Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Rue
“Checklist,” Felicity says as we idle on a quiet street four blocks from Marcus Navarro’s neighborhood.
I ran through it at home, but in deference to my nervous sister, I go through the short version.
“Knife, check. Fully stocked murder kit, check. Pell’s magical drunkalizing compliance spray, check.”
Fi plucks the pink bottle out of my backpack. “Seriously, what’s in this?”
“Witchcraft.”
I hold out my hand, and she sets it carefully in my palm.
“And you remembered to account for his larger mass?”
“Yes,” I say once I’ve wrestled my far-less-patient response under control.
This is how Felicity shows she cares: by reminding me about safety protocols I’ve obsessively reviewed a dozen times already.
“All I need to do is blow a fuse in Navarro’s house, hit him with the spray, get the names of the assholes helping lead his little cabal of woman haters, and push him down the basement stairs so it looks like he took a fall while he was headed to the fuse box. Easy peasy.”
“Right,” Fi says flatly. “Are you sure you don’t want me there as backup?”
Great. This again.
“It’ll be fine.” I hope there’s only a hint of irritation in my voice. “I’ve done harder things.”
“On smaller, weaker men.” My sister’s lips press in a tight line. “This guy is big and has no problem doing terrible things to women. Maybe that’s one variable too many.”
“If you’re with me, I’d be distracted worrying about you.”
It’s too blunt and her lips tighten, but I ignore her disappointment. Like always, she’s over it fast.
“If he goes down quick, maybe we can squeeze in an actual ladies’ night afterward.”
“Two a.m. margaritas?” I hook my pinkie around hers. “Deal.”
“Okay. Go be Mom with better chemicals.”
“Pell chemicals or brain chemicals?”
“Both.” She grins at me, wolfish and wild. “Go nail his ass.”
And then I’m out of the car and falling into a jog that takes me to Navarro’s house. It’s as easy to get in the second time as it was the first, and I trip the main at the basement fuse box and settle into the dark living room to watch for his return home. As I do, I think about Gomez.
Is he really going to show up next Thursday to scope out Timms’s house with me, and if so, how on earth am I going to keep myself in check?
Because if I’m correct that Aaron McEwan was his kill, I’m officially a fangirl.
But smart killers don’t use the homes of future victims as hookup spots like teenagers necking in the back of a car.
Our only job is to learn everything there is to know about Timms, then decide who gets to kill him.
Flipping a coin should work. Nobody needs to have unwise sex in the empty house of a vacationing cop who’s eighty-three point six percent likely, according to Felicity’s model, to have framed his ex-wife for a murder that he committed.
I’ve kept Pell’s spray bottle in my hand while I’ve been waiting, and I hold it up in the dim light to study it once more, excited to try it out tonight.
I’ve also got my NCU breath spray and the dial-a-dose in my other pockets just in case, and thinking about that reminds me of Pell threatening Hugo, which makes me realize it’s way after midnight, and I haven’t checked for his check-in text yet.
I pull out my burner and prepare to send a quick “Life!” reply, but there’s no text from Hugo.
Weird.
Using the spoofing program that lets me text as if it’s from my number, I reach out to him first—a reversal from the usual order of events.
Life!
Hugo generally answers within ten seconds, but tonight my phone stays dark for a solid twenty minutes. This is… concerning.
Okay, now I really do need proof of life from you, neighbor.
I’m staring at the screen, waiting for his reply, when I hear Navarro’s vehicle prowl up the driveway.
Biting back a curse, I shove my phone in my pocket and wait for the automatic garage door to rumble open and shut again so I can activate the signal jammer in my bag, blocking all Wi-Fi and phone service. Then we can get this show on the road.
But the door doesn’t open. Instead, there’s the chirp of a vehicle lock, the shuffle of steps, the clatter of keys as Navarro drops them on the porch.
“Fuck,” he moans. “Hold on, dude.”
Fuck, I scream internally. My plan was to spray him as he was coming in from the garage, but he’s headed to the front door, with me in the living room like a sitting duck—and he’s talking on the phone, which means I’ve got a potential witness listening in.
Frustrated, I shove the jammer into my front pocket, but before I can move to a better position, the front door bursts open and Navarro staggers inside.
“Fffffuck,” he moans again, blearily lifting his phone to his ear. “Anyway, yeah, man. Go back to her place and use up all her fuckin’ holes. Then get out before she gets crusty.”
Crusty? Marcus Navarro has to die.
I tiptoe around the perimeter of the living room, avoiding the man swaying in place on the tiled floor of the entryway, and peek out the front window from behind the curtain. His car’s parked sideways across the driveway, the front wheels resting on the lawn.
No need to panic. He’s here, and he’s already drunk.
Question is, should I hit him with the spray I overpaid Pell for, just to be safe?
I need him compliant enough to cough up the names of the cops, lawyers, and politicians he’s working with, then to take a little tumble down the stairs. Chemical incentive might not hurt.
My target walks unsteadily down his front hallway, still talking to whatever nightmare man’s on the other end of the line.
“Nah, I didn’t bring any pussy home with me.” His shoulder hits the wall, and he stagger-veers in the opposite direction. Sir Isaac Newton would be so pleased yet so horrified. “Got a big weekend planned. Conserving energy.”
