6. Novak
SIX
Novak
The Pit was quiet by the time I was called in—another night of cage fights where thousands changed hands, and where someone like me and my team would be needed.
Two of my men stayed outside by the loading doors.
Containment first. Always containment. No one in, no one out.
I hadn’t wanted to take the work tonight, but Caleb was safely at the Cave working the latest intel I’d given him, and I knew Doc was with him and had given Doc express instructions to let me know if that changed.
What Doc thought of that, I don’t know, and I didn’t care, but so far, he’d done as I asked when it came to Caleb.
I didn’t enjoy the cleaning side of my business as much as I did the work I was doing for the Cave, but this was a commitment I’d made some time ago, and I never reneged on a deal.
Jeremy, my latest hire, a big guy, all muscles and tattoos, followed me down the concrete steps. He walked half a pace behind, hands loose at his sides, eyes up. He didn’t talk unless spoken to. Didn’t sniff. Didn’t twitch. Didn’t skim from pockets or steal the nearly-dead for body parts.
Unlike my last second in charge, Rufus, who’d done all of that, and had barely managed an hour under my knife before I slit his throat. At least he’d given up names, which was useful for Doc and Levi—about the only useful thing he’d done.
Jeremy had worked with me for three months so far. A promising start, given I hadn’t had to kill him yet.
The door to the fighting cage hung open. The canvas was already being stripped back. Blood darkened the center where the fight had turned ugly. A broken rib had ended it. Or maybe the kick that followed. Hard to say. Men blurred together when they were on the floor.
A doctor knelt beside the fighter on a stretcher just outside the cage. Mid-thirties. Clean hands. Clean boots. Not my Doc.
I was used to my Doc’s rhythm, and this guy felt out of place, as if someone had rearranged the furniture in my house.
He pressed along the fighter’s side. The man groaned, eyes squeezed shut.
“Don’t move,” the doctor said calmly. “You’ve got at least one fractured rib. Possibly two. I need to check for a pneumothorax.”
The fighter blinked at him. “A what?”
“Collapsed lung,” he translated. “If you’re short of breath or dizzy, you tell me. Now.”
He listened with his stethoscope, moving it methodically across the man’s chest and back.
“Breath sounds are reduced on the left,” he muttered. “But stable. He needs imaging. He can’t go home.”
I stepped closer. Jeremy stayed where he was, watching the exits as I’d trained him.
“Is he transportable?” I asked.
The doctor glanced up at me, assessing. Measuring what I was. We hadn’t worked together before; and I didn’t trust him.
“With care,” he said. “Keep him upright. Minimal movement. He needs a hospital tonight. If that lung fully collapses, he’ll suffocate.” He stared back at the fighter. “You’re lucky. Another hit, and this would be a different conversation.”
I studied the man on the stretcher. “He’ll live?” I asked.
“If you move him now,” the doctor replied. “Yes.”
I nodded once to Jeremy, and the big man scooped up the fighter and strode out to our van.
“Shall we discuss your fee?” New-Doc asked brightly, as if my fixed fee was something to negotiate.
I stared at him until he dropped his gaze. “Transfer the usual fee,” I said. Not a question. Not a discussion. “Before we reach the hospital.” I checked my watch. “You have thirty minutes.”
“It’s very steep, and I?—”
“Pay,” I said in a flat voice.
“Jesus, I was just… okay… I’ve got it!” He pulled out his phone and pressed buttons. “There, done.” He sneered at me. “There are other cleaners, you know.”
I shrugged. “Then use them.”
I gave the room a final sweep. We hadn’t been inside long enough to leave any meaningful DNA, even if the fighter had died and a cop had to treat this like a real scene.
Jeremy was clean. I was clean. The doctor carried the only visible blood, and that wasn’t my concern.
There was nothing here that required our usual attention or DNA scrubbing.
I left without another glance. Jeremy had the engine running.
We loaded the fighter onto the designated bench in the alley behind the hospital, out of the camera’s reach, and secured him in place.
I made one call. My contact inside would “discover” him within minutes.
“Clean the van down, and you’re done tonight,” I said.
Jeremy nodded and drove off to undertake the forensic sweep of the van.
I walked a different route to my truck, parked four blocks away, checked my account for the payment from New-Doc, and headed home.
I almost made it when my work phone vibrated with a 911 from Doc—Alejandro.
Fuck it. He is, and always will be, Doc to me.
An address followed. I changed direction without slowing. Starlight Motel. The place the reverend had given me last week.
