Cross

ourselves out,” he said.
    Ms. Goodes answered without turning away from her sobbing friend.
    “Just go. Please don’t come back here. Leave Lisa alone. Go.”

Chapter 55
    THE BUTCHER WAS ON A JOB—a hit, a six-figure one. Among other things, he was trying to keep his mind off of John Maggione and the pain he wanted to cause him. He was observing an older well-dressed man with a young girl draped on his arm. A “bird,” as they had called them here in London at one time.
    He was probably sixty; she could be twenty-five at most. Curious couple.
Eye-catching,
which could be a problem for him.
    The Butcher watched them as they stood in front of the tony Claridges Hotel waiting for the man’s private car to pull up. It did so, just as it had the previous evening and then again around ten o’clock that morning.
    No serious mistakes so far by the couple. Nothing for him to pounce on.
    The driver of the private car was a bodyguard, and he was carrying. He was also decent enough at what he did.
    There was only one problem for the bodyguard—the girl obviously didn’t want him around. She’d tried, unsuccessfully, to have the older man ditch the driver the night before, when they had attended some kind of formal affair at the Saatchi Gallery.
    Well, he would just have to see what developed today. The Butcher pulled out a few cars behind the gleaming black Mercedes CL65. The Merc was fast, more than six hundred horsepower, but a hell of a lot of good that would do them on the crowded streets of London.
    He was a little paranoid about working again, and with pretty good reason, but he’d gotten the job through a solid contact in the Boston area. He trusted the guy, at least as far as he could throw him. And he needed the six-figure payday.
    A possible break finally came on Long Acre near the Covent Garden underground station. The girl jumped out of the car at a stoplight, started to walk off—and the older man got out as well.
    Michael Sullivan pulled over to the curb immediately, and he simply abandoned his car. The rental could never be traced back to him anyway. The move was a classic in that most people wouldn’t even think of doing it, but he couldn’t have cared less about just leaving the car in the middle of London. The car was of no consequence.
    He figured the driver-bodyguard wouldn’t do the same with the two-hundred-thousand-dollar Mercedes, and that he had several minutes before the guy caught up with them again.
    The streets around the Covent Garden Piazza were densely packed with pedestrians, and he could see the couple, their heads bobbing, laughing, probably about their “escape” from the bodyguard. He followed them down James Street. They continued to laugh and talk, with not a care in the world.
    Big, big mistake.
    He could see a glass-roof-covered market up ahead. And a crowd gathered around street performers dressed as white marble statues that only moved when someone threw them a coin.
    Then, suddenly, he was on top of the couple, and it felt right, so he fired the silenced Beretta—two heart shots.
    The girl went down like a throw rug had been pulled out from under her two feet.
    He had no idea who she was, who had wanted her dead or why, and he didn’t care one way or the other.
    “Heart attack! Someone had a heart attack!” he called out as he let the gun drop from his fingertips, turned, and disappeared into the thickening crowd. He headed up Neal Street past a couple of pubs with Victorian exteriors and found his abandoned car right where he left it. What a nice surprise.
    It was safer to stay in London overnight, but then he was on a morning flight back to Washington.
    Easy money
—like always, or at least how it had been for him before the cock-up in Venice, which he still had to deal with in a major way.

Chapter 56
    JOHN AND I MET that night for a little light sparring at the Roxy Gym after my last therapy session. The practice was building steadily, and my days there made me happy and satisfied for the first time in a few years.
    The quaint idea of
normality
was in my head a lot now, though I’m not sure what the word really meant.
    “Get your elbows in,” Sampson said, “before I knock your damn head off.”
    I pulled them in. It didn’t help much, though.
    The big man caught me with a good right jab that stung like only a solid punch can. I swung and connected solidly with his open side, which seemed to hurt my hand more than it hurt him.
    It went on like that for