Yeah, well, all the best-laid plans of mice and men, yada, yada, yada . . .

In his first battle with Devina, he’d required some information—and Matthias the Fucker had been the only place to go for it. Naturally, when it came to that bastard, things were strictly quid pro quo, so if you wanted something, you had to give something and the “quo” had been killing Isaac. After all, there were no pink slips for the fired or gold Rolexes for the retired in XOps—you got a bullet in the head and, if you were lucky, maybe a coffin for your corpse.

And yet he was curiously grateful: Being assigned to assassinate the guy was the only way to help him; otherwise there would have been no way to know that Isaac had taken off and was now a hunted man: Jim was the only one who’d been let out free and clear.

But then his situation had put the “by your short hairs” in Matthias’s “extenuating circumstances.”

He stopped in front of a pair of stainless-steel doors marked STAFF ONLY and looked over his shoulder. “Keep your hands to yourself, Adrian.”

God knew the angel seemed willing to fuck anything that moved—which made you wonder if not moving would be a rate-limiting step for him.

With a curse, Adrian went all holier-than-thou. “I only touch if they ask.”

“What a relief.”

“But you know, reanimation is possible.”

“Not tonight it isn’t. And certainly not in this place.”

“Man, you could suck the fun out of a strip club.”

“Pass.”

Ghosting into the large, clinical room, it was damn obvious why horror movies used morgues for settings. Between the green security lighting, the rolling gurneys, and the drains in the floor, the place was the perfect backdrop for a case of the heebs.

Even though he’d died and gone to heaven and all that crap, his adrenal glands still waved its flag well enough. Then again, the twitches were probably less about the other dead guys and more about the fact that he was going to look his own corpse in the face.

As he headed for the massive refrigerator unit, with its rows of cold flats, he knew exactly what he was doing. When he didn’t kill Isaac on schedule, two things were going to happen: Someone else would and somebody would be sent out looking for Jim.

And that was the reason they were here. His old boss was going to want to make sure Jim had bought the farm, so to speak: Matthias didn’t believe in death certificates, autopsy reports, or photographs because he knew all too well how easy it was to fake that kind of documentation. He also didn’t trust funerals, burial sites, or weeping widows and mothers, because he’d substituted too many bodies one for another over the years. Face-to-face verification was the only way to be sure in his book.