Still, I looked and listened a moment more, searching for the telltale shape of a half giant or some sort of fire flickering in the shadows. But Jake McAllister wasn’t waiting for me. Daddy was probably bailing him out of jail right now. McAllister would be here sooner or later, though. I’d gotten the better of him, and he knew it. He wouldn’t be satisfied until he’d returned the favor. I hoped he tried. Might alleviate some of the boredom that had settled over me these last two months during my retirement.

For a few minutes, anyway. Guys like Jake McAllister always thought they were tougher than they actually were.

Satisfied the Fire elemental wasn’t going to come gunning for me tonight, I dropped my hand from the cold brick and headed home. I walked three blocks in the drizzling rain, cut through twice as many alleys, and doubled back five times before I was positive no one was following me. Sure, I was a retired assassin, but that didn’t mean there weren’t people out there who didn’t want me dead.

As the Spider, I’d killed my share of powerful men and women over the years, and I wasn’t taking any chances with my safety—retirement or not.

Twenty minutes later, I retrieved my car—a sturdy, silver Benz that I’d recently purchased—from one of the parking garages near the restaurant and headed for Fletcher’s.

Traffic was light on the downtown streets that ringed the Pork Pit. The bankers, businessmen, and other corporate sharks had long since fled the city’s spindly skyscrapers for the comfort of their posh homes in Northtown.

Their secretaries and junior staff lived out in the suburbs that clustered around the heart of the city, while the janitors, maids, and other menial workers made their homes on the rough streets of Southtown.

The city of Ashland spread over three states—Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina. The official borders might have shown it to be one cohesive city, but the area was really divided into two distinct sections—Northtown and Southtown. A holdover from the Civil War days that had just never faded away. The sprawling, circular confines of the downtown area joined the two halves of the city together, but they bore little resemblance to each other. The working poor and blue-collar folks populated Southtown, along with vampire hookers, gangbangers, junkies, and all other manner of rednecks and white trash. Most of them lived in run-down row houses and public housing units that resembled fallout shelters. The Pork Pit lay close to the Southtown border.