The Blonde Read Free

sickness. It was anger.
    After leaving the airport bar, Jack followed the signs to baggage claim. He didn’t have luggage to pick up—he made it a point to live out of one bag, no matter how many days he traveled. Lostluggage was too much a pain in the ass. But according to the airport’s Web site, the taxi stands were to the left of baggage claim, and sure enough, they were. Cabs to Center City Philadelphia were a flat rate—$26.25, so said the Web site. He climbed into the back of the first available taxi and tried not to think too much about the strange girl in the bar.
    Strike that.
    The strange,
pretty
girl in the bar.
    It was just as well he’d left her behind. Considering his morning appointment with his wife’s divorce lawyer.
    Poison me?
    Sweetheart, I wish you had.

9:59  p.m.
    Adler and Christian Streets, South Philly
     
    O ne squeeze. One hell of a mess to clean up.
    But that wouldn’t be Mike Kowalski’s problem. These days, it wasn’t even up to the police. No, this pleasure would fall to one of the crime-scene cleanup outfits. For fifteen dollars an hour, they’d hose down the blood, mop up the bits of bone and tissue, return things to normal. Or back to normal as possible. In Philadelphia, crime-scene cleanup services were a booming industry. Thanks, in part, to guys like Kowalski.
    And right now, he had his night-vision sights trained on a nice little head shot. Yeah, it’d be messy.
    In fact, depending on how the bullet impacted and exploded, it could mean an extra couple of hours’ pay for the crew that worked this part of South Philly.
    Which would be the Dydak Brothers. Couple of nice, strapping, blond Polish guys based in Port Richmond. They’d beencleaning up a lot of Kowalski’s scenes recently. Weird that they worked South Philly, traditionally an Italian stronghold, now full of mixed immigrants and twenty-something hipsters priced out of downtown.
    But whatever. Kowalski liked seeing some of his own people get theirs.
Sto lat!
    He’d make this one a gusher. Just for the Dydaks.
    See ya, cheeseball.
    The guy whose head was covered by a professional assassin’s sights had absolutely no fucking idea. He was eating a slice of white pizza—uh, yo, dumb-ass, it’s the dough and cheese that make you fat, not the sauce—and sucking Orangina through a clear plastic straw.
    Savor that last bite of white, my friend.
    Steady now.
    Index finger on the trigger.
    Set angle to maximize blood splatter.
    And…
    And Kowalski’s leg started humming.
    There was only one person—one
organization
—who had the number to the ultrathin cell phone strapped to Kowalski’s thigh. His handler, at CI-6. When they called, it usually meant that he should abort a particular sanction. He would feel the buzz and immediately stop what he was doing. Even if the blade was halfway through the seven layers of skin of some poor bastard’s neck. Even if his finger had already started to apply pressure to the trigger.
    But this sanction was personal. There was nothing to abort. Only
he
could abort it.
    This was capital
V
—Vengeance.
    Still, the buzz troubled him. Somebody at CI-6 was trying to reach him. Ignored, it could mean more hassle. More explaining to do, which was bad, since he was supposed to be on extended leave of absence. No operations, no sanctions, no nothing. The last thingan operative like Kowalski needed was to explain why he’d been systematically wiping out what remained of the South Philadelphia branch of the Cosa Nostra. That was seriously off-mission.
    The Department of Homeland Security kind of frowned on the idea that their operatives—even supersecret ops, like Kowalski— would use their training and firepower to hunt down ordinary citizens on a mission of vegeance.
    They might secretly applaud it, get off on the details, but approve? No way.
    So okay, okay. Fuck it.
Abort
.
    Your lucky day, cheeseball. I’ll get back to you later. In the meantime, go for some sauce. Live it up.
    Rifle