Dying for Revenge Read Online Free Page A

the kid was okay. On my iPhone, I clicked on an icon for software I had installed, entered the I.P. address, and looked in on a house in Powder Springs for a moment. Catherine was in the kitchen. The kid was sitting at a table, book in hand. Fourteen cameras were hooked up. I saw every move they made in the shared spaces. No cameras were in bedrooms or bathrooms. Saw what was outside the house. In the kitchen. Watched footage of them moving from room to room. It was like having my own CCTV. Big Brother was watching.
    Everything was fine. No one had reverse-engineered my life back to them.
    Not yet.
    I spied the streets of London again, in search of a strawberry blonde and a redheaded killer.
     
    Killed them.
    I should have killed them like I had killed the assassin she had sent after me in the Cayman Islands. But that message had not been strong enough to end this. No matter how many morticians I kept in business, Detroit would send more hired assassins, would send killers until she succeeded.
    Eventually she would.
    She lived to finance my death.
    I spied Berwick Street, let droves of people go by before I blended into the morose crowd, stopping at a vendor and buying a dark, oversized hoodie, stuffing my black jacket in my dark bag, buying a dark cap and darker scarf, putting them on, changing as much of my wardrobe as I could change in less than three minutes. The midnight colors I wore made me a moving shadow amongst moving shadows.
    If I were smart I would be on the way to a safe house.
    I would be on the way out of the U.K.
    Right now I had another mission. I’d resurfaced and come back to London for another reason.
    This reason more emotional than logical.
    I’d come back to the U.K. because of the kid. This mission was as personal as it was urgent.
    I rushed through the center of the whores’ district, hurried by vendors selling fruit and clothing as upstairs international women sold their bodies, moved by strip clubs that were advertising American-style pole dancing, big guys who looked like they were Russian mafia guarding the doors.
    One of the Russians posted outside a den of sin caught my eye and said, “Hello, my friend.”
    Making eye contact, hand inside my bag, I replied, “ Zdorovo, my friend.”
    He smiled. “Hochesh poglyadet na golyh devok?”
    “Spasibo ne nado.” I shook my head. “I don’t want to look at naked women.”
    A dark-skinned African boy was kicking a worn soccer ball. He’d grown almost a foot taller since the last time I saw him. He paused when he saw me, looked at me as if he knew me, remembered who I was, what I had done in the name of anger, and his mouth opened like he wanted to sound an alarm.
    I put my finger to my lips before the fear in his eyes made its way to his mouth.
    That hushed him.
    He had seen me once, a year ago, when I had come here in search of my own revenge. I had come here to put the woman who had corrupted me in the ground. But that hadn’t happened.
    With a kind smile I asked, “Are you Nusaybah’s son?”
    He nodded at me, soccer ball underneath one arm, his free hand creating a fist, my smile not trusted.
    I asked, “Where is Nusaybah?”
    He pointed upstairs to a dirty window. His mother’s red light was off. I understood that signal. She had a customer. While her son played in the streets she was busy getting pounded for the pound.
    I couldn’t talk to Nusaybah, not right now. Wasn’t sure if she would talk to me at all.
    So much hate was in her eyes the one and only time I’d ever seen her, rightfully so.
    I’d hurt her friend on that day, my anger deep and never-ending, out of control.
    But when money was on the table, people would sell their souls, would sell out their friends.
    It wasn’t for Nusaybah but because of another woman that I had come back to this sordid place.
    A woman who used to be one of her coworkers, her red light glowing in the gloom on this street.
    I paused and stared up at what used to be her red-lit window.