15. Cal Walker
Alexa, play: Riot - Hollywood Undead
B uddy clearly knew I was following him. I wasn’t exactly being subtle about it, and I didn’t really care. It was past nine on a Wednesday morning in a relatively suburban area. Hopefully, most people were working. If worse came to worse, I would just retire the Bentley for a bit after I was done.
My plates were fake anyway.
Driving with my knees, I quickly pulled my skull-face bandana over my nose to hide my shit-eating grin. I needed this. I had a feeling Ryan wasn’t going to let me fuck him anytime soon, so I would need a murder moment to hold me off. This fucking asshole was the perfect snack.
His Jaguar fishtailed in front of me as he ran a stop sign. I wondered idly if he was going to be dumb enough to lead me to his house or go straight to the nearest police station. Neither option mattered. If he went to the police, I just needed to know which precinct he was filing his report with. Then I could hack their records, wipe the report, and get his name and address that way…
Well, when I said I, I meant Vox. Don’t get me wrong, I could do the basics. Give me enough time, and I could get into most secured networks, but it definitely wasn’t my specialty. My buddy, Vox, on the other hand, was a fucking prodigy when it came to black hat hacking.
I was pretty sure Vox wasn’t his real name because… that would be fucked, right? Who literally names a mute Vox?
For all I know, his shit parents could have had a sick sense of humor. It wasn’t clear if Vox couldn’t speak or just refused to. However, I often suspected he just didn’t want to if his one-word text responses and refusal to sign with me were any indication. I usually just yammered his ear off and parroted what I assumed his responses to my antics were back to him based on his facial expressions.
Turning off Internet Friends by Knife Party so I could use the text-to-speech function on my phone, I fired off a text to the man in question.
“ Yoooooo! Voxy babyyyy , I’m shooting you an addy in a sec; you know what to do.”
Almost immediately, I received a thumbs-up emoji, and my grin widened beneath my bandana. This was not my first time chasing down some fuckhole for fun, and Vox was usually more than happy to help me out.
To my surprise and absolute delight, my mark turned into a rather large detached home. This was highly unusual. Despite the fact that I was thrilled I wasn’t going to have to fish his address out of the system to cash in on a new trophy for my murder shelf, it did make me wary.
If he hadn’t gone to the police, it most likely meant he was dirty and wouldn’t want the cops involved. It also meant his house was likely armed to the tits with cameras, and he probably had a gun or a bodyguard with a gun waiting on the other side of his front door. Or worse, a gun in his car.
The cameras wouldn’t be a problem. I dropped a pin to Vox. Once I was inside and had my mark detained, I would send him the make and model of Buddy’s modem. Home network devices usually come with default usernames and passwords, which most users don’t ever think to change. It would be more than enough to get Vox in to wipe whatever digital evidence of my presence might be caught by any surveillance this guy had installed.
The man in question ripped down his long, winding driveway to the massive house that was set nearly a quarter mile back from the street. His property was enormous and was lined with a barrier of twenty-foot Italian cypress trees, which was excellent.
No witnesses.
But if this guy had a gun and managed to fire a shot at me, there was a risk someone would call 911 if they heard it. I doubted this area of the burbs was accustomed to a casual gunfight on a peaceful Wednesday morning, so I would need to disable my prey as quickly as possible.
Without taking my eyes off the man’s tail lights, I reached into the back seat and pulled out my tranquilizer gun. I still had all my murder shit from when I thought I would be killing Ryan. My tranq gun was my favorite way to get my marks under control before the fun began.
It looked like a tiny rifle but was much more lightweight and packed enough punch to knock a hippo out if I needed it to.
Once we made it to the house, Buddy hit the brakes abruptly in front of me. Laughing, I pulled up my parking brake, forcing my Bentley to drift to the left as he dove out of the driver’s seat.
Yup, Janie’s got a gun. Fuck… now that’s gonna be stuck in my head all day. Actually… wouldn’t I be Janie in this situation? Nevermind. Maybe ‘I shot the sheriff’ would be a better reference? Ugh, this is deffo not the time! FOCUS CAL, JESUS!
Giving my head a shake to get back in the game, I caught the matte-black flash of what appeared to be a Beretta clutched in Buddy’s right hand as he stumbled out of his vehicle.
However, he had no time to aim. The back end of my car was completing its drift exactly where he had tried to take cover, forcing him to dive once more.
He somersaulted out of the way like some sort of less-cool version of a Cirque du Soleil performer, causing me to laugh again as my car came to a stop seconds before slamming into his.
