Hawk, p.2
Hawk, page 2
part #6 of Will Slater Series
The first man took her by the arms, and the second by the legs. They lifted her up and dumped her down on the mattress, in roughly the same position she’d been dozing. Blood welled across the pillow, soaking in. The first man breathed out, put his hands on his hips, and admired his handiwork.
A smile creased his thin lips.
He was savouring the thrill.
The second guy could tell his colleague was high off the adrenalin. He’d been the one to fire the kill shot, and he didn’t seem to be treating the situation with the urgency it required. They’d both been briefed about the woman’s partner. They knew a rough outline of his operational history. Rumours and whispers of the details that hadn’t been blacked out in the records.
As much as their superior could divulge, apparently.
But the second man had a bad feeling about the whole goddamn thing.
It seemed like their employer had been holding back certain details.
The second man said, ‘Let’s go.’
But he wasn’t able to mask the fear in time. He uttered the words too fast, and his voice cracked at the end. The first man wheeled on the spot, almost amused by the whole thing.
‘Why?’ the first guy said. ‘What’s the rush?’
‘The husband.’
‘They’re not married.’
‘You know what I mean. The boyfriend.’
‘He’s still at the gym.’
‘You sure?’
The first man shrugged, and adjusted his grip on the 9mm in his hand. ‘I almost hope he’s not.’
And suddenly the second guy saw it all laid out before him. It almost seemed too obvious, in hindsight. He should have known there was room for error.
His co-worker had endless experience in the field, but sported nothing close to the reputation of this mystery man — the guy whose girlfriend they’d come to kill. The second guy saw envy and jealousy and bitterness in his co-worker, all rolled into one. The first man, despite his supposed “experience,” wanted to confront the mystery man. Wanted to put a bullet in his head to prove a point. Hence the lack of surveillance.
The first guy wanted to meet the guy whose reputation had supposedly trumped his own.
Because of his own goddamn lack of humility.
The second guy said, ‘I don’t think you should be so confident about this.’
The first guy said, ‘Supposedly this man is the stuff of legend. I want to see what he’s made of.’
‘If he’s anywhere near us, he’ll have heard the gunshot.’
‘Good.’
The front door crashed off its hinges, ripped from its frame by a thunderous front kick.
Both men wheeled toward the sound, and the first guy reacted accordingly. He raised his 9mm pistol and fired a couple of shots at the door as it clattered to the floor just inside the entrance. One round shredded the wood, and the other whisked out into the night.
Hitting nothing.
Because no-one was there.
They both froze in the shadows, wired to the eyeballs with adrenalin, and the second guy thought the world might end right then and there. He’d never been put on the back step like this. They both skewered their gaze on the doorway, searching for any sign of movement in the semi-darkness beyond.
Then a giant figure vaulted in through the open window beside them, impossibly fast.
Way faster than they had entered.
Neither of them spotted it until he was right there, only inches away from them in the lowlight, and by then it was too late.
The first guy tried to swing the 9mm pistol around in time but the newcomer seized him by the wrist and snapped his forearm with a stabbing elbow. The grotesque crack made the second guy hesitate for a moment, and he found himself unusually unprepared to react. He went for the 9mm pistol at his own waist, but by that point the newcomer had bundled the first guy up in a powerful bear hug, and then he hurled his foe like the guy was nothing more than an oversized bowling pin.
Inhuman strength.
Almost surreal in nature.
Two hundred pounds of the first guy hit the second guy in the chest and knocked him off-balance. He didn’t go all the way down, but he lost his footing, and by the time he righted himself the newcomer was right there in his face.
Six foot three.
Well over two hundred pounds.
Short, thick brown hair.
A weathered, handsome face with a jaw like steel and eyes like ice.
Jason King head butted the second guy in the face, breaking the man’s orbital bone with his own forehead.
The second guy collapsed back against the bungalow wall, in too much pain to think.
The first guy was unarmed and pale, his shooting arm mangled beyond repair.
King kicked him in the groin and threw him head-first into the same wall, where he slumped down alongside his colleague.
