Web of Lies (Page 15)

I stayed outside three minutes. Empty. The apartment was empty. If Jake McAllister had been inside to see or hear the door open, he would have come out to investigate by now. Most people weren’t good at waiting. They moved too soon, too quickly, and then they got dead.

A minute was enough to unnerve most people. Three, enough to drive all but the most consummate professional assassin crazy with adrenaline. Even I didn’t like waiting three minutes for something to happen. But there was a reason Fletcher had dubbed me the Spider – because I could be infinitely patient. Because I had that internal restraint. Because I could wait those long, long three minutes, if it meant getting to my target – or not becoming one myself.

I slipped inside the apartment and closed the door behind me.

It was a small space, divided up into even smaller rooms that reminded me of a rat’s maze. Knives in hands, I slipped from one room to the next, checking them all with extreme caution and care.

Empty. The place was totally empty.

No furniture, no appliances, not even a couple of fastfood wrappers crumpled and discarded on the linoleum floor. It didn’t even smell of anything except the cold rain gusting in through the open window. Not bleach, not food, nothing. I frowned. Not what I’d expected. Jake McAllister didn’t strike me as a patient person – much less the kind to pick up after himself. If the Fire elemental had been up here for any length of time, there should have been some evidence of it. Beer cans, cigarettes, an empty soda bottle, some candy bar wrappers. Instead, there was nothing. I didn’t even see any roach traps hidden in the corners.

I dropped my Stone magic and let my skin revert back to its normal texture. Then, I moved to the back of the apartment and the open window where the shooter had been when he’d fired into the Pork Pit.

Again, there was nothing. No cups, no wrappers, no evidence anyone had been inside the apartment today or anytime in the recent past. I peered under the window.

He’d even policed his brass, picking up the spent shell casings from the bullets he’d fired. Again, not something I would expect from a reckless, twitchy, Fire elemental hothead like Jake McAllister.

Dingy exposed brick outlined the window, and I pressed my hand against it. The uneven stone bit into my palm, and I closed my eyes and reached for my magic again, letting the cool power flow through me, attuning myself to the smallest vibrations embedded in the brick.

Nothing. Just calm. I concentrated, going deeper and deeper into the stone, until it felt like a part of me. A natural extension of myself I could examine and analyze the way I might my own fingernails. I felt more calm and… the sense of someone waiting. Not particularly bored, but not excited either. Just waiting… for the right moment to come along. An emotion, an action, I knew all too well.

My frown deepened. I opened my eyes, dropped my hand, and stepped away from the brick. I looked at the room again with a more critical eye, putting all the facts together.

There was nothing in the apartment, no trash, no shell casings, no emotions, because Jake McAllister hadn’t been here. He wasn’t smart enough, wasn’t calm enough for this sort of action. This – this was the work of a professional.

An assassin, just like me.

My gray eyes narrowed. So Jake, or more likely Jonah McAllister, had hired a big boy to clean up his son’s mess.

Now I was really annoyed.

But still… I couldn’t shake the feeling I was missing something. Something important. Vital. Obvious.

My reading, my sense, of the vibrations in the stone was correct. I knew it was. Even from an early age, I’d been able to hear the stone murmuring to me, and my power to understand and interpret it had only sharpened and strengthened over time. And would continue to do so until I died, hopefully at the ripe age of a hundred and fifty or so.

From the vibrations I’d picked up, the shooter had been waiting the better part of an hour. Maybe longer.

Sophia came in early, usually by nine, to start baking the day’s bread. I usually showed up around ten, and the restaurant officially opened for business at eleven. But the shots hadn’t been fired until almost noon.

Why? Why had the assassin waited so long? I’d been moving through the restaurant all morning. Cooking, cleaning, wiping off the tables and booths, flipping the sign on the front door over to Open. He could have taken me out at any time during the morning. So why hadn’t he taken a shot before lunchtime? Why then?

I went back over the shooting in my mind. I’d been standing behind the counter when the shots had been fired. A tough shot to make, even for a professional assassin, no matter how good with a gun he was. Maybe he’d wanted an audience when he killed me. Maybe that’s why he’d waited. Finn had been in the restaurant, standing off to my left. The girl had been there too, more or less in front of me –

And I realized what I’d been missing. The shooter, the assassin, hadn’t been firing at me.

He’d been aiming at the girl.

Chapter Six

The girl, Violet. The shooter had been aiming at her, not me.

That was the only thing that made sense. The assassin could have shot me any time I’d been close to the storefront windows. But he hadn’t. Instead, he’d sat in this apartment for almost an hour, waiting for her. She’d been sitting in a booth in the back, out of sight of the storefront windows, so he’d had to wait for her to finish her lunch. When she’d paid and started for the front door, that’s when he’d taken his shot.

My mind processed the information and moved on to the next question. Why shoot her inside the restaurant?

Why not wait for her to step outside onto the street? Why not just do her in some back alley?

The answer came to me. The robbery. The assassin must have seen the story in the newspaper about the botched robbery at the Pork Pit.

Maybe the assassin had realized that if he took out the girl in the restaurant, there was a good chance her death would be connected to Jake McAllister and the robbery last night. No doubt the cops would have had the same first thought as me – that Jake or whomever he might have hired had been aiming at me, not the girl. That I’d been the target. That Jake had wanted to silence me and make all the charges against himself just disappear. Given all that, the police wouldn’t be inclined to look too hard in other directions, to consider other theories. Like the fact the girl had been the intended victim all along.

And if laying the blame on Jake McAllister didn’t work, well, there was another option. The Pork Pit wasn’t officially located in Southtown, but it was only a couple of streets over, which meant the whole area had its share of crime. Drug deals, shootings, domestic disputes. One or more of those happened every day of the week.

Given the rough neighborhood, the girl’s death today might have just been chalked up to random violence in the area, if the cops were feeling particularly lazy. Some sort of drive-by or gang shooting that she’d been unlucky enough to get in the middle of. A ten-year-old kid and his younger sister had gotten caught up in one of those last week, less than a half mile from the restaurant.