LITMIR.BIZ

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He flashed his lights, honked his horn and waved a hand out the window in the hopes of grabbing an officer’s attention. The cops flew past. Apparently a broken back window hadn’t been enough to raise suspicion. And he wasn’t about to stop.

      The gunmen were now only two car lengths behind. He cut through a parking lot, swerved into an alley and came out on another street. The van followed. He could see the driver now. It was the tall one of the three. He’d pulled a hood over his head to keep the mask covering his face from drawing the attention of anyone not looking straight on. But Daniel could still see the mask—black, oval-like fencing gear and utterly featureless. Would they be brazen enough to open fire on a busy Toronto street? The light ahead of him turned yellow. Daniel gunned the engine and flew through. He hit the other side of the intersection seconds before it turned red. The van followed tight on his tail. The vehicle was now so close he could practically feel it tapping his bumper.

      The hospital sign appeared ahead. Cars lined up to enter the hospital parking lot, but Daniel wasn’t about to wait. He aimed straight for the emergency-vehicles ramp. Two cop cars and an ambulance sat near the emergency room door. He hit the brakes beside them.

      A smattering of hospital staff and police ran toward him.

      The black van kept going, disappearing into traffic.

      “Hey! You can’t park here!” A paramedic reached him first. “You have to go around to the lot—”

      Daniel threw the truck into Park and leaped out. Shards fell from his clothes. “This woman needs help and might have a head trauma. There was a car bomb inside the courthouse parking lot. People shot at us. A man named Brian Leslie was just murdered. Wait—be careful. The truck is full of broken glass.”

      Two paramedics eased Olivia out of the truck and onto a stretcher. Daniel turned to follow her. A hand tapped his shoulder.

      “Sir, you’d better follow me.” It was a hospital security guard, flanked by a uniformed police officer.

      “Absolutely. I want to give a statement. Just let me get her stuff first.” He turned back to the truck. The messenger bag had spilled all over the floor. He scooped the contents up quickly. Her press photo identification badge was hooked on the edge of the seat. He pulled it loose, allowing his eyes one moment to linger over the adventurous curve of her smile. “Her name is Olivia Brant. She’s a newspaper reporter.”

      The security guard took her belongings from him. “What’s your connection to her?”

      I’m her bodyguard.

      The answer he’d have given in his former life flew through his brain automatically and he just barely caught himself before it left his mouth. “Absolutely none. I just happened to be there when the bomb exploded and saw she needed help.” His eyes glanced toward the emergency room door. He couldn’t see where she’d gone. “But if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to stay and give my statement here. Just in case she needs anything. Or at least stay until you’re able to reach her emergency medical contact, so she’s not alone.”

      He had no real reason to stay. Yet something inside was urging him not to go.

      “Sir?” The officer’s tone was definitely a little sharper now. He took another step toward Daniel. “I think you’d better come with me.”

      * * *

      Words swam in a jumble of black-and-white on Olivia’s computer screen. A pencil spun between her fingers. It had been two days since Brian Leslie had been murdered and her memory of the event was still nothing but an incoherent mess of disjointed images. She leaned back in her chair and listened to the clack of her colleagues’ fingers hitting keyboards. It was Friday afternoon and she seemed to be the only one blinking bleary-eyed at a story that wouldn’t come together. She added a few more pencil lines to the sketch in her small pocket-size notebook.

      A blank oval face, like a black fencing mask, stared back at her through a haze of charcoal smoke swirls.

      “Hey, can I borrow that a second?” Ricky rolled his office chair across the alcove from his desk to hers. “I want to check it against something I saw online.”

      “Help yourself.” She shrugged. “It’s all I can remember of the killers. But it’s not much to go on.”

      The young photographer picked up the notepad and rolled back to his computer. “I never knew you could sketch like this. Why aren’t you in the graphics department?”

      She shrugged. “I really enjoy writing.” And editing, graphic design, ad layout and photography. Over the past few years she’d settled into a pretty comfortable role at the newspaper as a “bit of everything” journalist who could write one day, edit the next and field a decent classified ad page in between. But being good at a little bit of everything wasn’t the same as proving to Vince that she belonged on his new, smaller team.

      Last summer, Vince had gotten into a major battle of wills with Torchlight’s former publisher when they’d tried to force him to fire crime reporter Jack Brooks over his investigation into the Raincoat Killer. So Vince had bought out the newspaper and turned it into a scrappy independent. Which was actually awesome, except that he’d warned them it would mean cutting staff. Now was no time to have a mind full of smoke and haze.

      Her temples ached. If she closed her eyes, she could almost recapture the memory of the man who’d saved her—dark eyes, a voice as deep and soothing as a morning cup of coffee, chestnut hair curling ever so slightly at the nape of his neck. Daniel. But then she’d blink and he’d be gone again.

      “Hey, Olivia? Come look at this.”

      She slid her chair over. It was an internet web page. Three crude figures in black fatigues and featureless fencing-style masks stood in the center of the screen under the words The Faceless Crew.

      The sudden reminder of how terrified she’d been sent adrenaline coursing through her. “What is this?”

      “It’s a fragment of a website that was shut down a few weeks ago.” Ricky ran one hand through his shaggy hair. “Remember that car bombing in Vancouver last June that turned out to be some turf war between small-scale rival gangs? These guys tried to take responsibility for it and a few other car fires, too. They posted some stuff on various hate websites, trying to get attention as some kind of homegrown terrorist group for hire. No one took them seriously.”

      She vaguely remembered Ricky bringing it up at a news meeting weeks ago. Vince had said no hard facts equaled no story and that the paper wasn’t in the business of chasing ghosts. But it seemed these men weren’t ghosts anymore. “Can you print it for me?”

      “Yup, and look here.” He zoomed in. “I was able to recover some text, too.”

      She read out loud, “‘The Faceless Crew are a gang of three killers. Rake is the strategist and leader. Brute is the weapons expert and, ah...assassin. Shorty is the explosives expert.’” She looked up. “They misspelled assassin. Looks to me like three brash, delusional kids who watched too many action films and decided to go start their own gang.”

      “You can see why no one took them seriously.”

      Right up until the moment they planted a bomb in the court garage and killed a man. Then again, an alarming number of gang-related murders, and even terrorist attacks, were committed by angry, mentally unstable young men whom no one took seriously at first.

      They walked over to the shared printer and waited for the page to come through.

      “Is it possible someone got them to murder Brian Leslie?” Ricky asked.

      “I don’t know.” She ran both hands through her hair, then twisted it into a knot at the back of her neck. “Brian owed his crew a lot of money. They hadn’t been paid in weeks. He’d skimmed money off their checks. He had them working off the books without them knowing it, which meant they can’t even claim unemployment now. So I can imagine a lot of people wanted to hurt him. But there are far easier ways to get justice

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