Through a haze of semi-consciousness, the second man felt fear like nothing he’d ever experienced before. It was a deep, guttural, primal sensation. He already couldn’t see out of one eye. He couldn’t feel the left half of his face. But the physical pain wasn’t what bothered him. It was that King hadn’t shot them on sight. He’d beaten them down like they were made of glass.
He’d kept them alive.
To decide their fate when he had time to deduce what had happened.
Through a mask of agony, the second man watched King approach the bed, labouring slowly across the dark room like a golem. He stood quiet for what seemed like hours, staring down at the body on the mattress. Pure emotion bristled in the air. The atmosphere crackled. The second guy opened his mouth to apologise, to say something — anything.
But what the hell was he going to say?
So he sat there, wallowing in pain as the left half of his face swelled like a pumpkin, mute and forlorn. His colleague sat alongside him, in an equal amount of pain, feeling an equal amount of regret.
Finally, Jason King turned around to face them.
There was a look in his eyes that neither of them had thought physically possible.
They didn’t know one man could possess so much rage.
King advanced toward them.
Part I
1
Budapest
Hungary
Present day…
‘Do you understand who my husband is?’ the woman hissed under her breath, her voice low.
Trying to keep the conversation hushed.
But, seated next to her, Will Slater heard every word.
He was in a ruin bar, surrounded by artistic disrepair, silently savouring the aesthetic. The Budapest staple appealed to him. It was a battered, broken shell of a room. It had been converted from a rundown and vandalised office space, but most of the destruction dished out to the commercial premises had been left as is. Instead of cleaning up, the new owners had worked around it, adding bright colours and tables and chairs and a long wooden countertop. It was gritty and unfiltered and suited him just fine.
He could appreciate anything that thrived in a state of ruin.
Atypically, he was as far from ruin as he’d been in quite some time.
After a harrowing stretch in Zimbabwe a few months earlier, he’d come away sporting a surprising lack of permanent injuries. His shoulder, chest, and sternum had healed promptly, no thanks to a generous dose of controversial stem cell therapy in a clinic he frequented on the outskirts of Tijuana.
It was illegal in mainland America, but Mexico provided guaranteed anonymity.
He was feeling fresh within ten days. Then he’d plunged into an exercise regime with a sickening level of dedication. He didn’t know why. If he had to pinpoint a reason, he might ruminate that his life seemed to ebb and flow with every incident he got involved in.
And it seemed to move in a cycle.
There was a short burst of pain and war, followed by an extended period of downtime. He was learning to recognise the downtime for what it was and take advantage of it. He’d spent the past two months bettering himself in every way imaginable, even though there was little to improve upon in the first place.
And, somehow, he’d kept himself out of trouble along the way.
But then the woman next to him raised her voice in heavily accented English, and a dark premonition in the primal part of his brain told him the downtime was over. Her lithe figure was clad in an expensive black dress that ended halfway up her thighs. She wore knee-high boots and her straight black hair hung like a stage curtain over the back of her neck. He figured she was in her early forties. She was with a friend who looked awfully similar — tall, dark, sly — and they were embroiled in an argument with an unruly big guy on the other side of the line-up.
The new guy had a friend, too.
Two on two.
The women had been quiet and subdued until the conversation took a turn. The men were loud and drunk, as they had been for most of the last ten minutes. And then there was Slater, stewing silently on his own, as he always did.
He gulped down the last mouthful of the Old-Fashioned in his hand and gently placed the empty tumbler back on the bar’s countertop. He looked at the bartender, who looked right back at him. Asking a question, and getting an answer from the level of detail in the guy’s eyes.
Don’t get involved, the bartender was silently telling him.
Slater swivelled on the stool and got involved.
The women were in a neat line, shoulder to shoulder along the bar, stomachs pressed to the countertop, facing directly forward. The age-old leave-me-alone pose. The men had started that way, opting to fire catcalls across the bar, but the guy furthest away had drifted over to get closer to them. Now they formed a rudimentary right-angle.
Slater leant away from the bar, so they could see him sitting there. All two hundred and ten pounds of him. He’d packed on muscle like nobody’s business during this particular stretch of downtime. Usually sitting at one-ninety, he’d converted an extended calorie surplus into a near hundred pound increase in all his usual compound lifts. He rested a bulging forearm on his knee and stared directly at the two guys.
