Mark for Blood by Nick Thacker

Author:Nick Thacker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Turtleshell Press

34

ON ANY OTHER NIGHT I wouldn’t have even blinked if I’d seen such a sight. I would have noticed it, I was sure, as I had been trained to notice things like that. But I wouldn’t have cared. I would have driven past, maybe thinking it was an odd sight, but nothing really out of the ordinary. After all, the government types like this certainly did engage in waiting around and looking at the scenery, ostensibly on some sort of secret mission. It was only a matter of probability that I would eventually see one in action.

But this scene was different. The fact that there was a government-issued SUV driven by a government-issued driver, sitting in the most obvious spot on the most out-of-the-way road in the country, told me this scene was very different.

They were watching the road. They were watching me. And they weren’t the people that took Hannah and murdered her brother. They were the people who were supposed to be on my side.

But I also knew these government types weren’t wanting anyone else to be on their side. The man in the car had spotted me, and that meant I was now marked. No different than a mark, except that they weren’t going to try to kill me. They’d try to pull me off, get me away from their territory. But if I refused, then they’d kill me.

FBI, DEA, possibly even CIA, depending on how big this Crimson Club business had gotten overseas. Didn’t matter to me which one it was, as I didn’t want anything to do with any of them. There wasn’t a ‘lesser of three evils’ here, in this situation.

I needed to shake them. They’d pegged Joey’s car and were probably pulling it up now in their database. They would know within an hour that I was friends with one of them, or at least a casual acquaintance. They would assume he had mentioned something to me and I was down here checking it out, a civilian taking on contractual duties for a federal agent. A huge no-no if it wasn’t approved by the big boys.

So I had a new problem, and this one became more urgent. I passed the SUV but stared at it in my rearview mirror. It didn’t move, but I could almost feel the guy’s head inside swiveling slowly, keeping me in his sights all the way down the hill on the other side of the bridge. I sped up, taking the turn south a bit faster than I should have, and came upon the gate of Hannah’s land.

It was massive, and it was immaculate.

The gate itself was like walking through an entrance to heaven itself, all weathered but in a perfectly acceptable way, the whitish stones peeking out from behind the gently manicured foliage of South Carolina coastline. Palms, brush, and other bright green vegetation, all blackened in the night light, culled back to form a natural opening to a large block of land just between the road and the ocean.

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