Along Came a Husband Read Online Free Page A

I want this taken care of before I get back to the States next week.”
    “I’m working on it.”
    “I get busted, my men get busted, or my inventory is confiscated and you’re a dead man.”
    Click.
    “Son of a bitch!” Mason shoved his phone in the holder at his waist and then slashed open a cushion with his knife. He gutted the couch. Nothing. The chair. More nothing.
    Frustrated, he flung his knife across the room, and it stuck with a satisfying thud in a kitchen cabinet. He’d torn this damned apartment to pieces and had come up with zilch. No addresses or phone numbers. No laptop or memory devices. Not even a single cell phone record. The man took the concept of anonymity to an entirely new level. How were they going to find him when they had absolutely nothing to go on?
    As Mason stood there his cell phone rang. He glanced at the display and answered. “Tell me you found him.”
    “Not a trace.”
    “Dammit!” he bit out. “I want—”
    “Relax, Mason. With all that blood in the alley, he’s dead or dying.”
    “Not good enough.” Mason paced around the mess he’d created of furniture stuffing, hunks of broken dishes and fractured picture frames. An end table was the only piece of furniture still standing. “This is your fault. You told me he’d turn. You told me—”
    “So I was wrong. Shoot me.”
    “I want the body.” Mason struggled to keep his voice down. “Then I want it never found.”
    “What do you think I am, stupid? If he’s identified, people are going to start asking questions. Did you tell Delgado?”
    “I didn’t have to tell him. His people did.” Mason closed his eyes. “If I go down, I won’t be going alone. Understand?”
    “Oh, I understand. Do you?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “We’re working outside the lines right now, remember? This is no-man’s-land. So don’t give me any more orders. Understand that?”
    “Yeah,” Mason muttered. And when all this is over and done with, you’re dead, no matter what.
    “Good. ’Cause we got bigger problems on our hands than you think.”
    “How could this get any worse?”
    “He kept files.”
    “Of what?”
    “All the evidence he turned over to you over the course of the last four years. He backed up everything on a memory stick.”
    Mason broke out in a cold sweat. “You gotta be shitting me.”
    “If we don’t find him soon, he could turn everything over and we’re dead anyway.”
    “Why didn’t you grab his files while you had the chance?”
    “Why didn’t you kill him in the alley? If you had this wouldn’t be a problem. Did you find anything at his apartment?”
    “What do you think?” Mason barely held his temper in check. He hadn’t really expected anything to be here, but every base had to be covered. “I have meetings tomorrow in D.C.”
    “I can handle things on this end.”
    “I’m telling you he’s hiding with someone he knows. Someone he trusts. His father. His wife.”
    A loud laugh sounded over the line. “There is no one. Why do you think I suggested him for this assignment in the first place? No one in the world gives a rat’s ass whether Jonas Abel lives or dies.”



CHAPTER THREE
    J ONAS WOKE TO THE SOUND of a robin warbling loudly and quite happily outside the bedroom window. He glanced through the filmy pale green curtains and located the noisy little bastard perched on the branch of a massive elm tree. Lacking the energy to blow the damned thing to kingdom come, he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to ignore the sound.
    What do you think you’re doing?
    Get up. Get it done. Do your job.
    Sighing, he tried to sit and pain sizzled through him, knocking him back down. Damn, it felt as though his body had been first tenderized and then run through a man-size meat grinder. Apparently, that’s what first getting jumped by four men, then shot, and then losing half the blood in his body did to a guy. He was in no shape to do anyone any damage.
    Rolling over in the hopes of