They were in their thirties, European, big, muscular, pumped full of testosterone. They must have come expecting a conquest, and it was getting late. Therefore they were getting desperate.
They needed some action.
Slater figured he’d give them some.
He didn’t blink. He just kept looking at them until they noticed him. He had enough life experience to know how to antagonise. If they could hand out master’s degrees in the practice, he would have received his ten years ago.
They noticed him.
They both stared at him, and then one of them looked away, anticipating that Slater would back down from his confrontational stance.
He didn’t.
Then they both really stared at him.
The bigger guy said, ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’
Like reading from a B-movie script.
Both women spun, and Slater made eye contact with them for the first time. They could have been twins. They both had black eyeliner piled on thick, which made their green eyes striking. They were tanned. But on top of all that, they looked dangerous. Maybe not to the common observer. But Slater could see a menacing spark in both their eyes.
And suddenly he thought he might have interpreted the bartender’s look the wrong way.
It was always, Don’t get involved.
But it might have been because of who the women were, not the men…
But now he was involved. And he’d enraged the two perverts. Which meant none of this was going to end politely.
Although he didn’t exactly feel like wasting his energy in a barroom brawl.
So he changed the direction of the script. The following conversation was supposed to hit all the prerequisite beats. Slater had seen it a thousand times before.
What the fuck are you looking at?
You.
Going to do something about it?
Maybe. Why don’t you come over here and find out?
This is your last chance to leave. Beat it.
I’m staying right here.
Well, okay then…
It had a purpose in traditional bar fights. There had to be some kind of feeling-out process. You didn’t see someone staring at you and instantly hit them in the face. There had to be that vital delay where you could size them up, read into their responses, try to discern how nervous they were, all the while injecting confidence into yourself in preparation for that first big swing.
But none of that happened.
Because as soon as the first guy said, ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’ Slater flew off the stool like he’d been electrocuted, and before either of them could blink he was in front of the guy with one hand wrapped around the back of his neck. Which didn’t have to be taken as a dire physical threat at first. Men did it in bars all the time to establish dominance. Clasp a palm around the back of the neck and pull them in close.
But Slater didn’t pull forward. He flexed his forearm and used tremendous grip strength to pull the guy’s head down, and there was nothing the man could do to resist it. Then Slater hit him in the gut with a short uppercut, but he used the bulk of the guy’s frame to mask the punch from the rest of the bar, so the altercation wasn’t visible.
Then Slater stepped away, as fast as he’d darted into range, and he relaxed, diffusing the tension.
The guy he’d hit in the stomach threw up all over the bar’s countertop, his insides spasming violently from the force behind the blow.
Then he slumped onto the nearest stool and continued to dry heave.
Embarrassed and going pale, his friend shook his head in resignation and hauled the guy away from the bar, muttering a half-hearted apology to the bartender. There was a brief moment of tension — he looked at Slater and considered seeking revenge.
But he’d been right there. He’d seen how hard Slater hit his friend. It probably hadn’t even looked real.
Then the first guy threw up again, all over himself, and that sealed the decision.
The second guy opted not to risk any further embarrassment by lingering around in the contents of his friend’s stomach. He looped his hands under the man’s armpits and dragged him toward the exit.
The first guy retched again.
The second guy quickened his pace.
And then they were gone.
Slater sat back down on his stool and grimaced as he surveyed the puke littered across the countertop.
The bartender shot him a dark look and said, ‘Thanks for that.’
Slater feigned ignorance. ‘For what?’
‘You didn’t need to do that.’
‘But I did.’
Then one of the women piped up, and in a scornful tone she said, ‘You really didn’t need to do that.’
Slater said, ‘And yet, here I am.’
2
The dark-haired woman said, ‘Who are you?’
Slater said, ‘An accountant.’
‘No you’re not.’
‘Then you can narrow it down yourself, can’t you?’
‘If you’re the competition, you could get me in a lot of trouble for talking to you. That’s why I’m asking.’
Slater said, ‘What?’
She looked at him, then averted her gaze and said, ‘Never mind. Said too much.’
‘Who’s your husband?’
She raised an eyebrow.
He said, ‘You asked those guys if they understood who your husband was.’
‘That still falls under the category of saying too much, I’m afraid.’
