A $50,000 Bounty on My Head, and Every Hitman Who Came to Kill Me Became My Client.

I checked the dark web this morning and found a $50,000 bounty on my own head.

Ten minutes later, the first hitman through my apartment door had an $80,000 bounty on HIS.

Now he’s chained to my radiator with a 15-pound parking boot. Apparently, that makes him my first client.

I’m Jack Mercer: forty-one, broke, and a fugitive-recovery agent with bad knees, worse luck, and no talent for shooting straight. I make my living finding people who don’t want to be found. Turns out, the same tricks work on professional killers—especially when you have a parking boot, a roll of zip ties, and a healthy disrespect for traffic laws.

Then I learn why the hitman was marked for death: he used an old code to unlock my file, one tied to a job I took in October 2009. I was paid $600 to bring a woman to a motel. That night, the motel burned. Nine witnesses died.

Now the people connected to that job are being hunted one by one, and I’m the bait that dragged them out of hiding. To survive, I’ll have to protect the surviving killers who came for me, team up with a retired assassin who plans weddings, and find out who turned a routine six-hundred-dollar pickup into a seventeen-year-old murder conspiracy.

Because this time, I’m not letting a stamped form decide who gets handed over—and who gets buried.