Hitman vs Hitman - L.A. Witt Page 0,10

comes back, I’ll be on some tropical island with my dick down someone’s throat, so what do I care?”

“Uh-huh.” Ricardo folded his arms. “After conveniently using a poison that’ll get blamed on the exterminator, right?”

“What?” August sounded shocked, though he clearly wasn’t. “Is strychnine associated with exterminators? Why, I had no idea.”

Ricardo rolled his eyes. “Listen, if you’re done fucking around, we’ve got some shit we need to discuss.”

August was mixing something in with the strychnine, and he paused, holding the stem like he would an actual glass of wine.

Please do us all a favor and drink that.

But whether he liked it or not, Ricardo actually needed August to keep breathing for a little while longer.

The thing was, after he’d left Lance Baldwin’s office, Ricardo had made the rounds through the kitchen and ballroom, ostensibly to make sure no rats could make unscheduled appearances. He’d wandered through hallways and side rooms, making a mental map of the house and populating that map with all the important and well-armed people who’d be here tonight. He’d inspected security measures under the pretense of looking for rat droppings and access points.

And in the end, he’d come to a conclusion that annoyed the shit out of him: there was no way to pull off this hit during tonight’s party and make it out alive. The house was too heavily fortified, the mark was too heavily guarded, and Ricardo and August were both thoroughly fucked.

Leaning against a rack of wine bottles, Ricardo sighed. “We’re being set up.”

August’s eyebrow arched. “You don’t say.”

Ricardo rolled his eyes. “I’m not done. We’re being set up, and we’re fucked unless we work together.”

“How do you figure?”

Ricardo gave him the rundown of the building’s layout and the security measures.

“Christ.” August wrinkled his nose as he set down the glass of strychnine. “Did Baldwin learn about security from James Bond?”

“Or a James Bond video game,” Ricardo grumbled. “But the point is, we need to do this before everyone starts showing up, and I think we need to take Baldwin alive.”

“Alive?” August sputtered. “Why? I’d kill him for free.”

“Me too, but whoever set us up had to have known about tonight’s party. Even we didn’t have that information after doing our own recon. So our employer is either close to him, or they’re close to one of his high-dollar cronies.”

“So, what?” August inclined his head. “You want to kidnap him and interrogate him?”

“Basically.”

August blinked. “I… Are you serious? Because I was joking.”

“I’m not.”

His rival studied him for a moment, but slowly, his expression brightened. “Ooh, I call dibs on putting jumper cables on his nipples.”

Sighing, Ricardo pinched the bridge of his nose. “We can figure out the logistics later, all right?” He dropped his hand. “Right now, we need to figure out how to get our hands on Baldwin and get him out of here.”

August’s eyes lost focus. He folded his arms across his tactical vest, and his lips quirked. After a moment, his eyes widened, and he grinned. “I have an idea.”

Oh, this was going to be good.

Ricardo eyed him, waiting for him to go on.

“Okay. So.” August rubbed his gloved hands together. “While you were upstairs blowing him or whatever, I realized there’s a service entrance in the back of the wine cellar…”

Ricardo didn’t like working with other people under the best of circumstances. When “other people” meant a rival hitman with both a hair-brained idea and a vested interest in completing the hit and saving his own skin? Oh, he was not happy about that at all.

But he was low on options right now, which was the only reason he was in the process of “checking the master bedroom for rats.”

There were no rats, of course. There was, however, a walk-in closet. Two of them, in fact. One was full of sparkly evening dresses, stiletto shoes that could double as murder weapons, and laundry piled haphazardly by the door. Apparently, Mrs. Baldwin was about as neat and tidy as Ricardo’s ex.

The other walk-in was what he was looking for: suits, a few pairs of those running shoes that cost five figures, and… God, he wore Hawaiian shirts? How many Hawaiian shirts did one douchebag need? No wonder someone had ordered a hit on him.

In here, surrounded by these crimes against fashion, Ricardo waited. The party wasn’t for a couple of hours yet, but Baldwin had been wearing a golf shirt and jeans earlier. He’d be up here sooner or later to change clothes before the party. All Ricardo had