Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
"Dunno. Thought I maybe saw a flash when she realized who you were. Old crushes and all that cheesy shit. Where you going?" he asked when I went to go down the hall to my room. "Gonna write some more music about her? Because two albums weren't enough!" he added just as I got to my door.
No one brought up the albums.
I honestly wasn't even sure anyone had thought to look it all up.
There hadn't been a vetting process before letting me into the club, so all my secrets were mine to keep. Not that the albums were a secret at all. They'd done well, actually. They put the band on the map.
They'd also been my undoing.
But that was a story for some other time.
Or never.
Never worked for me just as well.
I preferred my life in two parts.
During the band.
And after the band.
It made everything easier to deal with. Made lost dreams less of a jagged pill to swallow. Made this new life an easier transition without everyone knowing and bringing up all that old shit.
As I walked into my room, though, I felt an old, yet familiar, itching in my fingers. Not just to play. I played music all the time. But never my own. Always someone else's thoughts and ideas and feelings. I stopped writing my own music ages ago. But right then, my fingers were itching to get on my guitar, to grab a notebook and start writing things down.
I was choosing not to think too hard on why, for the first time in many, many years, words and music were finally coming back to me.
Because I was pretty sure I would find the common denominator if I did the math.
And that the answer was one that would complicate the fuck out of everything.
Seven
Ferryn - Present Day
I didn't intend to leave.
I mean, at least not so soon after getting back to Navesink Bank, not before I at least made contact with my parents and siblings.
The nature of my job was that when you got the call, you had to pounce.
Lifelong criminals get to be lifelong criminals because they are good at what they do. Because they are smart.
Stupid criminals end up behind bars or in shallow graves.
So if you were a smart criminal, you knew that keeping the same home base for any length of time was a surefire way to have shit trace back to you. What does your fellow neighborhood criminal do to prevent getting traced? They moved. They moved frequently.
If your plan was to try to get to one of these types of criminals, you had to be flexible with your time. You had to pounce when you finally got a pin in them. Because, chances were, if you missed the opportunity, you would never be able to find them again.
I had to go.
It was that simple.
This was an operation I had on my radar for over a year, had been turning over every rock to try to find their slimy asses. With no luck. Not even a trail of breadcrumbs.
And, well, when this mission was all that your life was based around, you didn't just shrug it off and keep on sitting in some old apartment trying not to overthink the way your girlhood crush still managed to get a rise out of you when no one else was capable of such a feat.
You had to go.
You had to do what you do.
In my case, that meant I had to drive across two states, throw on a baggy shirt, slap a hat on my head, and once again impersonate some guy looking for a 'good time.'
I couldn't even think that phrase without grimacing. I wasn't sure how it wasn't a dead giveaway that I wasn't an actual, real client when they opened the doors to me.
But, well, scumbags tended to think all other men are scumbags, didn't they? That because they had sick, sadistic fantasies, that all men were like them.
I couldn't even be too mad about it because it worked in my favor.
I took a deep breath as I walked down the wood-paneled walls, breathing in smoke and pot and cheap beer, things so familiar that I barely registered them anymore.
It was a slow night.
I liked slow nights.
Especially now.
Especially because I was completely on my own.
It wasn't unheard of. Holden knew this was my path in life. And I understood that it wasn't his. We still did big jobs together when we came across them, but most of the smaller ones were just me on my own.
I simply had to hope that the nights I got there were slow. Because no matter how good I got, no matter how sharp a weapon I had made myself become, there were some odds that were not only not in your favor, but impossible to accomplish.