Page 10 of The Hitman and the Psychic

I’d had a feeling that was the case. “Don’t worry about it. Why don’t we make a list of your enemies? That’s a good place to start.” Thank goodness he was focusing on the task at hand. Maybe offering to bandage him up hadn’t been the best idea. But I’d felt bad for him.

I’d left my shoulder bag on the floor, so I grabbed it and took out my notebook and pencil. I flipped to an empty page and labeled itEnemies. “Okay. Let’s get started. Can you think of anyone who’d want you dead?”

His brows rose, then his lips twisted into a frown, like he thought it was a stupid question. “Well… yeah.” He scratched his neck. “In my line of work, it comes with the territory, but I don’t think many of them would go to the trouble. I mean… a bomb is kind of overkill.”

“Well, not exactly. It didn’t work, so it wasn’t actually overkill.”

He rolled his eyes and shrugged. “Fine. There’s Switchblade… but I think he moved back to Orlando, so probably not. Maybe Brent White’s son, Jake… since Brent’s… uh… dead. Although I’m not sure Jake would be that upset about it… so maybe not him, either.” He huffed out a breath. “This is a waste of time. It’s not going to be that obvious.”

“It’s not a waste. Let’s just be more specific. How about this? Do you know anyone who knows how to make a bomb?”

Stone shook his head. “Not that I can think of, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t learn if they wanted to.”

“Okay. Well… let’s try a different approach. Did you make anyone mad recently? Say… within the last six months?”

Stone glanced up at the ceiling before shaking his head. “I’ve made a lot of people angry, but they’d never come after me. I have a reputation, and they know it wouldn’t turn out so well for them.”

“Right.” I swallowed, grateful I hadn’t seen a vision of him beating someone up… or… killing someone. He didn’t look like the kind of person to kill people in cold blood, but what did I know? Still, I definitely didn’t want to see that. “Then tell me about the times you were nearly killed. Including today, how many are there?”

“Including today… three… no four.”

“Okay. Tell me about the first one.”

He sat back in his chair. “Sure… but first you have to remember that I didn’t think someone was trying to kill me at the time, or I might have done a better job of tracking them down.”

I raised a brow. “Sure. I totally get that. So what happened?”

His brows dipped. “The first time is the one you saw, where I barely missed getting hit by that truck. I managed to get out of the way, but my bike slid out from under me. The truck just took off, so I chalked it up to incompetence and forgot about it.”

“When was this?”

“A little over a week ago.”

My brows rose. “Oh… that recent? Okay. What happened the next time?”

“That was a day later in the parking garage here. I had just parked my car and was walking to the elevators. I heard a car coming up behind me, so I moved to the side. Instead of driving past me, it slowed and waited for me to cross in front of it. When I took a couple of steps, the driver sped up and came right at me.”

Stone shook his head. “I managed to dive out of the way, but it was close. By the time I got to my feet, he’d gone around the corner, and I didn’t see a plate. The car was a tan, late model sedan, but there was nothing to distinguish it.”

“Did you check the security cameras in the garage?”

“Of course I did.” His voice hardened. “But the angle didn’t show anything more than what I saw.”

“Okay.” I made a note of it and met his gaze. “So, the first two times they used a vehicle to kill you… uh… I mean… try to kill you. When was the next time?”

He let out a breath. “It was two days ago. I was just leaving the gym and walking down the street to my bike. My buddy yelled at me to watch out, and I ducked into a doorway. This big AC unit comes crashing down from the roof. If not for his warning, it would have hit me for sure.”

His lips twisted. “I was so mad that I rushed into the building to see which apartment the unit had fallen from, but no one seemed to know anything. I hurried to the roof and found some scratch marks on the concrete. Whoever put it up there either had help, or they were strong. That’s when I first suspected someone was out to get me. I told Vanetti, and he agreed. The bomb this morning was the fourth attempt.”

“Okay… so this morning you were lured to the building by a text from a contact?”

“Yeah.”

“But it obviously wasn’t them, right? So did you talk to your contact afterward?”

“Yeah… I called him while I was cleaning up, and he insisted he hadn’t sent it.”

I shook my head. “So it was someone pretending to be him?”

---