Chapter Seventeen #5
“Next up, tell me where to find Devon Slater, or as you may know him, Slater J Devon.”
Yeah, she’d read the intel Gene had gotten before The Hunters got there. Rogue had sent her everything and copied Gene. That had been one more reason she’d not been sleeping.
She was getting ready for war.
At the mention of his name, the man begged.
“Please. I’ll tell you what you want, but I can’t tell you much about him. It was one phone call, and then cash arrived to a post office box.”
Elizabeth pointed at the phone.
“Gene, see what you can find. If it’s viable, get it to Gabby.”
He started plugging the phone into a tablet.
She kept questioning him.
“Did he hire you for any more jobs?” she asked. “I ask because I’m going to find him and make him pay.”
The man shook his head.
“No. It was one and done. I haven’t heard from him since. Please call an ambulance,” he muttered, his kneecap dangling from his blown apart knee.
Yeah, that wasn’t happening.
“Do you work with anyone?” she asked, not mincing words. “Who helps you do the jobs?”
He shook his head.
“No one! I work alone!”
She glanced over at Maura and Jagger.
“Does that match our intel?” she asked.
Jagger nodded.
“Yep.”
Well, then, they had nothing more to talk about. Anything else would just be shit she didn’t need, but when you hunted, you kept your word.
So, Elizabeth shot him in the balls anyway. The man screamed, and she stuck the gun under his chin. He was bleeding onto the floor, and that told her she’d hit an artery. He wasn’t going to be living much longer.
And he certainly wouldn’t need his dick.
He was wailing.
“You’re disgusting to kill children for money. If I was a nicer bitch, I’d take you into jail and let the inmates have at you for the rest of your life. Since I’m all out of nice, you have three seconds to tell me EVERYTHING you know about Slater before I remove your face with this next bullet.”
He sang.
Well, he tried, but it was a short tune.
Like she expected, it was nothing she needed to know.
“I swear that I never met him face-to-face! I don’t know how to find him!”
She glanced over at Maura.
“Need any more intel?” she asked. “On any bombings before I put this piece of shit down?”
She shook her head.
“Nope. Want me to make his face Swiss cheese?” she asked. “I hate kid killers.”
Yeah, her too.
Taking the side of her hand, she slammed it across the man’s windpipe, crushing it.
“You don’t get to die fast,” she stated. “That’s for those babies. May you burn in Hell.”
From where he stood, Jagger approved. It appeared that her Marines were showing her ways to neutralize a threat the old-fashioned way.
With accuracy.
“Nice one,” he said, shoving the chair backward that the man was zip tied to as he struggled to breathe.
Then, they focused on Gene who was trying to go through his shit to find something.
They really needed it.
“Anything?” Maura asked. “A map would be nice. A way to find him would be perfect.”
He laughed.
“Well, since that’s never happened before, don’t bet on it happening now,” he stated.
“As for anything, he wasn’t lying. There’s one call in, and it’s that same number we got that was a burner.
We also have a digital receipt for a post office box from the United States Postal Service in town. He didn’t lie about that either.”
Well, shit.
Why couldn’t they for once get the one who knew ALL the information—instead of none of it?
Then again, that was par for the course.
As they were dealing with that, Rogue came into the room. They noticed that he had a file in his hand.
“I got in, and we’re not going to like this,” he stated, tossing the file onto the table. He stepped over the dying man like he wasn’t even there.
“What?” Gene asked.
Maura knew.
“He has a dossier with ALL of the Blackhawks in it. It looks like Devon gave him intel. I doubt this was his first job for him. He was going to try to take your whole family out, one by one. From the look of it, he paid in advance to carry it out in case he went down.”
Oh….
Did he now?
Someone had lied.
What pissed her off more wasn’t that he’d done that, because you expected the bad guys to lie. It pissed her off that they might never know who was going to come for them. Devon could have hired a zillion mercenaries.
Yeah, this was an uphill battle.
Moving past Gene, she went over the suffocating man who was almost out of breath.
“See you in Hell you lying sack of shit,” she said, putting a bullet in his head.
And just like that, the gasping for air stopped.
