Hell on Wheels (Black Knights Inc. #1)(47)

Then he kissed the bejeezus out of her.

Kissed her until he could no longer ignore what is was he was supposed to be doing. He stormed out of the garage’s little side door, trying not to think about the way her eyes had gone all dreamy and glassy, or the way she’d lifted a hand to her chest as if to hold her heart in check.

The woman was going to be the death of him.

“About time you did that,” Becky chimed smugly in his ear.

“Can it,” he told her.

“I’m just sayin’—”

“Don’t just say anything!”

Geez, he was so losing it.

***

“Yo.”

Senator Aldus grimaced at the salutation.

Johnny Vitiglioni had about as much class as a music festival Port-o-potty, but Aldus figured a guy whose specialty was Colombian Necktie executions didn’t really spend much time polishing his social skills.

“I’ve got another job for you and the boys,” he said without introducing himself. There was no need. Johnny knew exactly who he was talking to.

“I’m listening.”

Of course the fool was listening. Aldus paid Johnny a ridiculous rate to make sure the guy was always ready to listen.

“Yes well, let’s hope you do better with this one than the last one.”

“Hey, dude, I told you Rocco—”

“I don’t care,” Aldus growled. “Besides, what’s done is done. Hopefully, this next assignment is a little more to Rocco’s taste.”

“Wha’ didja have in mind?”

What did he have in mind? Death, that’s what. And an end to this pain-in-the-ass situation.

“There’s a man traveling with the woman I hired you guys to mug.” Thinking of Zoelner quitting when his target was out on a motorcycle—a statistically dangerous device—where it could’ve been so easy for the ex-CIA agent to simply wait for a barren strip of road to careen into the guy, made Aldus’s blood pressure boil. Of course, clean-up would’ve been a problem, but that was a moot point. Zoelner was far too high-minded to engage in such nefarious tactics.

Thankfully, Johnny and his boys had no such hang-ups.

“And?” Johnny prodded when Aldus had been silent for too long.

“And they’re on some big, loud Harley. Probably on the road between Chicago and Jacksonville. They need not to be.”

“That’s a pretty big swath of country, dude,” Johnny drawled.

Good God.

Aldus abso-f*cking-lutely hated being called “dude.”

He wasn’t a dude. He didn’t ride a pony, wear a Stetson, or yell, “Git along li’l doggie!” Nor did he bum around some beach smoking pot and waiting lazily for the next big wave while drawing unemployment.

He was a goddamned senator of the United goddamned States of America, and if he ever made it to the big office, he planned to make it a little harder for the dudes of the nation to skate by so easily.

“That’s why I’m sending two additional addresses to your secured email account,” he told Johnny, trying to hold on to his patience. It was never an easy task, and this…situation only made his already volatile temper worse.

And the fact that he’d had to stop in to buy a brand new prepaid phone only illustrated that point. “One of those addresses is the man’s residence in Chicago,” he went on to explain. “The other one is the woman’s parents’ house. You still have her home and work addresses?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Now, they will most likely end up at one or the other of these locations within the next twenty-four hours. When they do, I want you to take them out.”

“An accident like the last job?” Johnny asked.

Aldus wished it could be that easy, but he was finished taking chances. This had to end now.

“No. It’s imperative their bodies are never discovered.” He needed assurance that if Alisa was somehow carrying the files on her person, they’d never reach the light of day. “I mean never. Encasing them in lead and dropping them into the Mariana trench still isn’t going to cut it.”

“The what?”

Oh, for crying out loud. Johnny was a walking, talking, stupid Italian mobster cliché. Francis Ford Coppola would absolutely love the little prick. “Just make sure you dispose of the bodies in such a way that no trace of them will ever surface. Is that clear?”

“As f*ckin’ lead crystal, dude.”

Aldus felt the vein in his forehead bulge.

“Hey,” Johnny said, “I’ve got two pictures of dudes on my screen here. I thought you said it was a man and that Alisa woman we were taking out. Neither of these is her.”

Wow, this just gets better and better. Someone sign Johnny up for Mensa. Sometimes it was so depressing to know the world was populated by idiots.

Lucky for Aldus, idiots were easily manipulated. Just look at his constituency…

“That second man,” he said slowly so Johnny the Dimwit could follow, “means a bonus for you and the boys. I want you to make sure he receives your specialty.”

“Ah,” Johnny chuckled, and it sounded sort of sick, like the laughter of a little boy pulling wings off a butterfly. No doubt Johnny had done his share of wing-pulling as a child. “Dude must’ve pissed you off, huh?”