LOS ANGELES, UNITED STATES — 2:47 A.M.
His name, for now, was Hunter Salvatore. Not his real name, he had buried that long ago, along with most of everything else that had once made him human. Tonight he wore all black: fitted tactical trousers, a dark jacket zipped to the throat, thin leather gloves that had been worn so many times they had taken the exact shape of his hands. He moved along the rooftop ledge of a twelve-story commercial building in with the unhurried attitude of a man who had done this a thousand times, because he had.
Below him, the street was a pale ribbon of lamplight. A black sedan sat idling outside a restaurant that had long since closed, its exhaust rising ghostlike into the November air. Hunter crouched low, drew a small pair of optical binoculars from the inner pocket of his jacket, and trained them on the vehicle. Two men visible inside. One driver. One target. The target was the heavyset man in a grey suit. He was on his phone, oblivious, laughing at something the person on the other end had said.
People always laughed right before the end, Hunter had noticed. As if the universe extended some small mercy, one final moment of lightness before the dark.
He exhaled slowly, tucking the binoculars away. He did not feel satisfaction. He did not feel dread. He felt the way he always felt before a job. Empty.
TWELVE HOURS EARLIER — SILVERLAKE ANIMAL CLINIC
The fluorescent lights of the examination room hummed gently. The smell of antiseptic hung in the air. On the steel table, a golden retriever lay sedated, its flank rising and falling with the slow, trusting rhythm of deep sleep. The dog's owner, a woman in her late thirties with red-rimmed eyes, stood in the doorway wringing her hands.
"Will she be all right?" the woman asked. Her voice was small, fragile as paper.
The veterinarian did not look up immediately. He was working with a careful, methodical focus, gloved hands moving over the dog's abdomen with a gentleness that seemed almost at odds with his appearance. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with a face that was handsome in a severe, angular way, cheekbones sharp enough to cast shadows, eyes dark and still as deep water. His expression was habitually neutral, but in this moment, leaning over the sedated animal, something in it softened almost imperceptibly.
"She'll be fine," he said at last. "The foreign body is out. She was lucky you brought her in when you did."
The woman exhaled a breath she seemed to have been holding for hours. "Oh, thank goodness. Thank you, Doctor Salvatore. Thank you so much."
He nodded once, as though he had measured the exact amount of response required and offered precisely that. He began suturing with neat, practiced strokes.
His assistant, a bright-eyed young woman named Amy Lammens, hovered nearby, handing instruments with quiet efficiency. She had worked with him for eight months. She thought him brilliant. She also thought him the strangest man she had ever met, not unkind, not cold exactly, but sealed, like a room with all the windows painted shut from the inside.
"She's going to need rest for at least three days," Hunter said, stripping off his gloves. "No running. No jumping. Small meals. If she stops eating or runs a fever above thirty-nine point five, bring her back immediately."
"Of course, of course," the owner said, already moving toward the table to hover over her dog with the anxious love only pet owners truly understood.
Hunter moved to the sink and washed his hands. In the mirror above the basin, his own reflection looked back at him. He stared at it for a moment longer than necessary. Sometimes he looked at his own face the way a stranger might, searching for something familiar and finding only surfaces.
His phone vibrated in his coat pocket. Once.
He dried his hands carefully, folded the towel, and walked out of the examination room.
BACK CORRIDOR — STAFF ONLY
The hallway behind the clinic was narrow, lit by a single buzzing tube light. Hunter stood with his back to the wall, phone held low, reading the message on a secure encrypted application that looked, to any casual observer, like a simple notes app. The message was four lines. No greeting. No signature.
"Target confirmed. Window: tonight, 0200–0400. Package at the usual location. Completion required before dawn. No complications."
He deleted the message, pocketed the phone, and stood for a moment in the humming silence of the corridor. From the examination room behind him, he could hear the soft, drowsy sounds of the dog coming slowly out of sedation, a low whine, a shuffle of paws against the steel table. He heard the owner cooing softly, reassuring. "I'm here, baby. I'm right here."
He wondered, briefly and without sentiment, what it felt like to have someone say that to you and mean it.
Then he put the thought away, and walked toward the clinic's back exit, already composing in his mind the sequence of steps the night would require.
BEVERLY HILLS -BH POLICE PRECINCT — SAME EVENING, 6:12 P.M.
Detective Lisa Parker had been awake for twenty-two hours. Her desk was a mess: case files stacked in towers that somehow made sense only to her, three empty coffee cups forming a small ceramic skyline at the corner, a whiteboard behind her dense with photographs and arrows and handwriting that her colleagues called illegible and she called efficient.
She was thirty-one years old, lean and sharp-featured, with dark eyes that rarely blinked as much as most people's and a habit of tapping her pen against her knee when she was thinking hard. She was thinking hard now.
"Lisa."
She looked up. Her partner, Detective James Rhodes was standing at the edge of her desk holding a takeaway bag. He was ten years older, patient as stone. The smell of Gumbo drifted out of it, warm and savory, and her stomach contracted with the sudden urgent awareness that she had not eaten since the morning.
"Eat something," he said simply, setting the bag down.
"I'm in the middle of—"
"You're always in the middle of something. Eat."
She gave him the assessing look she gave most things before accepting them, and then pulled the bag toward her. "The Allan Hughes," she said, unwrapping the container. "The body they found in Echo Park. Forensics came back. Two shots. Close range. Professional grouping, both rounds within four centimeters of each other. No shell casings recovered. No witnesses."
James sat down across from her, folding his arms. "How many is that now?"
"Three in six weeks," Lisa said, picking up her chopsticks. "All men with records. All connected, loosely, but connected, to the same investment group. And all killed the same way." She paused. "Same shooter. Has to be."
James was quiet for a moment, studying the whiteboard over her shoulder. "A hired gun."
"A very good one." She ate a spoonful of stew, staring at the photographs pinned to the board. Her eyes moved over the faces, three men, three different ages, three different lives, and settled on something she couldn't yet name. A shape forming in the data, still too vague to articulate. "Someone's cleaning house," she said quietly. "The question is whose house. And why now."
Her phone buzzed on the desk. She glanced at the screen. A text from an unknown number, a single set of coordinates. Her face lit up.
She was already reaching for her jacket.
"Lisa," James said, his voice carrying that particular note of measured concern he reserved for moments when he suspected she was about to do something that would give him a headache. "Where are you going?"
She paused in the doorway, jacket half on, and looked back at him with an expression that was almost a smile. "To ask some questions," she said. "Don't wait up."
And then she was gone, the door swinging behind her, and the fluorescent lights hummed on in her absence over the whiteboard full of faces and the three empty coffee cups.