Page 90 of Lone Wolf

Joey’s teeth pinched her lower lip as she eased a fresh nylon over her foot, guiding it up her ankle, the bump of her calf.

“A few trails led to dead ends in the dark web,” Melinda said. “Fortunately I have an employee who spelunks in there full-time—it’s useful for forgeries, stolen art. He managed to trace some of her activity to a site for contract killers. She’s not bitten in a while.”

Joey slid off the table, wiggled the pantyhose up over her knees, gestured for Evan to turn away. He abided.

Evan asked Melinda, “Do you have any info on her last job? The one before she took out Dr. Hill?”

Joey pulled herself upright, tapped his shoulder, threw her arms up in triumph. “Wa-la!”

He had to concede she looked stunning, black-brown hair tumbling across her undercut, wide smile dimpling the right cheek, tiny emerald nose stud drawing out her eyes, metal-fiber bracelet joined by two magnetized stainless-steel skulls, classic round-cut diamond solitaire pendant resting against her rich brown skin, and the Joeyest pièce de résistance, scuffed Doc Martens into which she’d shoved her elegantly stockinged legs.

His eyes caught on her and she saw them catch and her smile grew wider and he gave her a thumbs-up and turned quickly away before the intimacy between them grew more uncomfortable.

“I can’t guarantee it was her last job,” Melinda was saying. “But her last job on here? She was paid in Bitcoin, which I thought was untraceable, but the girl—”

“The girl,” Joey said, her confidence restored, “has a magical Hungarian hacker who’s a blockchain maniac. He sniffed the transaction data, cross-referenced it with KYC information from the crypto exchanges, and identified the wallet owner.”

“Who linked the account to a trust in Wyoming of all places.”

“It’s called a Cowboy Cocktail,” Evan said. “Wyoming’s got the strongest privacy laws in the country, basically zero regulatory oversight. Hide a trust inside a tangle of private companies with concealed ownership and you’re invisible. Even Russians oligarchs and Argentine mobsters have caught on.”

“Well,” Melinda said, “the girl’s Hungarian is digging for more financial data.”

“Any word on who paid Lopatina?”

“Yes,” Melinda said. “We traced the payment to a Las Vegas enterprise.”

“What kind of enterprise?”

“Human trafficking,” Melinda said. “Domestic.”

Evan’s jaw tensed, bringing an ache to his molars. He relaxed it. His thoughts tightened into a hard focus. A sudden calmness descended, the tranquility of purpose.

“I’ll text you the address of their suspected headquarters,” Melinda said. “I’m sure you can get some answers from them.”

“Oh, man,” Joey said, “those poor fuckers.”

42

Any Violent Means Necessary

At first glance, the compound looked like most of the other run-down buildings on the block. Single-level industrial, brown stucco crumbled to reveal cinder block beneath, mission-style roof missing every third tile.

Evan had been observing it through his Steiners for the last hour from the remains of a neighboring attic. The house beneath him had been hollowed out by a fire, the charred wood still holding the chemical reek of meth manufacture. One roof beam had miraculously escaped the blaze intact, giving him a char-free perch.

Michael Way neighborhood, a hotbed of human trafficking, was less than twenty minutes north of the Strip but a world apart. The neon glow of capitalism didn’t reach this hood—no whir and chime of slot machines, no European cars polished to a mirrored gleam, no what-happens-in-Vegas tourists jetting in for designer sushi and thousand-dollar handbags.

Instead: hammered-flat land squared in cookie-cutter blocks, brown lawns and dilapidated concrete, weed-infested lots languishing behind chain link. Boarded storefronts, foreclosed apartments, abandoned buildings turned squat houses. On the drive in, Evan had passed a public school that looked like a Third World prison. North Las Vegas PD’s Northwest Area Command on Washburn, seven miles away, was loaded up with a half dozen units out front and a well-used paddy wagon big enough to round up a medium-size street gang. With violent crime soaring above the national average and despair running even higher, the neighborhood was a great place to hide a human-chattel operation.

The longer Evan watched, the more convinced he became that the compound was mostly impenetrable. The fifteen-foot-high powder-coated steel fence looked ordinary enough, but a closer inspection revealed anti-climb razor spikes, their angles overlapping like shark teeth. The posts were set in concrete, the sturdy gate barred, access granted only via a video call box. A solid metal front door sat at a slight tilt inside a reinforced frame that strained under its weight. When passing headlights illuminated the few high-set windows, they brought internal security bars visible.

Despite the late hour, a steady stream of men carrying briefcases entered, likely delivering end-of-week cash drops. One of them brought a blond woman in her early twenties, gripping her high on the biceps and steering her with a firm hand. The men looked shockingly ordinary—middle-aged guys with brown mustaches, pleated khakis, and polo shirts bulged over hip holsters. Were it not for the guns, they could have been retail salesmen at a home-appliance store. Evan had expected the usual scumfuck stereotypes to apply—scraggly facial hair, tattoos, weaponized hygiene—but the face of this operation was Hannah Arendt–banal.

The only clear roughneck was the gorilla straining a folding chair on the porch and picking his fingernails with a folding knife like an extra in a Charles Bronson movie. No gun on display, not outside, but Evan had glimpsed bigger hardware behind the door when the others had entered. The surveillance drive-by he’d taken had shown an open parking lot in the back with a few empty trucks. High chain-link topped with concertina wire blocked narrow side alleys clogged with trash barrels and nests of rusting HVAC units.

A proper frontal assault would take a good measure of planning, a Tommy Stojack gear-assist, and several days of surveillance.

With Lopatina circling the waters and Jayla Hill under time-limited witness protection, he didn’t have a few days.