He hiccups as he flips the light switch in the hallway, but it remains dark.
“What the—” His heavy, confused voice trails off as he jiggles it. “Shit, I gotta go. If you take video, post it, bro. Y’know we like to watch.”
The phone slips between his fingers and clatters to the floor as he stumbles into the kitchen, where he tries the light switch with the same result, producing another round of cursing.
Now that he’s off the phone, I can finally power the jammer on to block all incoming and outgoing calls.
That done, I reposition my grip on the spray bottle and follow the sound of Navarro ricocheting off his dining room furniture like a pinball.
But his noisy progress is interrupted by shattering glass and a short, sharp scream that ends as abruptly as it started.
“What did you do, you cretin?” I mutter as I ease into the dining room and freeze two steps in.
Looks like Marcus Navarro got a head start on removing himself from the population tonight.
“Hoo boy.” I saunter over to the china cabinet and give a low whistle. “You’re in a real predicament, aren’t you?”
“H-hel… help,” pleads the drunk asshole, his words garbled by the shard of glass jutting out just below his right cheekbone.
“Really? Not an ounce of surprise about the masked woman appearing in your home?” I circle behind him to figure out what the hell happened. Everything from his chin down is soaked in blood, but none of it has pooled on the floor yet, which means I won’t leave bloody footprints as I investigate.
Navarro’s feet are on the ground, but the upper half of his body is folded over the lower edge of the glass-front cabinet door that once protected his collection of bongs.
Based on the lacerations to his forehead, nose, and cheeks, I’m guessing he tripped—a glance down confirms that, yep, his left shoelace is untied—and fell through the glass face-first. The bottom of the shard poking through his cheek is still lodged in the doorframe.
“C-c-ca—” He coughs, and it turns into a wet gurgle. “Call n-nine one…”
His eyes dart around the room, but he’s not able to look down, which means he can’t see what’s going to kill him. I can, though. The pink froth bubbling around the glass dagger embedded in his chest tells me his lung is punctured, and he’ll drown in his own blood within minutes.
It’s a masterpiece. I wish I could stage an “accident” this horrific.
And since he’s not going to survive the night and I’ve jammed all his devices, I indulge myself and pull off my mask so I can enjoy the carnage fully.
If I leave behind a stray hair follicle or two, well, good thing I’ll be back in an official capacity tomorrow, shedding hair all over the place.
“Oh, I’m not here to help, Marcus,” I say brightly.
His eyes roll wildly until they settle on me.
“H-hey. I know you,” he slurs.
“Yeah, you do. I’m the low-value female who’s here to kill you.” His choppy breathing picks up as I lean in to whisper in his ear. “Turns out, we are all castrating bitches.”
He turns his head to look at me fully, and the motion widens the existing wound on his cheek, slicing the skin open all the way to his ear. But he’s so far gone he doesn’t notice the fresh rivulet of blood dribbling down his chin.
“No.” He struggles to focus his eyes. “I know you.”
“You don’t.” My voice turns hard. “Now tell me the names of the other Philosopher Kings. What cops are you working with? Who pulled strings to get those three rape charges thrown out last year?”
“W-who’s… who…”
The smell of urine fills the room as his body starts to let go.
“Come on,” I say a little desperately as my opportunity for answers slips away. “Do me this little favor before your one-way ticket to hell. One name.”
Marcus Navarro opens his mouth and laughs in my face. The movement tears the rest of his cheek open, and I watch in fascination as the flap of skin and muscle slowly flops forward to land wetly against his jaw.
“I k-know… y…” He coughs again. “You… s-slut.”
Although he’s still breathing, it’s fast, shallow, and wet-sounding, and his eyes are starting to dull.
His dumb ass is dying without giving me the chance to extract a single name.
In a last-ditch effort to get something useful out of him, I grab the compliance spray and hit him in the face with it, knowing it’s too late for the chemicals to work yet too frustrated not to try.
But it’s clear he’s done talking forever.
“You’re as useless dead as you were alive,” I snarl.
He’s not dead yet though, which means I can punish him a little more.
And I know exactly how to do it. One detail has lived in my heart since Hugo and I talked about Stiletto Guy all those weeks ago, so I find the longest shard of glass on the floor and wrap it in the extra gloves in my backpack.
Next, I study Navarro’s trapped torso and splayed legs, trying to calculate the precise angle the glass would’ve had to travel and the amount of force it would’ve taken to penetrate both clothes and skin.
Then I decide, eh, fuck it. I’m the one who’ll be investigating this.
Holding the makeshift dagger carefully, I lift my arm and plunge six inches of jagged glass into Marcus Navarro’s junk.
“Your body,” I whisper into his ear. “My choice.”
And oh, look at that. I’m the one who killed him after all.
The scrotal trauma caused a full-body spasm, and based on the dark-red, deoxygenated blood now flowing from his chest wound, the glass inside him nicked his pulmonary artery.
His head falls with a clunk onto the one glass shelf that somehow remained intact in his fall, his eyes open and staring and his lips pressed against the big purple dildo bong.
“Well, okay,” I say to the silent room. “I guess that’s sorted.”
I slip out of the dining room and vanish into the night.