But her actions belied her words, because she sure as shit wasn’t going anywhere. In fact, she was tilting herself toward Slater to make the conversation a little easier.
The opposite of the age-old leave-me-alone pose.
There was unrest all around them. The bartender circled around the bar with a mountain of cloths and rags in one hand, and a mop in the other. The fetid stink of the vomit began floating across the space, driving patrons to the other ends of the room. Surprisingly, though, no-one had vacated the premises in a hurry. This was Budapest, and people had paid good money for their drinks. A light scuffle at one end of the room wasn’t going to deter them.
But the bartender shot daggers at Slater as he set to work cleaning up the mess, so Slater deemed it prudent to move the conversation elsewhere.
He gestured to an unoccupied booth skewered into the corner of the far wall.
He lifted an eyebrow.
Wordless.
The women looked at each other, shrugged to themselves, and nodded in unison.
He slid off the stool and made an after you gesture. As they stepped away from the countertop, Slater passed a twenty-euro note to the bartender.
‘Sorry about all that,’ he mumbled.
‘Watch yourself,’ the bartender muttered back, flashing a pointed glance at the two black-clad women.
Slater said, ‘I can take care of myself.’
He followed them toward the booth and sat down across from them. He hadn’t a clue where the conversation might lead, but that was the nature of his life.
Venture boldly into the unknown and see what awaits.
‘I’m not the competition,’ he said. ‘My name’s Will Slater.’
‘Is that supposed to mean something?’ the first woman said.
The second woman had yet to say a word.
‘It’s just my name,’ he said. ‘I assume you’ve both got them too.’
The first woman said, ‘Camilla.’
The second woman said, ‘Dani.’
Slater looked at Dani and said, ‘You speak.’
‘Not often,’ Dani said, but she managed the hint of a smile.
‘I’m usually the one that does all the talking,’ Camilla said. ‘And I’m not about to break that trend, I’m afraid. Might I ask why you’re sitting across from us right now?’
Dani mumbled, ‘He’s oblivious.’
‘Evidently,’ Camilla said.
Dani said in her trademark low tone, ‘He’s making a mistake.’
‘Obviously,’ Camilla said.
Slater shrugged. ‘I make mistakes all the time. It hasn’t caught up to me yet.’
A smile creased his thin lips.
He was savouring the thrill.
The second guy could tell his colleague was high off the adrenalin. He’d been the one to fire the kill shot, and he didn’t seem to be treating the situation with the urgency it required. They’d both been briefed about the woman’s partner. They knew a rough outline of his operational history. Rumours and whispers of the details that hadn’t been blacked out in the records.
As much as their superior could divulge, apparently.
But the second man had a bad feeling about the whole goddamn thing.
It seemed like their employer had been holding back certain details.
The second man said, ‘Let’s go.’
But he wasn’t able to mask the fear in time. He uttered the words too fast, and his voice cracked at the end. The first man wheeled on the spot, almost amused by the whole thing.
‘Why?’ the first guy said. ‘What’s the rush?’
‘The husband.’
‘They’re not married.’
‘You know what I mean. The boyfriend.’
‘He’s still at the gym.’
‘You sure?’
The first man shrugged, and adjusted his grip on the 9mm in his hand. ‘I almost hope he’s not.’
And suddenly the second guy saw it all laid out before him. It almost seemed too obvious, in hindsight. He should have known there was room for error.
His co-worker had endless experience in the field, but sported nothing close to the reputation of this mystery man — the guy whose girlfriend they’d come to kill. The second guy saw envy and jealousy and bitterness in his co-worker, all rolled into one. The first man, despite his supposed “experience,” wanted to confront the mystery man. Wanted to put a bullet in his head to prove a point. Hence the lack of surveillance.
The first guy wanted to meet the guy whose reputation had supposedly trumped his own.
Because of his own goddamn lack of humility.
The second guy said, ‘I don’t think you should be so confident about this.’
The first guy said, ‘Supposedly this man is the stuff of legend. I want to see what he’s made of.’
‘If he’s anywhere near us, he’ll have heard the gunshot.’
‘Good.’
The front door crashed off its hinges, ripped from its frame by a thunderous front kick.
