“Beautiful, sugar,” he said with a laugh. “It was good stuff.”

“Chavon, did you get sick at all?” Cohen asked. “Fevers or anything like that?”

Chavon shook his head.

“Do you remember where you injected it?” Cohen asked.

Chavon nodded. He reached down and rolled up the sleeve past the crease in the elbow of his cadaverous right arm. Then his eyes went wide in their bony sockets. At the crease, there was a matchbox-sized defect of missing skin. It was crusted at the edges with dried blood and pus, and a black scab had hardened over it, which looked as if it might slough off at any moment. “I thought it was just the coke. I’ve had the same kind of thing before when I missed the vein.” He looked up from the suppurating wound. “But you know what, doll? I’ve been doing this a while.” He stared right into Cohen’s eyes. “I know I didn’t miss that vein.”

22 - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

22

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Dennis Tyler was gone. The real Tyler had disappeared four years earlier while sailing off the coast of the Baja California. But the man who until recently had traveled the West Coast posing as a drug dealer, using Tyler’s driver’s license, had also shed Tyler’s borrowed identity. According to his current identification, he was now Wayne Forbes, of Rockford, Illinois.

Like Dennis Tyler before him, the real Wayne Forbes had died at the hand of the man who now carried his ID. Conveniently, many of his previous targets had led shady and secretive lives. When they disappeared, they were not necessarily missed. Accordingly, it was sometimes convenient to borrow their names.

Forbes was delighted to have left Tyler and the assignment attached to his identity behind. A job is a job, he reminded himself. But he was enjoying the current assignment enormously, and staying in focus was easy. Anyone can pull a trigger, but this task was full of nuance and subtlety. It appealed to his creative side.

He sat, for the fourth morning in a row, parked a half block down from the Ukrainian Community Center, savoring a cup of tea. He had one eye on the newspaper and the other on the Center’s entrance, but he could have taken a nap without missing his mark. The man spent exactly one hour working out in the Center’s gym every morning before heading into work. After four days of following the man, Forbes had already learned that he was as predictable as the sunset.

Had the job been a simple termination, the mark’s predictability would have been an advantage. But that was not what his employer had in mind. And for the fee attached to the assignment, Forbes intended to take his time and execute it perfectly.

Opportunity would come. The key was to be prepared when it did.