He tried to tell himself that it had all been necessary, merely part of a mission. He didn’t choose who lived or died. He just carried out the orders of someone with a lot of money. If it wasn’t him collecting that money, it would have merely gone to someone else, and the targets would have been just as dead.

Kruger accepted that argument, understood the ways of the world, the food chain and his place on it. But Idris Madeira kept thinking of the missionaries who had once visited his village and their tales of a place of burning and weeping and eternal torment.

He checked his watch, cursed himself for losing another few minutes, and then removed his tools, laying them out on the dead man’s chest. Four tools in all—a speculum to hold open the eyelids, an evisceration spoon and an enucleation snare for removing the eyeball, and a pair of ratcheting pruning shears for cutting off the thumbs. After examining the tools and planning out the procedure, Kruger picked up the speculum and evisceration spoon and set to work.

Chapter 3

Dominic “Nic” Juliano swerved around a Sunday driver and then used the emergency brake to drift the black Maserati GranTurismo MC Stradale around the corner onto Lead Street. He slowed as he bumped up through the entrance marked with a red sign stating Do Not Enter posted above a white sign that read Reserved Parking—Police Vehicles Only.

He rolled into a spot and looked over at his passenger. She was ignoring him, which was pretty much the standard for LJ these days.

The building in front of them possessed a vaguely Persian flair. Maybe it was the sandstone and the palm trees, but it had always reminded Nic of the Sultan’s Palace from that cartoon, Aladdin.

He shut off the Italian sports car’s engine, and the purring beauty fell silent. He gave the dashboard a pat and a rub and said, “Sleep well, baby.”

LJ rolled her eyes and, in a rapid burst of sign language, used her hands to say, “So, Uncle Nicky, does it make you feel cool to drive my dad’s car around like you just stole it?”

He signed back, “Don’t call me Nicky, and considering that I probably don’t make enough on my SWAT team pay to cover the monthly interest on a car like this … the answer is hell yes. It does make me feel cool. And it’s the only perk I received for taking you in, princess.”

Nic had already stepped from the car before he realized the implications of the words he had just signed to his niece. He growled. He was twenty-eight years old, single, and the only life he had known since he was eighteen was defusing IEDs in the army and kicking in doors as a cop. He didn’t have any business raising a thirteen-year-old girl, especially one who was hearing-impaired.

He dropped his six-feet-four-inch frame back into the cab of the sports car. LJ wouldn’t look at him. Her jaw was set, and her cheeks were wet.