As soon as he was dead, she rolled her neck. Yeah, the stress was going to kill her well before Devon Slater.
“This is problematic.”
Rogue handed Maura the folder, and he was pretty sure Elizabeth was going to snap and lose her mind.
She had good news for her.
“He paid up front. I doubt he paid others if he was dumping that much money into this guy’s lap. No one else was really taking Devon serious on The Dark Web but the four we isolated.”
Well, that was making her feel better.
“We just need to handle them. If he prepaid this dude, then I’m going to say that Devon also likely gave the other woman intel, too. I’d bet there would be more poison coming for you.”
Maura showed her the note in the folder.
As she read it, she knew that the only way her family would be safe would be if they all died.
“We have to take them out,” she said. “Look,” she said, showing Gene.
‘In case of my arrest or my death, please carry through with the plans to blow up their home on the reservation. It has been a pleasure working for you. Cash has been placed in the PO box.
SJD.’
“Slater J Devon strikes again,” Gene stated, reading over the letter.
Elizabeth knew what this meant.
Glancing over at MATE, she gave her yet another job.
“Find Callen and tell him no one goes to that cabin until security sweeps it,” she stated. “Tell him about this note, and that we don’t know how many more people he hired, or if this guy lied about working alone.”
MATE nodded.
“Got it, Mother.”
She wasn’t done.
“Tell them that one is down, and we’re up to our eyeballs in shit. He’ll understand.”
Her AI nodded and popped out of there to go deliver the message.
“We can use her as a messenger service, too?” Zayn asked. “Shit! We haven’t been utilizing this tech at all.”
Jagger gave him a look.
“Read the room.”
Yeah, he was, and it was tense.
Elizabeth considered all of this.
“We know that Devon contacted four mercenaries. Are we sure only two worked for him? Because we still have a Russian spy out there playing games. We don’t need more killers.”
No one argued that.
Jagger tried to calm her down.
“I don’t think he hired too many more. We would have heard about it.
What we know is that they didn’t trust that he wasn’t a cop,” Jagger said.
“When someone new pops onto the scene, people are suspicious—well, mercenaries who want to live a while are. He might have found the people he needed to, and that was it. We know Jace was taking other jobs.”
Gene still didn’t like any of this.
“We have to find the rest of his money and make sure none goes out automatically to pay off contract hits on us.”
She was aware.
“We’ll find it,” Maura stated. “It just takes time. Get us a location with tech in it, and we’ll have Rogue handle it.”
What it came down to was that she trusted The Hunters.
This wasn’t their first time doing this.
“Okay, well, we need to get to the person who was trying to take us out by poison. Maybe she knows more than he did, or she’s less willing to lie. Where is she?”
Maura was to the point.
“About two hours from here. We’re going to have to get moving,” she stated. “She lives on the opposite side of Salt Lake City in a small town.”
Elizabeth looked at her watch.
“I don’t like how Devon is just lounging around, getting ready to make another attempted at my family. That worries me,” she admitted.
And it should.
“Then, let’s get the show on the road. The quicker we cut off his hires, the quicker we’ll find him.”
That worked for her.
As for clean up in there…
Since he was dead, they left him lying there. Once outside, Zayn went to the gas line that ran into the kitchen and rigged a timer.
“We’ll have enough time to get onto the main road before it blows,” he said.
Good.
No one would find Jace, or the bullets she put in him.
Together, as a unit, they carefully moved back through the trees, and as they were getting into the vehicle, the building with the dead man in it blew up.
Jagger jumped.
“What the fuck, Zayn! You said we had time!”
The man laughed.
“My bad. I get Fahrenheit and Celsius mixed up,” he admitted. “I gotta stop doing that.”
Gene stared at him.
At first, he thought he misheard him, but then, he realized he hadn’t.
What he said was…
Absurd.
“What the fuck does that have to do with blowing something up?” he asked. “Those are measures of temperature, not time. Time is always the same.”
The man smiled.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
That made Gene just shake his head as he got into the vehicle.
“I can’t with him. He’s unhinged.”
Welcome to their world.
Zayn was insane and a menace.
And oddly, that was always the least of their problems.
Unfortunately.