Hitman vs Hitman - L.A. Witt Page 0,48
the house, that made me think we made a play no one was expecting. They probably didn’t think we were stupid enough to go back to the scene, so there was no one there anticipating us.”
Ricardo nodded mutely. He’d had the same thought; as guarded as he’d been and as much as he’d scanned their surroundings going in and out of the house, he’d been a little surprised no one had taken a potshot at them. At the car, he’d done a quick sweep of the usual places to find trackers and explosives, and come up empty. Not even a smudge in the dust on the car or some disturbed gravel to let them know someone had been close to the vehicle.
But August was right—they weren’t dealing with the criminal equivalent of rent-a-cops. They had to assume that whoever was on their tail had brains, technology, and the resources to acquire whatever and whoever they needed.
Fighting the urge to steal a skyward glance in search of a drone, he said, “We should probably ditch the car too.”
“Good idea.” August’s voice had lost its edge. He was all business now. “I say we leave this one someplace, steal another, then grab Heidi and all our supplies and find some other place to hunker down.”
“You have any place in mind?”
With a grin that somehow raised both Ricardo’s hackles and his dick, August said, “As a matter of fact, I do.”
If there was one thing hitmen and their ilk were good at, it was efficiency. It was kind of a job requirement for those who weren’t fond of federal prison cells or caskets.
So despite the animosity between them, not to mention the newfound tension Ricardo had inadvertently added today, he and August went through the vehicle acquisition motions with surgical efficiency. They left the car behind a business park where it likely wouldn’t be discovered for a few days. They dumped their burner phones and batteries in separate places after destroying the SIM cards, and at a nearby shopping mall, went to different cell phone stores to acquire new burner phones in cash. Ricardo had more back at the safehouse, but as August had pointed out, burner phones were like good shoes—you could never have too many.
After they’d bought their phones, they went separately out to the parking garage. There, August stood in the exit lane of the valet section and gave a theatrical but impressively believable monologue about how all the charging stations for electric cars were actually stealing data from the cars’ computers, including the GPS.
“You all think you’re being so green,” he declared with evangelical conviction, “but you’re just giving all your personal information over to billionaires. Do you think Elon Musk is using that to do good deeds? No, no, my friend—he’s working with Jeff Bezos to make sure your car is telling them everything so they can target you with ads, ads, and more ads. And don’t even get me started on how they know every single place you go when you’re not in your car, and—”
Ricardo didn’t catch the rest. By this point, August had drawn a small crowd, including the curious attendants from the valet booth. They, along with their manager, did their best to placate August, reassuring him that they believed he made valid points, but could he please clear away so that mall patrons could drive out.
That was all the time and distraction Ricardo needed. Face shielded by a stolen baseball cap, he stealthily broke into a car in the self-park row next to the valet entrance.
About the time security was showing up to tell August to move along, Ricardo was in. He caught August’s eye, and August gestured sharply at the people around him. “Sheep! You’re all a bunch of propaganda-swallowing sheep!” Then he stalked away with a dramatic flourish and dropped into the passenger side of the newly stolen car.
Okay, so that part of the operation may not have been efficient, but it had been effective. And entertaining. There’d been at least two dozen witnesses, but like magicians who’d mastered sleight of hand and misdirection, August and Ricardo had maintained total control of everything those witnesses actually saw. They saw August. They heard his speech. They saw the valets and security urging him to leave. They saw him get into a car with someone else and leave.
Not one of them had paid attention to Ricardo subtly letting himself into the car.
Not one of them had made a mental note of the car’s