Shadow Woman by Linda Howard

Author:Linda Howard [Howard, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Google: _qQLInLoMy0C
Amazon: B007PFDGRC
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Xavier grabbed some much-needed sleep in the safe room in “J. P. Halston’s” condo, tilted back in his chair, his booted feet propped on the desk. He could have slept in his own bed, but being where people could find him—and by that he meant not his own people—struck him as a little risky right now.

An instant message had alerted him about the confrontation Lizzy had had with the surveillance dumb shit. God, that was such typical Lizzy, slick and ballsy.

But none of the others knew Lizzy the way he did. The way she was playing it, there were still reasonable explanations for everything. She was keeping them guessing, and his people were watching and would let him know if anything unusual happened. He already knew Felice had met with Al again very early that morning, and he also knew that, after Lizzy’s confrontation with her surveillance, whoever Felice had hired to do the job had been pulled off.

That would be the smart thing to do, not push Lizzy, let her settle back into her routine. The biggest question was, did Felice know how not to push? She had too much confidence in her own cleverness, which meant she was constantly underestimating what other people could and would do to fuck up her plans and schemes. In her world, all she had to do was give orders, and she expected them to be followed. In the real world, people disobeyed orders all the time. If it wasn’t in their own best interests, people could be amazingly uncooperative.

So she would be shitting bricks that Lizzy had blown the surveillance put on her. Al would be … God only knew. Predicting what Al would do at any given time wasn’t easy, which was why he was so good at what he did.

Felice was completely predictable. Al was the opposite. So why did he trust Al the most?

Because Al had been through a lot of the same experiences that he himself had dealt with, that was why. Al knew what it was to take live fire, and to return it. Al knew what it was like to kill someone. What they did was real to him, not an abstraction. Five years ago, they had all become involved in a bad situation; four years ago, the bad situation had devolved into a nightmare. How they’d handled it was something that kept them all tied in an uneasy alliance.

They all had to live with what they’d done. All except Lizzy. She’d been the outsider, the one deemed untrustworthy. Considering she’d been at ground zero of the plan Xavier didn’t see how she could be untrustworthy, but he had to admit she’d had a hard time dealing with it afterward, and that was what had tipped the scale against her. She’d been a mess, withdrawn, crying a lot. The solution had been a bullet in the head or undergoing the process. Lizzy had chosen the process. Yeah, some choice. Lose her life, or lose herself.

He himself hadn’t had a choice, not at the time.

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