Chapter 2: Professional Courtesy

　　Professional hitmen spend ten thousand dollars on titanium suppressors, subsonic ammunition, and tailored kevlar coats, all to avoid one thing: a municipal police report.

　　Which meant my best weapon against four men with German submachine guns wasn't a bigger gun—it was a traffic violation.

　　"You're insane!" Vic Danner shrieked as I popped the lock on the fifteen-pound wheel boot, yanked him off the kitchen linoleum by his good arm, and shoved him toward my bedroom window. "They're already on the porch! If we go out the side alley, they'll cut us in half!"

　　"Shut up and jump, or I'll lock the boot to your neck," I snapped, kicking out the rotting wooden screen of my first-floor window.

　　At the front of the apartment, my cheap hollow-core door imploded under the weight of a steel battering ram. No shouting. No warnings. Just the wet, rhythmic thwip-thwip-thwip of suppressed MP5s stitching nine-millimeter holes through my living room drywall.

　　I shoved Vic headfirst through the open bedroom window into the rain-soaked hydrangeas, tossed the fifteen-pound steel wheel boot out after him, and dove into the mud a second before a burst of subsonic rounds shattered the window glass above my head.

　　My left knee—the bad one—slammed into the concrete edge of the storm drain. Pain shot up my thigh like hot wire. I bit down on the inside of my cheek, grabbed the collar of Vic's windbreaker, and dragged him twenty feet down the narrow brick alley to where my rusted 2011 Ford was nose-out toward the cross street.

　　I threw open the rear passenger door, shoved Vic onto the floorboard between a leaky hydraulic jack and three empty fast-food bags, and vaulted into the driver's seat.

　　As I jammed the key into the ignition, two of the charcoal-coated Cleaners rounded the corner of the building. The lead shooter didn't even raise his pulse. He planted his feet in the puddles, brought his MP5 to his cheek, and aimed dead-center at my rear window—not at me, but at the spot where Vic was curled up.

　　I didn't shift into drive. I slammed the transmission into reverse and floored the gas.

　　Two tons of Detroit rust roared backward down the narrow alley. The lead Cleaner dove into a stack of wet cardboard boxes a split-second before my dented rear bumper clipped his partner's hip, sending him spinning across the hood of a dumpster. Subsonic rounds chewed through my trunk lid, filling the cabin with the acrid stench of punctured spare rubber and gunpowder.

　　I wrenched the steering wheel left, bounced over the curb onto 4th Street, and stomped the accelerator to the floor.

　　Behind us, the black Mercedes SUV peeled away from the curb, its tires screaming against the wet asphalt as it surged into my rearview mirror.

　　"They're right on us!" Vic yelled from the back floorboard, his bound hands clawing at the base of my seat as he tried to keep his head below the glass. "Cut my zip-ties! Give me my gun! You don't even have a piece on you!"

　　"In the glovebox, and you're not getting it," I grunted, weaving between a municipal garbage truck and a stalling city bus. "You tried to murder me four minutes ago, Vic. We aren't partners. You're cargo."

　　"If they box us in at the next light, we're both dead cargo!"

　　The Mercedes SUV closed the gap to ten feet. In the passenger window, a Cleaner leaned out, bracing a suppressed rifle against the side mirror.

　　I looked ahead. Two blocks up, at the intersection of 4th and Market, sat a twenty-four-hour pharmacy. And idling in the no-parking zone right outside the neon drive-thru window—exactly where she parked every Monday morning at 8:25 AM to pick up her black coffee and blood pressure medication—was an unmarked grey Dodge Charger with state government plates.

　　Senior Investigator Hannah Ward, Bureau of Bail and Insurance Investigation. Forty-six years old, mean as a junkyard badger, and the woman who had spent the last six months trying to revoke my recovery license over a questionable door-kick in Riverbend.

　　"Brace your good shoulder against the transmission hump," I told Vic.

　　"What? Why?!"

　　"Because I'm about to void my insurance."

　　At forty miles per hour, I yanked the steering wheel hard to the right, jumped the curb outside the pharmacy, and drove the front left quarter-panel of my Ford straight into the rear bumper of Hannah Ward's state-issued Dodge Charger.

　　The impact sounded like a dumpster falling off a three-story roof.

