
I start going through the images, making sure they’re backed up into the cloud, emailing a few to myself just to be redundant. There’s the shot from the store where they’d dressed him up with that scarf and glasses, but I see his wild heart shining through in spite of it all. And the before and after haircut pictures. I pause on one of the motel images. Kiro on the bed, back against the headboard, glowering, steak bone in each hand, surrounded by empty to-go cartons, hair still wild and long.
I spread it large and study his face. I smile, even though he’s glowering. I’ll never get sick of looking at Kiro.
I decide not to send the photos yet. I’ll deal with it all later. I shut it off and pull the thing apart.
I store the battery in one baggie and the body in another baggie—it keeps better that way. I tuck the baggies into a pocket in my purse and look out at Kiro, kneeling there, so still. Loving that he’s back.
How can anybody blame him for wanting to get lost in the wilderness after the way the world treated him?
I grab the stupid little wolf keychain off the dashboard and turn it around and around in my hand.
I’ve never known anybody like Kiro. I’ll never know anybody like him ever again.
It makes my heart ache.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Lazarus
My executive coach,Valerie, has a bias for the carrot over the stick. If you asked her, she’d try to tell you that fear doesn’t inspire excellence.
It’s possible she has that right vis-a-vis the corporate world; people fearing for their jobs may not be as creative as they could be. But people fearing for their lives—that’s a whole different level of creativity. The human animal longs to stay alive. Will do nearly anything, even the seemingly impossible, to stay alive.
So when my team loses Kiro and the girl outside the mall, I send my pet hitter, Tarik, to take out the leader. Because this was a balls-to-the-wall fuckup. Kiro and the girl were in the store. They were sitting ducks. It was a miracle we’d picked up their trail at all.
And what did my guys do? They set up on the vehicle instead of the people they were following. A team of five lethal killers and they were all standing around that parking lot in sight of one another. It was fucking lazy.
And such a simple hit—a bullet in the brain in parking lot. Easy to film.
Somehow, the girl and Kiro made my guys and slipped out the back.
Lazy. Sloppy.
I get the second in command, a man named Dirk, on the phone. I tell him I want him and his men to come up with three strategies for locating the pair of them again. I have more guys on their way up. He needs to handle the manhunt. I don’t threaten to kill him if he doesn’t succeed. But he gets that I will kill him if he doesn’t give 110 percent.
Kiro needs to die. Hell, he needed to die before he knocked me out and dislocated my shoulder. Things aren’t looking great.
Until seven hours later.
That’s when I get the call from some editor from out east telling me he has a way to get the location of Kiro and the girl, who turns out to be a reporter—in exchange for a generous finder’s fee and a favor. He wants to embed his own reporter. He actually uses the word “embed.” Like this is a troop situation.
“How’d you get my number?”
“I have sources everywhere,” he says. “A journalist never reveals his sources. It goes for you, too. You want my info or not?”
“You know where they are right now?” I ask him.
“I know where they were two hours ago. And as soon as my freelancer puts her battery back into her phone, I’ll have her location.”
“They’re heading into a wilderness area the size of a small state. You think you can run GPS off her phone?”
“No, I’ve got a tracker on her. Runs behind the scenes off the lithium battery,” he says. “The phone doesn’t need to connect to a tower to give me her location. She just needs to assemble the thing to take a picture. It’s only a matter of time.”
“And I want a reporter telling the world what my people do…why?”
“My guy, Garrick, is interested in getting a few pictures of Savage Adonis in his home and, if possible, to have a word or two with him. After that, Garrick walks away. A quick interview, a few images of Kiro in his natural habitat. Keeping you strictly out of it.”