Off the Edge (The Associates) Read Online Free

mined his word choices and frequency of use. He got to understand Jazzman’s speech habits well enough to be able to recognize him to a 99.5% certainty— if he could hear him speak. Not just a few words; it had to be a real conversation.
    That would be the trick. To get close enough to the dealers to hear conversations.
    Rio, on the other hand, was hunting the old fashioned way. With a very powerful rifle and a list drawn up by Dax, the leader of the Associates.
    “How many of them are staying at this place?”
    “About thirty so far,” Rio said. “Turns out the Shinsurins own this place.”
    “Ah, Shinsurin hospitality. Ideal for the romantic exchange of weaponry.” The Shinsurins were a powerful clan with strong connections to the Chinese business community and the New Tong out of Texas.
    Rio speculated aloud on ways to get close enough to the tables of dealers to record their conversations. The Arabs would be the problem—they weren’t mixing with the other arms dealers.
    Macmillan didn’t think Jazzman was an Arab. English could be Jazzman’s second language, but Arabic wouldn’t be his first. But he let Rio spin on. He was soaking in Rio’s tone, the gestalt of his speech and manner. Rio had lost his wife some years back and he’d turned darker and more nihilistic since. Anybody could see when a man held himself apart from the crowd; Rio was smart enough not to do that. But Macmillan could hear Rio’s remoteness in his language itself. More passive constructions. Fewer content words and third person pronouns. The tone, the delivery, even the unsaid. As if Rio was drifting away. Sometimes when Macmillan listened to him, he had the impulse to clamp a hand onto his friend’s arm, to be his anchor. Macmillan knew what it was like to lose somebody.
    The assassin gave him a steely glance. “I know that look. I know what you’re doing.”
    Macmillan tilted his head.
    “Back off,” Rio said. “I won’t be one of your puzzles.”
    “Fair enough,” Macmillan said.
    The waiter set down two teas and a plate of honey cakes. Rio thanked him, smoothing a stray bit of dark, wavy hair back out of his eyes. “Will the libidinous student body survive the week without their eminent guest lecturer?”
    “They’ll have to parse their tender sentences without my strong, sure hand, I’m afraid,” Macmillan said.
    A smile in Rio’s eyes. He always seemed so amused by the groupies Macmillan got when he was forced to play tousled, self-effacing Doctor Peter Maxwell. Macmillan wasn’t one to sleep with students, though. There were classes to teach, papers to grade, books to write, and severed hands to not think about. 
    Macmillan had a lot of sex, but it was always for the job—just him, gathering intelligence, a shining blond Viking with ill intent.
    Macmillan caught sight of various players: The Russian clan leader. The Valdez brothers. Then he spotted Thorne, the notorious Hangman lieutenant. “Thorne’s here,” he mumbled.
    “Party’s really starting now,” Rio mumbled. Things got dangerous when Thorne came around.
    Up on the stage, a boy in a white, short-sleeved shirt set up a microphone stand. Then he set out a stool and pushed two large vases of roses onto either side of it, so that they would frame the singer.
    A minute later, a lone woman with a mass of loose, dark curls walked out onto the stage. She had on a pillbox hat with a net that came down to conceal the top half of her face. Her dress was a classic little black number, worn with knee-high panty hose, pulled up like tall socks, of all things. She lifted a hand in a wave, smiling at the audience, then she adjusted her microphone with deft movements, pale skin glowing in the torchlight.
    His eyes fell to those knee-highs with their crass stripe of too-tight elastic squeezing the flesh just below her knee, the hose itself just a titch darker than her skin.
    Macmillan knew, from his extensive experience undressing the opposite sex, that