But Fletcher had said that soon I’d be ready to start doing solo jobs and that these dry runs with him would help me prepare. I didn’t really understand what he was talking about, though. On the few jobs I’d been on so far, all I’d done was stand in the shadows, watch him get close to the target, wait for him to deliver the killing blow, and then leave the scene of the crime with the old man. Not exactly the hands-on method I’d imagined.

But that had all changed tonight.

Fletcher had learned that Delov had sent his giant guards on down to his Miami mansion that afternoon, while his personal staff was at the airport, readying his private plane. Delov was leaving early in the morning to meet with his drug suppliers down in the Keys, and he was the sort who’d want everything picture-perfect for his trip.

Without the usual guards patrolling, it had been child’s play for us to climb over the stone wall that ringed the estate, creep through the woods that surrounded the mansion, and then slip inside the structure. We hadn’t seen a soul, not even Peaches, Delov’s pet Pomeranian. Clear sailing all the way up to the third floor, where his bedroom was.

Only the drug lord hadn’t been sound asleep like he was supposed to have been, given that it was one in the morning. Fletcher and I stood in the shadows that blackened Delov’s bedroom, staring at the enormous, empty bed with its rumpled silk sheets.

“Where is he?” I whispered. “We’ve been watching him for two weeks now. He’s always in bed by this time.”

Fletcher shrugged, but I could see the tension in the tight muscles of his neck and shoulders.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But we have to find him and do this tonight. We won’t be able to get this close to him again this easily.”

Fletcher crept over and put his hand down in the center of the bed. “The mattress is still warm, which means that he’s probably on this floor somewhere. Where do you think he went, Gin?”

The old man was always giving me little pop quizzes like this, always making me put myself in my target’s shoes, always drilling into my head that it was better to think ahead, to plan, to act rather than to react, no matter what situation I was in.