Both men wheeled toward the sound, and the first guy reacted accordingly. He raised his 9mm pistol and fired a couple of shots at the door as it clattered to the floor just inside the entrance. One round shredded the wood, and the other whisked out into the night.
Hitting nothing.
Because no-one was there.
They both froze in the shadows, wired to the eyeballs with adrenalin, and the second guy thought the world might end right then and there. He’d never been put on the back step like this. They both skewered their gaze on the doorway, searching for any sign of movement in the semi-darkness beyond.
Then a giant figure vaulted in through the open window beside them, impossibly fast.
Way faster than they had entered.
Neither of them spotted it until he was right there, only inches away from them in the lowlight, and by then it was too late.
The first guy tried to swing the 9mm pistol around in time but the newcomer seized him by the wrist and snapped his forearm with a stabbing elbow. The grotesque crack made the second guy hesitate for a moment, and he found himself unusually unprepared to react. He went for the 9mm pistol at his own waist, but by that point the newcomer had bundled the first guy up in a powerful bear hug, and then he hurled his foe like the guy was nothing more than an oversized bowling pin.
Inhuman strength.
Almost surreal in nature.
Two hundred pounds of the first guy hit the second guy in the chest and knocked him off-balance. He didn’t go all the way down, but he lost his footing, and by the time he righted himself the newcomer was right there in his face.
Six foot three.
Well over two hundred pounds.
Short, thick brown hair.
A weathered, handsome face with a jaw like steel and eyes like ice.
Jason King head butted the second guy in the face, breaking the man’s orbital bone with his own forehead.
The second guy collapsed back against the bungalow wall, in too much pain to think.
The first guy was unarmed and pale, his shooting arm mangled beyond repair.
King kicked him in the groin and threw him head-first into the same wall, where he slumped down alongside his colleague.
Through a haze of semi-consciousness, the second man felt fear like nothing he’d ever experienced before. It was a deep, guttural, primal sensation. He already couldn’t see out of one eye. He couldn’t feel the left half of his face. But the physical pain wasn’t what bothered him. It was that King hadn’t shot them on sight. He’d beaten them down like they were made of glass.
He’d kept them alive.
To decide their fate when he had time to deduce what had happened.
Through a mask of agony, the second man watched King approach the bed, labouring slowly across the dark room like a golem. He stood quiet for what seemed like hours, staring down at the body on the mattress. Pure emotion bristled in the air. The atmosphere crackled. The second guy opened his mouth to apologise, to say something — anything.
But what the hell was he going to say?
So he sat there, wallowing in pain as the left half of his face swelled like a pumpkin, mute and forlorn. His colleague sat alongside him, in an equal amount of pain, feeling an equal amount of regret.
Finally, Jason King turned around to face them.
There was a look in his eyes that neither of them had thought physically possible.
They didn’t know one man could possess so much rage.
King advanced toward them.
Part I
1
Budapest
Hungary
Present day…
‘Do you understand who my husband is?’ the woman hissed under her breath, her voice low.
Trying to keep the conversation hushed.
But, seated next to her, Will Slater heard every word.
He was in a ruin bar, surrounded by artistic disrepair, silently savouring the aesthetic. The Budapest staple appealed to him. It was a battered, broken shell of a room. It had been converted from a rundown and vandalised office space, but most of the destruction dished out to the commercial premises had been left as is. Instead of cleaning up, the new owners had worked around it, adding bright colours and tables and chairs and a long wooden countertop. It was gritty and unfiltered and suited him just fine.
He could appreciate anything that thrived in a state of ruin.
Atypically, he was as far from ruin as he’d been in quite some time.
After a harrowing stretch in Zimbabwe a few months earlier, he’d come away sporting a surprising lack of permanent injuries. His shoulder, chest, and sternum had healed promptly, no thanks to a generous dose of controversial stem cell therapy in a clinic he frequented on the outskirts of Tijuana.
It was illegal in mainland America, but Mexico provided guaranteed anonymity.
He was feeling fresh within ten days. Then he’d plunged into an exercise regime with a sickening level of dedication. He didn’t know why. If he had to pinpoint a reason, he might ruminate that his life seemed to ebb and flow with every incident he got involved in.
And it seemed to move in a cycle.
