Chapter 6
SIX
Doc
It had been hard to wait this long, but the night swallowed me as I cut through the city, heading toward the industrial side where the head of my cleanup crew lived.
Leon Novak—ex-military, loyal when paid on time and on call for me twenty-four-seven for good money.
When I called Novak, he and his team stripped a scene—burned or buried what was left —handled it so no one ever asked questions.
Only tonight, I wasn’t calling in advance, and Novak had no idea I’d be visiting.
Someone had killed my patient, and I was starting at the top.
I slipped a blade between the door and the frame, pushed, and was inside within seconds.
The house was dark, the air heavy with the smell of bleach and gun oil.
I moved through the living room, silent, until I reached his bedroom.
Novak was alone, sprawled across the bed, one arm hanging off the side. I flicked on the lamp. His eyes flew open, his hand going for the gun under his pillow, but he stopped when he saw it was me.
“Doc?” he rasped, voice thick with sleep.
“Get up,” I said. “I’ve got questions.”
He glanced at his watch. “I didn’t hear a call!” He shoved at my hand, glaring, then reached for his phone. “You didn’t call.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Then what the fuck?”
“This is personal.”
Novak rubbed his eyes, still half-asleep but starting to realize this wasn’t a standard cleanup call, and tiredness gave way to something wary.
He sat up, glancing at me the way a man checks for landmines before taking another step.
Of all the people I dealt with, Novak was the only person I trusted on a cellular level.
He was clinical, detached, and unshakable, didn’t flinch at blood, didn’t moralize about right or wrong.
To a psychopath like him, his work was all math: cause, effect, cleanup, reward.
That kind of certainty made him a valuable asset.
Dangerous too, because men like Novak didn’t hesitate once they decided where their loyalty sat.
I’d heard him sing while bleaching a room where he’d killed someone, humming off-key while dragging a body toward the back door.
But I’d also seen him drop a warm one at the hospital without hesitation, keep his word, and never sell anyone out. In my world, that was worth of trust.
“This isn’t about a job, is it?” he asked, voice lower now, standing and pulling on jeans and a black T-shirt.
“You ever cleaned up for the Iron Bulls?”
Novak didn’t answer right away. He moved into the kitchen, flicked on a single overhead light, and reached for the coffee pot as though this were any other night.
I let him. I wanted him to be awake, alert, and thinking clearly.
He poured two mugs—one with sugar and milk for himself, the other black, the way I always took it—and set mine on the table before sitting opposite me.
Steam rose between us, and he rubbed a hand over his face, trying to shake the sleep off. I didn’t speak. I wanted him to fill the silence, to see what spilled out when he was too tired to edit himself.
“And this couldn’t wait until morning?” he muttered, taking a sip.
“No.” I watched him over the rim of the mug, tracking his pulse and the twitch of his jaw. Every movement cataloged, measured. I needed answers, and I needed him steady enough to give them.
Novak finally set the mug down with a clink.
“Yeah, I did a couple of jobs for them,” he said.
“They’re a walking shitshow. Thought they were hard, thought they knew how to handle a scene, but they were sloppy as hell.
Biker ego and too much coke, that’s all it was.
They didn’t follow protocol, didn’t listen, left evidence behind, and my crew was exposed more than once.
You don’t fuck with the timeline when you’re cleaning, but those idiots thought they were untouchable.
” He spat out the last word as if it tasted bad. “I told them I was done years back.”
“And?”
“They started working under some cleaning crew in South L.A.—gang shit, or someone trying to be. Last I heard, they were using a pit down near the border for disposal. Fucking amateurs. They’d be lucky if the coyotes didn’t drag half their mess back out by sunrise.”
“Who do they answer to?” I asked.
Novak’s expression shifted. He went still, gaze flicking up at me, measuring whether the truth was worth the risk. “I don’t ask for what’ll get me killed,” he said slowly, voice dropping.
I rested my hand flat on the table. When I opened it, the scalpel sat in my palm, the hypodermic at my wrist, both catching the low kitchen light. The silence stretched, tight as a wire.
“Fucking hell,” Novak muttered, though there was no fear in it, just fascination. His eyes lit like a predator catching scent. “You gonna kill me? What for?”
“You must have heard something,” I said, tone flat.
He exhaled, the sound lazy, almost bored. “All right, fine. águilas Cartel out of Sinaloa.”
