Page 2 of Brought to Light
“Try it?” he asked, his tone barely shy of pleading. “Just a taste. Let me know what you think. I’m sort of new at this. I need feedback.”
According to the file he’d been working here for months. If he didn’t know how to make a fucking hot chocolate by now, he had to be hopeless. And hadn’t he said he was great at it?
Still. I put the cup to my mouth, and then hesitated. Jesus. It held cocoa, for fuck’s sake. Not rat poison.
Probably. But I knew what rat poison tasted like. I’d be able to tell.
I took a sip, having to slurp the whipped cream to get to the liquid under it.
My eyes widened. It was…the best thing I’d ever put in my mouth. Without question, without any doubt, it tasted better than the first beer after basic training, or the lips of the first girl I’d ever kissed in tenth grade. It was fucking ambrosia.
John’s eyes were fixed on me, oddly intent. “You like it?”
“It’s amazing,” tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop it. “It’s good. Really, really good.”
Until his whole body relaxed, I hadn’t noticed John’s tension. He carried himself so lightly that it hadn’t been obvious. But he seemed to settle, his whole posture looser. Jesus. Was he afraid of losing his job if someone told his manager he made shitty hot chocolate? Was his manager the same person who’d chosen the sign out front? If so, maybe I’d make another stop on my rounds.
“Good,” he said. “That’s—good. Thanks for coming into the Chipper Bean!”
I managed a growl that could have been words, turned, and hightailed it the fuck out of there. Maybe I’d go back after an hour and follow John home; maybe I wouldn’t. It could wait another night. Fuck.
Hot chocolate in hand, I wandered down the street. I really wasn’t in the mood for strolling casually through the picturesque downtown of a shabby seaside tourist trap, gawking at the fishing-themed this and driftwood that and shell-encrusted whatevers. Fuck that.
And my mood itself pissed me off even more, because the dayaftera job was almost always the worst. Not that I usually regretted what I’d done, or got worked up all that easily, but the adrenaline took a bit to wear off. A lot of preparation and careful planning went into my jobs, and executing that plan—shitty pun intended—always put me in a heightened state of awareness that took time to fade away and left me with a wicked hangover.
First approaches, though. They tended to give me a high: the thrill of the hunt, the beginning of something new. But this day-before-a-job felt like all the days after I’d finished rolled into one, with a heavy, nasty sensation in my gut and a snappish irritability that I just couldn’t shake.
The sidewalks were fairly empty. On a Tuesday night, in the middle of January, no one wanted to be out in the chill—coastal northern California was surprisingly cold for a state with a reputation for sun-drenched beaches. No one was shopping; they’d already returned all their crappy Christmas presents and gone to ground to stare blankly at the screens of their new electronics.
Fuck them, too.
I headed down the street again until buildings gave way to scrubby grass dotted with wind-bent trees, all spreading out until it merged with the beach. I stared out over the Pacific, or what little of it I could make out between the darkness, the overcast, and the fog underneath that. I wasn’t really seeing it anyway.
The hot chocolate warmed me from the inside in a way that didn’t have much to do with its temperature. I thought of John, his sweet smiles and the grace in his long limbs. What the fuck had he done to bring death down on himself? You never knew. I’d killed a guy one time who looked like a kind old grandfather, gave massive amounts of money to animal charities, fostered abandoned kittens, and financed a bloody rebellion in a small South American country that had ended with the deaths of thousands of civilians.
But John hadn’t armed any revolutionaries, and he didn’t have a past. I’d checked, or rather, my handler Jesse had checked. Jesse dotted everyiand crossed everyt. And Jesse said the kid didn’t have a past, didn’t have any skeletons, and that we had to kill him anyway because we were dead men if we didn’t.
Fuck, that was good hot chocolate. I drained the last drop, tilting the cup up as far as it would go, and barely restrained myself from licking the inside of it. Killing someone who could make something taste that amazing had to be a crime…okay, yes, killing anyone was technically a crime. But not a crime I gave a damn about most days.
I crumpled the cup in my hand.
A second later I had my phone out, and Jesse answered on the first ring, sounding a little breathless, like he expected me to be mid-emergency.
Well, wouldn’t be the first time.
“Tell me again who those assholes were,” I said without any preamble or pleasantries.
“If I knew who the assholes were, I’d be researching how to get them off our backs, wouldn’t I?” he snapped. Jesse valued the pleasantries. God only knew how he put up with me. “No ID, but they knew the right names to drop and the right hints to make. We’ve been over this. Callum, they weresomeone. You think I can’t recognize spooks? These motherfuckers had thoseeyes, you know?”
I did know, but I rolled mine anyway, glad he couldn’t see me and give me shit for it. Jesse could be so fucking dramatic.
“Okay,” I said. “I believe you.” Which I did—and I also needed to cut him off at the pass before he got all poetic. “But there’s something really fucking off about this. The whole thing reeks. I made contact tonight, and in person…fuck, Jesse. You didn’t see this guy. He’s not—the usual.”
Not that we exactly had a usual in our line of work, but older, richer, and creepier were a lot more common.
Jesse sighed, a whoosh down the line that made me picture him puffing up his cheeks and glaring. “I know he’s not,” he said quietly. “But nothing about what we do is usual. Make something up about him. Some backstory that’ll let you live with this. But—it’s him or us, Callum. It’s up to you. I can’t do it for you, and I wouldn’t be able to anyway. But that’s the trade-off here.”
I ended the call just as confused and wired and pissed as before, only now with extra guilt on top. Jesse couldn’t do the job for me. That wasn’t his part of the deal. But if I didn’t go through with it, he’d pay the price right along with me.