There was a short burst of pain and war, followed by an extended period of downtime. He was learning to recognise the downtime for what it was and take advantage of it. He’d spent the past two months bettering himself in every way imaginable, even though there was little to improve upon in the first place.
And, somehow, he’d kept himself out of trouble along the way.
But then the woman next to him raised her voice in heavily accented English, and a dark premonition in the primal part of his brain told him the downtime was over. Her lithe figure was clad in an expensive black dress that ended halfway up her thighs. She wore knee-high boots and her straight black hair hung like a stage curtain over the back of her neck. He figured she was in her early forties. She was with a friend who looked awfully similar — tall, dark, sly — and they were embroiled in an argument with an unruly big guy on the other side of the line-up.
The new guy had a friend, too.
Two on two.
The women had been quiet and subdued until the conversation took a turn. The men were loud and drunk, as they had been for most of the last ten minutes. And then there was Slater, stewing silently on his own, as he always did.
He gulped down the last mouthful of the Old-Fashioned in his hand and gently placed the empty tumbler back on the bar’s countertop. He looked at the bartender, who looked right back at him. Asking a question, and getting an answer from the level of detail in the guy’s eyes.
Don’t get involved, the bartender was silently telling him.
Slater swivelled on the stool and got involved.
The women were in a neat line, shoulder to shoulder along the bar, stomachs pressed to the countertop, facing directly forward. The age-old leave-me-alone pose. The men had started that way, opting to fire catcalls across the bar, but the guy furthest away had drifted over to get closer to them. Now they formed a rudimentary right-angle.
Slater leant away from the bar, so they could see him sitting there. All two hundred and ten pounds of him. He’d packed on muscle like nobody’s business during this particular stretch of downtime. Usually sitting at one-ninety, he’d converted an extended calorie surplus into a near hundred pound increase in all his usual compound lifts. He rested a bulging forearm on his knee and stared directly at the two guys.
They were in their thirties, European, big, muscular, pumped full of testosterone. They must have come expecting a conquest, and it was getting late. Therefore they were getting desperate.
They needed some action.
Slater figured he’d give them some.
He didn’t blink. He just kept looking at them until they noticed him. He had enough life experience to know how to antagonise. If they could hand out master’s degrees in the practice, he would have received his ten years ago.
They noticed him.
They both stared at him, and then one of them looked away, anticipating that Slater would back down from his confrontational stance.
He didn’t.
Then they both really stared at him.
The bigger guy said, ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’
Like reading from a B-movie script.
Both women spun, and Slater made eye contact with them for the first time. They could have been twins. They both had black eyeliner piled on thick, which made their green eyes striking. They were tanned. But on top of all that, they looked dangerous. Maybe not to the common observer. But Slater could see a menacing spark in both their eyes.
And suddenly he thought he might have interpreted the bartender’s look the wrong way.
It was always, Don’t get involved.
But it might have been because of who the women were, not the men…
But now he was involved. And he’d enraged the two perverts. Which meant none of this was going to end politely.
Although he didn’t exactly feel like wasting his energy in a barroom brawl.
So he changed the direction of the script. The following conversation was supposed to hit all the prerequisite beats. Slater had seen it a thousand times before.
What the fuck are you looking at?
You.
Going to do something about it?
Maybe. Why don’t you come over here and find out?
This is your last chance to leave. Beat it.
I’m staying right here.
Well, okay then…
It had a purpose in traditional bar fights. There had to be some kind of feeling-out process. You didn’t see someone staring at you and instantly hit them in the face. There had to be that vital delay where you could size them up, read into their responses, try to discern how nervous they were, all the while injecting confidence into yourself in preparation for that first big swing.
But none of that happened.
Because as soon as the first guy said, ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’ Slater flew off the stool like he’d been electrocuted, and before either of them could blink he was in front of the guy with one hand wrapped around the back of his neck. Which didn’t have to be taken as a dire physical threat at first. Men did it in bars all the time to establish dominance. Clasp a palm around the back of the neck and pull them in close.
But Slater didn’t pull forward. He flexed his forearm and used tremendous grip strength to pull the guy’s head down, and there was nothing the man could do to resist it. Then Slater hit him in the gut with a short uppercut, but he used the bulk of the guy’s frame to mask the punch from the rest of the bar, so the altercation wasn’t visible.
