Prologue

It was the wettest July on record, and the perverted part of Speare’s mind would note, not in a good way. The addition of excessive thunder, lightning and hail made him ponder if Paganism had sprung a war between Thor and Zeus. But those were contemplations for a time when he was not standing in a rather awkward standoff.

The woman he was looking at dressed all in black with her long hair pulled back into a taut ponytail and a gloc pointed at him was the daughter of legendary shooter, Jake “Shades” Slick, or so her story on the street went. Her “dad” was like any shooter and finally ran into someone on his way down, who was on their way up and took eight in the chest. No one, including Speare had ever heard the womanizing sumbitch had ever reproduced, but if gunsulling was genetic, this lady was his daughter.  She was a gun for hire, one not expected to be found in a Canadian city’s mayor’s office.

But then John MacCurtis had always been a touch paranoid in his life. Speare wasn’t fully briefed on the reasons for that, but he knew there was a lot of secret government crap in the background that was never talked about, but the term hero got tossed around a lot.  The awkward part of this stand off was that Speare on his best day could not qualify to carry a restricted weapon, which in Canada was a hand gun…okay to be honest due to his political leanings and choices he couldn’t even qualify to own a hunting rifle.

So following up a lead from the start of the week…

The rain had come in hard and fast. There was some hail, mostly because outlying counties had received tornado warnings, but the city had just been warned of thunder and lightning. The joy for Speare was that the rain had cooled off the over 30 degrees Celsius down to the 17. A great moment, as he disliked the heat, especially when someone had asked him to come and look at a body found in a urine and grime soaked alleyway.

The downside was that the rain would probably wash away forensic type stuff the police would look for, but then again with how much DNA was present in the alley he was sure that would not have been useful. The question in this situation would always come back to did the heat wave cause emotions to boil over or was this planned?

A philosophical question, that did not need to be answered as he stood next to the lead reporter for the scene watching the police work with tarps trying to cover up what his grandmother colloquially would have called a 25 cent tart, but sadly was someone’s daughter and now was being loaded into a body bag to be taken back to the morgue.

 

Had brought him into the Mayor’s office, and epically so. The plate glass had cut like a bitch through his scalp when he leapt through. But Shades Juniorette was not part of the plan, this was supposed to be shock and awe for the mayor to find out what he knew about the dead girl. Only the office was empty but for the gun hand.

“So Jackie can we talk about this?”

“Speare are you always an insufferable ass?”

It was a good question, but the switchblade in Speare’s hand was not a confidence builder. What was it from the Untouchables movie, about bringing a knife to a gun fight? Speare really needed to work on his thuggery networking one oh one. This life was so much easier when the crew was running together, before the breakdown, before Sax decided to sell books.

Before a girl turned up dead that haunted his dreams for who he reminded her of.

“Where is he?”

“Not here, and soon you will be not here as well.”

Speare shook his head. Shades was tightening her grip on the handle of the gun, he noted her finger tensing. Upside in Canada, legally the gun could only have nine rounds, with one in the chamber, unlike south of the border where expanded clips could carry 10s to 100s of rounds. But seriously, how many bullets did it take to end a discussion?

Speare looked into her reflective Ray bans. His mind flashed to the girl being loaded into the body bag. The girl’s face.

So familiar.

The name flashing into his mind.

Shades moves forward with the gun at ready.

“Who the fuck is Reesa?!”

The gun hits the ground…

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