The highway gave way to a two-lane road that had once been the main road, it seemed, but it wasn’t lit up now; it was dark land under a sky thick with low cloud.
A van was already parked nose-out beside a collapsed fence line, and Doc stood a few feet from it. I killed my lights before I rolled the last ten yards and stepped out.
Levi nodded once. Doc didn’t waste the movement.
“You’re late,” Doc said.
“911 came in at 02:38,” I replied. “Twenty-three miles at posted limits puts me here now. I’m exactly on time.”
Levi’s lips twitched. “Caleb’s running thermal from inside.”
My gaze shifted to him automatically.
The van’s rear doors were barely open enough to vent heat.
Blue light from multiple screens cast a faint glow into the darkness.
Caleb stood inside, with his back to us, one foot on the step, shoulders squared toward the monitors.
Even from a distance, I could see the tension in him—the way he leaned forward when he focused—and something tightened low in my chest at the familiar shape of him.
I’d watched him so often and memorized how he stood when he was thinking.
Slight forward lean.
The left shoulder lower than the right.
Weight on the ball of his foot.
Useful tells.
He turned at the crunch of gravel under my boots, and the screen glow caught his face, eyes scanning lines of heat signatures and structural overlays. His jaw flexed once when he saw me, and he was probably irritated.
My pulse quickened.
I cataloged faces and try to figure out expressions. I assessed threat, utility, and instability. Caleb was none of those in this moment. He was an asset—precision under pressure, a mind that could dismantle a network from a chair in a van—but that wasn’t what registered.
I wanted to be closer so I could test the reaction. I climbed into the back of the van. Caleb was running this op—he was the one I needed to talk to. I stopped about six feet behind him, close enough to see the screens and to reach him if something went wrong.
A useful distance.
Caleb didn’t acknowledge my arrival. “You’re blocking the light,” he said, eyes on the tablet in his hands.
I shifted half an inch.
“What is this?”
“Starlight Motel. Abandoned, but with a shit ton of fencing and security. We had a hit on two of the names you got from Neil Langston. BlueRoom69 and RexWantsBare.”
“Already?”
“Levi got into the reverend’s safe, found the burner, the rest is gravy.”
“And the other name?” SaintMichael.
“Still running intel.”
“You think he’s also inside?”
Caleb shook his head. “Nothing on screens, so, if you could try not to kill everyone so we could get useful information, that would be good.”
I raised an eyebrow at that. I’d kill or be killed, but for Caleb, I’d try to hold back if I could. “Do you have pictures of the ones I’m not supposed to kill?”
“Three look like hired muscle, but the other two don’t fit, and I’ve matched them to the users in the forum.
” Caleb flashed up two men. One in a ball cap, sixties, cheap tracksuit, heavyset, smoking.
The other, maybe in his forties, slicked-back hair; skinny as fuck.
The surveillance pictures were clear enough for me to remember their faces.
“Ball-Cap and Skinny. Okay.”
“There are three kids inside, and we have intel on a sale.”
“If there’s a sale, why don’t we wait for it, so all the traffickers are under one roof?”
He shot me a glance I had no hope of understanding. I’d probably crossed some kind of line, but I was a big picture kind of murderer-slash-cleaner.
“The kids in there don’t look good,” was all Caleb said.
I nodded.
Caleb sighed and stared back at his screen, and I moved a little closer.
He was dressed up, a suit of all things, in the middle of the fucking night.
I thought he was supposed to be in the office.
I needed to get a tracker on him. Had he been on a date?
Had he been fucked? Or was he the one fucking?
That thought made me hard. I rearranged my cock.
“Are you really getting a hard-on for fucking up shit?” he muttered.
“No, you smell good,” I said.
He closed his eyes briefly. That line usually worked. People liked hearing they were wanted, but Caleb didn’t react the way most people should have. He didn’t soften or lean in; he ignored me, which made me want to test him more.
“What the fuck ever, Arnie,” he snapped.
“Why do you call me Arnie?”
“Terminator,” he snapped, and I realized what he meant. Was that an insult? It gave me a warm feeling that he’d placed a nickname on me. I’d think about that later.
“Were you on a date?” I asked and poked at his suit. He edged away.
“None of your business!”
“Is it always men you date? And do you fuck or get fucked?” I asked.
He stared right at me. I could read all kinds of emotions from visual cues, but his expression was blank. “Jesus Christ, Novak. Concentrate.”
I shrugged and refocused on eliminating the bad guys.