I stiffened; that name was way too close for comfort.
I knew that someone had taken the old cartel’s name, stolen the fear Raven and his asshole crews had instilled in locals, but I didn’t realize they’d started running shit up here again.
Why the hell didn’t I know this? One slip—one moment of looking away—and the world shifted under my feet.
I kept my reaction hidden, but Novak’s eyes widened.
“You know them?”
“No,” I lied.
“Yeah, okay then, keep your secrets.” He sighed.
“They’re new to the area, six months or so.
águilas move guns, women, drugs—anything that keeps the veins open.
The Bulls? They’re pets. Trained enough to bark, dumb enough to bite their own tail.
They haul the product, watch doors, and clean up when someone gets too loud.
Half of them think they’re soldiers; the other half are meat waiting to rot.
That’s all I’ve got, and trust me, Doc, if I knew more, I’d tell you, just to watch what you’d do with it. ”
“You know anyone from águilas?” I asked, and the scalpel’s edge glinted as I turned it once in my hand.
“Never had a cleanup for the cartel directly. Won’t take that level of crazy either.”
I studied him for a long moment. His eyes didn’t dart; his breathing didn’t spike.
There was no flicker of deceit, no tell I could see.
Hell, could he even feel those things? Novak knew nothing—and I could read the honesty in him not born from fear, but from genuine truth.
I slid the scalpel into its sheath and sat back in my chair, letting the tension drain from the room.
“Kyle Rourke turned up dead with missing organs. You wanna explain that?” I asked, voice level but razor-thin.
Novak’s eyes narrowed, confusion there before his cold assessment returned. “Red? The fight guy? Dead?” He straightened, the coffee forgotten. “He was breathing when we dropped him. You think something happened at the hospital?”
“No,” I said, quiet, steady. “I think something happened with you and Rufus.”
Anyone else would’ve told me to fuck off, maybe flipped the table, but Novak stared. I could work off most people’s tells—the twitch, the shallow breath, the fear under their anger—but Novak gave me nothing.
He stared at me, jaw working, catching up to the accusation.
“Same as always. Anonymous tip to someone we left unconscious on the bench, standard M.O. You patched him up enough to move, pulse weak but steady. We didn’t stick around long enough for the sirens.
You know how it goes.” His gaze sharpened, and his voice was flat.
“You think I’d butcher a man after hauling his bleeding ass halfway across town?
If I wanted him dead, he’d never have made it to the ER.
So, if organs went missing, that’s on someone else. The hospital, maybe. But not me.”
“What about Rufus?”
Silence. Novak had trust issues, I was sure, but did he know Rufus well enough to rely on him? He didn’t immediately tell me not to worry; in fact, his pale silver eyes turned flinty.
“Wait here,” he said, and headed into his bedroom, out again in less than a minute. Jeans gone, now head-to-toe in black, he was holstering a wicked-looking knife. “You want in on this?” he asked.
I followed him out. Turned out Rufus lived ten blocks away.
We took separate cars, and we let ourselves into an apartment barely holding itself together.
The door stuck, the frame swollen from damp.
Inside, the air was sour—stale smoke, rot, and sweat.
We moved quietly through a reeking kitchen, with garbage piled high and old takeout containers slick with grease.
Flies buzzed over an overflowing sink. The counters were littered with burnt foil, cracked pipes, a spoon blackened at the edges, and the sour stench of melted chemicals.
Novak’s eyes flicked to mine, one brow lifting as we exchanged glances and moved deeper into the room.
We stopped at a table shoved into the corner, its surface sticky and cluttered with the detritus of drug use—syringes without caps, baggies crusted with residue, a lighter fused to a patch of melted plastic.
There was a smear of something dark—blood or worse—dragged across the edge.
Novak’s expression stayed unreadable, his voice low. “Guess Rufus had himself a party.”
“Did you know he was a user?” I whispered.
He leaned in close. “Yeah. Shit, he wasn’t my first choice, but it worked in a pinch.
” There wasn’t even a flicker of guilt. This was his crew, his responsibility, and yet his focus remained pure and clinical.
He scanned the room like a crime scene tech instead of a man who worked alongside Rufus, noting details, angles, and exits.
“Cleanup crews are the fucking dregs of desperate humanity,” he added.
“Apart from you,” I suggested.
He raised an eyebrow and stared at me. “Maybe.”