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Dingy exposed brick outlined the , and I pressed ainst it The uneven stone bit into ain, letting the cool power flow throughmyself to the s Just cal deeper and deeper into the stone, until it felt like a part of me A natural extension of ernails I feltNot particularly bored, but not excited either Just waiting for the rightAn emotion, an action, I knew all too well

My frown deepened I opened my eyes, dropped my hand, and stepped away froain with a ether

There was nothing in the aparts, no emotions, because Jake McAllister hadn’t been here He wasn’t sh for this sort of action This - this was the work of a professional

An assassin, just like ray eyes narrowed So Jake, orboy to clean up his son’s mess

Noas really annoyed

But still I couldn’t shake the feeling I wasi, my sense, of the vibrations in the stone was correct I kneas Even fro to me, and my power to understand and interpret it had only sharpened and strengthened over time And would continue to do so until I died, hopefully at the ripe age of a hundred and fifty or so

From the vibrations I’d picked up, the shooter had been waiting the better part of an hour Maybe longer

Sophia ca the day’s bread I usually showed up around ten, and the restaurant officially opened for business at eleven But the shots hadn’t been fired until al? I’d been , wiping off the tables and booths, flipping the sign on the front door over to Open He could have takenSo why hadn’t he taken a shot before lunchti inbehind the counter when the shots had been fired A tough shot to ood with a gun he was Maybe he’d wanted an audience when he killed me Maybe that’s why he’d waited Finn had been in the restaurant, standing off to irl had been there too, more or less in front ofThe shooter, the assassin, hadn’t been firing at irl, Violet The shooter had been ai that made sense The assassin could have shot me any time I’d been close to the storefront s But he hadn’t Instead, he’d sat in this apart for her She’d been sitting in a booth in the back, out of sight of the storefront s, so he’d had to wait for her to finish her lunch When she’d paid and started for the front door, that’s when he’d taken his shot

My mind processed the information and moved on to the next question Why shoot her inside the restaurant?

Why not wait for her to step outside onto the street? Why not just do her in some back alley?

The answer came to me The robbery The assassin must have seen the story in the newspaper about the botched robbery at the Pork Pit

Maybe the assassin had realized that if he took out the girl in the restaurant, there was a good chance her death would be connected to Jake McAllister and the robbery last night No doubt the cops would have had the saht have hired had been aiet That Jake had wanted to silence ainst himself just disappear Given all that, the police wouldn’t be inclined to look too hard in other directions, to consider other theories Like the fact the girl had been the intended victi the blame on Jake McAllister didn’t work, well, there was another option The Pork Pit wasn’t officially located in Southtown, but it was only a couple of streets over, whichdeals, shootings, domestic disputes One or h neighborhood, the girl’s death today ht have just been chalked up to rando particularly lazy So that she’d been unlucky enough to get in the otten caught up in one of those last week, less than a half mile from the restaurant

Either way, nobody would think it had been a planned hit The best assassinations were always the ones that looked like so else A nice, neat, easy plan all the way around

Maybe the assassin had been following the girl, looking for just such an opportunity Maybe he’d known she was co to the Pork Pit today to eat lunch and ask about soone into the restaurant, he’d decided to ain It would have been easy for hi unseen, find the empty apartment, and jimmy the lock All he would have ahd to do after that ait for the right er

I stared at the cracked storefront of the Pork Pit He would have hit her too - four kill shots clustered in her chest

If the restaurant didn’t have bulletproof s

No, this didn’t have anything to do with Jake McAllister and irl So, the front door of the restaurant opened Violet stepped outside and hurried away

"Fuck," I snarled and sprinted froone, so I didn’t bother reaching for ain Besides, he wasn’t after me anyway Instead, I ran down the stairs and out of the apart a left and sprinted down the block in the direction the girl had gone

Shebecause she was already a full block ahead of me She raised her arm, and a cab slid to a stop at the curb in front of her

"Hey, you!" I yelled "Stop!"

The girl paid no attention to me I was too far away for my voice to carry over the traffic on the street Even if she had heard ht it was directed at her Hey, you wasn’t theat a full sprint If the street had been eht have reached her But every five steps, I had to duck right or left to avoid so on their cell phone

I reached the end of irl had settled into the cab I stepped out onto the street, ht yellow vehicle -

Beep! Beep!

And abruptly stepped back as a car horn blared out A second later, a ht

The driver shot me a dirty look

"Red means stop, you twit!" I screa away on her cell phone to do so safe, like pay attention to pedestrians and traffic signals And she’d cost irl Up ahead, the cab had already pulled out into traffic Five seconds later, it turned right, disappearing froone

And I had no idea where she went or more importantly, why so irl asked for the Tin Man that so That it wasn’t just a fluke or an accident or dumb luck That trouble had just walked into the Pork Pit

Trouble that had gotten away fro back to the restaurant

I tucked my knives up my sleeves and slowly, calmly, quietly strolled the block and a half back to the Pork Pit

No need to draw any more attention to ht call the police and report a crazy woo, I’d spent several days in Ashland Asylum on one of my jobs I had no desire to pay the facility a return visit

A couple minutes later, I stepped into the Pork Pit

Sophia was adding some red pepper and paprika to heranother cup of chicory coffee and reading the rest of the financial section