I sighted backward out of the window with my tranquilizer gun and nailed him directly in the ass just as he was stumbling back to his feet.
“Gotchya!” I grinned as he let out a strangled argghhhh and swatted at his ass as he fell to his knees.
I turned off my car and slipped out. It was a little tight getting out because of how close I had come to hitting his Jaguar, but whatever.
Shimmying between our two cars, I strolled over to Mr. ‘I’m So Big and Bad I Beat Up Little Boys’ and swiped his gun out of his nearly limp fingers.
“Yerrrr… in soooo, much shit… dooo yewww knooo who yerrr fuckinnn with?”
I chuckled and slipped his gun into the waistband of my jeans—sorry, Damian—and crouched down to meet his gaze. His face was smooshed into his fancy custom driveway, and I thought he looked a little bit like a blobfish.
“Is there anyone in the house I need to be worried about?” I asked.
He tried to spit on me, but it just kind of dribbled out of his mouth due to the fast-working effect of the tranquilizer.
“I’m going to take that as a ‘fuck you.’” I grinned before standing up and approaching the house.
If there was someone inside, they had definitely heard my car squealing out here. If there was a guard detail, they would be out here already, or I would have been shot at.
If there were civilians, then they were probably calling the cops or hiding… or both.
The cops were annoying but normally not a massive problem. Cassandra was my defense attorney (obviously), and she was a fucking bulldog. In the few situations that she couldn’t extrapolate me, Damian would usually come to my rescue. Swoon.
Damian Ryker had serious connections with the legal system, which was a big reason why he had been able to swipe me out of that precinct when I was a child.
Don’t get me wrong, I was under no illusions about what kind of a man Damian Ryker was. I knew I had been groomed to be a killer. It wasn’t a secret. It just didn’t really matter. If I could go back, I would have made the same choice, especially knowing what I know now.
No one would have been able to save me from Ryker. His influence ran too deep. If I had denied him, it would have been Cassandra learning to kill for cash, and honestly, she pulled off a pantsuit better than combat boots.
My sister was way too smart to waste her life doing what I did. Every time I mourned the loss of my childhood, I just cried right into the big ol stack of money Damian paid me for each job.
The money that put a roof over Naomi’s head and sent Cass to Harvard.
Boo hoo. Poor Cal. Can do whatever he wants with no consequences and has the money and power to keep his family safe. Tragic.
Anyway, back to how scary Damian is… To give you an idea of how deep his influence runs, the number of dirty cops he has in his pocket would alarm me if it didn’t usually work to my advantage.
This is why I got away with being a little bit more, ahem , ‘cavalier’ about my activities than most of my colleagues tended to be. And, though Damian hated bailing me out of trouble when it had something to do with my hobby and not an actual job, he still would.
He had invested too much time and money into me to let me get lost in the system, and despite my reckless nature, you couldn’t argue with my success record.
You wanted ‘em dead? I would get ‘em dead. It just might be a bit messier than it needed to be… but hey. Love what you do, amiright? This wouldn’t be half as fun if I didn’t get to do fun little car chases like this from time to time, so fuck it.
Keeping close to the house so it would be more difficult to shoot me if there was a guard detail inside, I made my way around the perimeter, peeking into windows and checking doorways. Places like this usually had security systems, and most dumbasses put the little sticker advertising what system was guarding their homes.
These could deter a casual B&E from a regular joe shmoe, but when you were fucking with professionals like me, it just made my job easier. Most security systems ran on embedded firmware that could potentially have known vulnerabilities.
If this home’s system ran on vulnerable firmware, Vox could exploit those weaknesses to gain control of the system.
Sure enough, in the bottom left-hand corner of this douchebag’s fancy French doors was a blue sticker that said: Property monitored by Silver Security Systems.
I snapped a picture and fired it off to Vox on our encrypted chat. He sent me a thumbs up again, and I made my way back to my car to get my wardriving laptop. Firing it up, I gave Vox remote access.
Once my cursor started moving on its own, I left the laptop in the front seat and started gathering all my shit.
I may be a hot mess when the action hits, but when it comes to being prepared for the main event, I’m insanely meticulous. Obviously, I had gone through my murder kit, like, forty-seven times before leaving the house the night before, but I gave it one more thorough tally before feeling ready to get to business.
I swung the black duffle over my shoulder just as my phone vibrated in my pocket. I slid it out and grinned behind my bandana at Vox’s fourth thumbs-up of the day.
I was in.