Then Slater stepped away, as fast as he’d darted into range, and he relaxed, diffusing the tension.
The guy he’d hit in the stomach threw up all over the bar’s countertop, his insides spasming violently from the force behind the blow.
Then he slumped onto the nearest stool and continued to dry heave.
Embarrassed and going pale, his friend shook his head in resignation and hauled the guy away from the bar, muttering a half-hearted apology to the bartender. There was a brief moment of tension — he looked at Slater and considered seeking revenge.
But he’d been right there. He’d seen how hard Slater hit his friend. It probably hadn’t even looked real.
Then the first guy threw up again, all over himself, and that sealed the decision.
The second guy opted not to risk any further embarrassment by lingering around in the contents of his friend’s stomach. He looped his hands under the man’s armpits and dragged him toward the exit.
The first guy retched again.
The second guy quickened his pace.
And then they were gone.
Slater sat back down on his stool and grimaced as he surveyed the puke littered across the countertop.
The bartender shot him a dark look and said, ‘Thanks for that.’
Slater feigned ignorance. ‘For what?’
‘You didn’t need to do that.’
‘But I did.’
Then one of the women piped up, and in a scornful tone she said, ‘You really didn’t need to do that.’
Slater said, ‘And yet, here I am.’
2
The dark-haired woman said, ‘Who are you?’
Slater said, ‘An accountant.’
‘No you’re not.’
‘Then you can narrow it down yourself, can’t you?’
‘If you’re the competition, you could get me in a lot of trouble for talking to you. That’s why I’m asking.’
Slater said, ‘What?’
She looked at him, then averted her gaze and said, ‘Never mind. Said too much.’
‘Who’s your husband?’
She raised an eyebrow.
He said, ‘You asked those guys if they understood who your husband was.’
‘That still falls under the category of saying too much, I’m afraid.’
But her actions belied her words, because she sure as shit wasn’t going anywhere. In fact, she was tilting herself toward Slater to make the conversation a little easier.
The opposite of the age-old leave-me-alone pose.
There was unrest all around them. The bartender circled around the bar with a mountain of cloths and rags in one hand, and a mop in the other. The fetid stink of the vomit began floating across the space, driving patrons to the other ends of the room. Surprisingly, though, no-one had vacated the premises in a hurry. This was Budapest, and people had paid good money for their drinks. A light scuffle at one end of the room wasn’t going to deter them.
But the bartender shot daggers at Slater as he set to work cleaning up the mess, so Slater deemed it prudent to move the conversation elsewhere.
He gestured to an unoccupied booth skewered into the corner of the far wall.
He lifted an eyebrow.
Wordless.
The women looked at each other, shrugged to themselves, and nodded in unison.
He slid off the stool and made an after you gesture. As they stepped away from the countertop, Slater passed a twenty-euro note to the bartender.
‘Sorry about all that,’ he mumbled.
‘Watch yourself,’ the bartender muttered back, flashing a pointed glance at the two black-clad women.
Slater said, ‘I can take care of myself.’
He followed them toward the booth and sat down across from them. He hadn’t a clue where the conversation might lead, but that was the nature of his life.
Venture boldly into the unknown and see what awaits.
‘I’m not the competition,’ he said. ‘My name’s Will Slater.’
‘Is that supposed to mean something?’ the first woman said.
The second woman had yet to say a word.
‘It’s just my name,’ he said. ‘I assume you’ve both got them too.’
The first woman said, ‘Camilla.’
The second woman said, ‘Dani.’
Slater looked at Dani and said, ‘You speak.’
‘Not often,’ Dani said, but she managed the hint of a smile.
‘I’m usually the one that does all the talking,’ Camilla said. ‘And I’m not about to break that trend, I’m afraid. Might I ask why you’re sitting across from us right now?’
Dani mumbled, ‘He’s oblivious.’
‘Evidently,’ Camilla said.
Dani said in her trademark low tone, ‘He’s making a mistake.’
‘Obviously,’ Camilla said.
Slater shrugged. ‘I make mistakes all the time. It hasn’t caught up to me yet.’