　　My airbag didn't deploy—because the sensor had died back in 2019—so my chest hit the steering wheel hard enough to knock the wind out of my lungs. My forehead grazed the sun visor. In the back, Vic howled as his broken collarbone bounced off the vinyl seat.

　　Hannah's Charger spun forty-five degrees across the wet crosswalk, its covert red-and-blue grille lights flashing to life automatically as the collision alarm blared across the entire intersection. Two uniformed Bellport PD beat cops coming out of the diner across the street dropped their coffee cups and drew their service weapons.

　　In my shattered side mirror, the black Mercedes SUV locked its brakes fifty yards back.

　　Through the rain, I watched the passenger-side Cleaner pull his rifle back inside the cabin. For two seconds, the SUV idled at the green light. Then, with three police sirens screaming to life within a hundred-yard radius, the Mercedes smoothly signaled left, turned down an industrial side street, and vanished.

　　"See?" I wheezed, rubbing my bruised sternum as steam hissed from my crumpled radiator. "Told you. Fatal allergy to paperwork."

　　Before I could catch my breath, the driver's door of the Dodge Charger was kicked open from the inside.

　　Hannah Ward stepped out into the rain. She was wearing a wrinkled trench coat over a cheap pantsuit, coffee spilled all the way down her blouse, and her Glock 19 was already pointed straight at my windshield.

　　"Mercer!" Ward roared over the wailing sirens, her hawk-like eyes locking onto me through the cracked glass. "Put your hands through the sunroof, you lunatic, or I swear to God I will shoot you and bill your estate for the bullet!"

　　"Wait here," I told Vic, reaching under my seat to grab the manila folder I kept wedged beneath the floor mat. "Those beat cops are gonna pull you out in ten seconds. Demand a lawyer, ask for protective custody, and don't say a word about The Counter until I figure out who's running the board."

　　"Wait—you're leaving me with the cops?!" Vic panicked, squirming on the floorboard. "She's state DOJ! If I go into central booking, the Cleaners will poison my tray before noon!"

　　"Better than getting shot in my backseat at 8:30 AM," I said, popping my door latch while Ward was still circling her crumpled trunk. "Tell Ward I had a brake line failure."

　　Then I heard the footsteps behind the pharmacy dumpster.

　　No sirens. No shouting. Just a man in a dry yellow rain poncho walking briskly down the crowded sidewalk, carrying a folded newspaper under his left arm.

　　He hadn't come from the Mercedes SUV. He had already been waiting at the intersection.

　　My eyes dropped to his shoes. Under the hem of the cheap plastic poncho, he was wearing matte-black tactical boots—the exact same brand Vic was wearing.

　　"Vic, get your head down!" I barked, lunging backward toward the rear door.

　　I was half a second too late.

　　The man in the yellow poncho didn't even break his stride as he passed the passenger side of my stalled Ford. A suppressed pistol poked out from beneath the folded newspaper, pressed flat against my rain-streaked rear window, and coughed twice.

　　Phut. Phut.

　　The safety glass spiderwebbed into a milky white sheet, punched through by two neat, quarter-inch holes.

　　Inside the car, Vic Danner jerked once against the transmission hump and went completely still.

　　"Gun! Sidewalk, yellow poncho!" I yelled at Ward, diving behind my open driver's door as the shooter melted into the morning crowd rushing out of the commuter subway stairs.

　　Ward spun, dropping to one knee by her fender, while the two beat cops sprinted toward the subway entrance with their weapons drawn. The intersection erupted into total chaos—screaming commuters, barking police radios, and the blinding strobe of red and blue lights reflecting off the wet asphalt.

　　I looked through the gap in my doorframe. Vic was staring up at the headliner with glassy, unblinking eyes, two dark holes centered in his temple. On the floorboard beside his limp hand, his encrypted phone chimed once.

　　A green banner flashed across the screen: CONTRACT FULFILLED — $80,000 RELEASED FROM ESCROW.

　　Less than twenty minutes from code activation to cold corpse. And they had done it ten feet in front of a state investigator without even dropping their umbrella.

　　I snatched Vic's encrypted phone off the carpet, stuffed my manila folder inside my jacket, and backed straight into the thick of the panicking subway crowd while Ward was screaming license plate numbers into her shoulder mic.

　　Twenty minutes later, I shoved open the back fire door of Quinn Bail Bonds on 9th Street, dripping rainwater and radiator coolant onto the threadbare carpet.

