Midnight Kiss (Men of Midnight #7) - Lisa Marie Rice Page 0,57

his Colt 1911 in his waistband, smoothing his jacket over it. He wore extra-thin leather shooting gloves. The Colt was scrubbed of all identifying marks and he’d loaded it using latex gloves. If anything happened, nothing could connect him to the gun and the gun itself would disappear in pieces thrown out the window over a radius of miles.

There were plenty more guns where that came from. His boss could choose from a whole arsenal of untraceables.

There was plenty of everything, actually. Weapons, IDs, hardware, money, transport. He had access to it all, and it was all the best. The only thing Resnick had to do was not fuck up.

Be a weapon. Point and shoot.

Resnick did a careful scan, 360°. There were no security cameras and hadn’t been since he turned off onto the country road. There had been three on the road from the city but none here.

No cameras and no people.

The place looked deserted, but it wasn’t. There were ancient rusted cars up on blocks but there were also a few working vehicles in sight. They were old and battered, but in use.

All the trailer homes were locked up tight but there were signs of life. A trash-can barbecue with an irregular pile of chopped wood to one side. Dingy stained sheets flapping in the wind, hung from a line of plastic cord running from a trailer to a nearby tree. A supermarket pot of daisies on a rickety porch. There could well be people inside but they were probably sleeping off a bender or high.

Resnick knew these people. They were his people. He knew what the trailer homes were like inside. He knew what they smelled like. He knew that many trailers would have a plastic tarp taped over the window frames instead of glass. He knew the residents all had substance abuse problems, impulse control problems, mental problems. Problems with the law and with what was in their heads. They’d been his people once, but not any more. He’d grown up in a trailer park marginally better than this one, but just as hopeless and ugly. Ten years ago, walking around this place would have given him the creeps, as if he’d been pulled back into the hell he’d grown up in. Now, he felt nothing. This place had no power over him. He was someone else, someone with no connections to this kind of place, where hope died an ugly death.

He was a warrior. A top-level security contractor who would soon be the right-hand man of the president of the United States. Nothing at all to do with the hungry, thin boy, son of Jimbo Resnick, alcoholic mechanic who couldn’t keep a job and who was a sadist. Whose son was terrified of him. That boy was gone.

He straightened his shoulders and started walking the trailer park in a grid. North to south. East to west. Nobody came out of the trailer homes to challenge him. He didn’t even hear human voices, just a dog barking in the distance.

When he finished, he stopped in the middle of the intersection of a couple of dusty paths. One led to what maybe had been a small canteen or grocery shop. One led to what had once been a swimming pool but was now cracked cement with putrid green scum on the bottom.

This was his one lead and it went nowhere. Resnick didn’t know where to go after this, so he needed to squeeze this intel until something popped out. He was not going to disappoint Senator Redfield.

He took another 360° scan of the area. Deserted and silent and run down. What would anyone do with this place? It was dead. Well, maybe not quite dead. There were a few signs of life and if people lived here, then there had to be a manager, of sorts. Someone to pay the monthly rent to, someone to intervene if there were fights.

Where he’d grown up, the manager had been a big bruiser, more like a bouncer than a manager. If the water wasn’t running, he wasn’t your guy. If you didn’t pay, though, he got right in your face. This place had to have a guy like that. Even legally, someone had to be in charge.

He set out to find that guy and finally, down a path that could barely be seen, he came across a cabin that was badly maintained and needed a coat of paint. It was isolated, fairly far from most of the trailers. You’d have