　　The office smelled like stale coffee, damp paper, and forty years of bad decisions. Behind a bulletproof plexiglass counter stained yellow from decades of nicotine, Rae Quinn sat in her squeaky leather swivel chair, an unlit Virginia Slim dangling from the left corner of her mouth. She had quit smoking thirteen years ago after her first bypass, so now she just chewed the filters to pulp and used the paper tube to point at people she didn't like.

　　"You look like you lost a fight with a lawnmower," Rae said without looking up from her ledger. "And Hannah Ward's office just called my landline twice. Did you really rear-end a BII cruiser in a company car, Jack?"

　　"It's my car, Rae. You stopped paying the lease in 2018," I said, locking the deadbolt behind me and limping toward her desk. "And somebody just put fifty grand on my head on The Counter."

　　Rae finally looked up. She was fifty-eight, with iron-grey hair cut short like a drill sergeant's and eyes that could spot a forged deed from across a courtroom. "Fifty grand? Who'd you piss off, the cartel?"

　　"No. Somebody from October 2009."

　　I reached into my jacket, pulled out the manila folder I'd kept hidden under my car mat since the day I bought the Ford, and slapped a single, faded sheet of yellow carbon paper onto her desk blotter.

　　It was the third ply of a standard Bellport bail surrender receipt—the yellow copy the recovery agent keeps to claim his mileage and commission.

　　DATE: October 14, 2009. 　　FUGITIVE: Evelyn Wren. 　　RECOVERY FEE: $600.00 (Paid Cash). 　　CUSTODY TRANSFERRED TO: R. Cross (Authorized Transport).

　　Stapled to the bottom right corner was a faded thermal receipt from the Route 17 toll booth gas station, time-stamped 18:42.

　　"A hitman named Victor Danner broke into my kitchen forty minutes ago," I said, watching Rae's face closely. "And right before a Cleaner put two subsonic rounds through his skull outside the pharmacy on 4th, he told me that Evelyn Wren wasn't a bail jumper. He said she was a federal witness hiding at the Sunset Motel—the same motel that burned down at 9:15 that night with nine people inside."

　　The office went dead quiet, save for the hum of the fluorescent tube flickering above the filing cabinets.

　　"You told me she skipped bond on an embezzlement charge in Mercer County, Rae," I said, my voice dropping an octave. "You handed me that warrant yourself. My very first job off the street. Did you check the court docket number before you sent me out to Route 17?"

　　"That was seventeen years ago, Jack," Rae said flatly, her eyes fixed on the yellow receipt. "I process four hundred bonds a year. If the paperwork came through the clearinghouse with a notary seal, I signed it and paid your six hundred bucks. Dead people don't pay premiums; live ones do. Why the hell would I send you on a murder hit?"

　　Her voice was steady. Her face didn't twitch. To anyone else in Bellport, she looked like a tough old bondsman annoyed by a stupid question.

　　Except I had worked for Rae Quinn for seventeen years. And I knew what she did with her left hand when she was lying through her teeth.

　　She took the unlit cigarette out of her mouth and began tapping the filter against the wooden edge of her desk. Tap. Tap. Tap.

　　My chest tightened. I didn't call her on it—not yet. If Rae had sold me out in 2009, pushing her right now would only make her burn whatever paper she was hiding in her floor safe.

　　Before I could open my mouth, the encrypted smartphone I'd taken off Vic Danner's body vibrated violently against my hip.

　　I pulled it out. Two notifications had hit The Counter at the exact same second.

　　The first was an update to my own file:

　　TARGET: Jack Mercer. 　　PAYOUT: UPGRADED TO $100,000 (Immediate Cash).

　　The second was a system alert on the backend tracker. Two more October 2009 sub-contract codes had just been punched into the server from a terminal less than a hundred yards from Rae's office.

　　ACCESS GRANTED: Sub-Contract #02 (C. Mason / R. Miller).

　　I whipped my head toward the rain-streaked front window of the bail shop. Across the street stood a condemned two-story transmission repair garage with boarded-up bays.

　　Up on the second floor, a single rotted plywood board had been pried back three inches.

　　A tiny, pinpoint dot of red laser light cut through the drizzle, pierced the dirty glass of Rae's front window, and settled squarely in the center of my chest.