Page 20 of Hunt Me, Daddy

CHAPTER 5

Kit

The problem with being right too often was that it made you very unpopular with coincidence.

Most people loved coincidence. They trusted it. They wrapped it around every unexplained little thing in their lives because it was softer than the alternative.

A neighbor parked somewhere different?

Coincidence.

A stranger appeared twice on the same route?

Coincidence.

The security light outside your building finally got fixed after months of sitting dead and useless over the front steps?

Coincidence.

I had never been that generous.

By Friday morning, everything seemed a bit off. It didn’t feel off in a dramatic way. There weren’t any footsteps behind me in an empty alley or black sedans parked under my window with a man smoking behind the wheel. There weren’t any threatening messages slipped under my door, no dead animal on my welcome mat, no Orlov thug grabbing me by the arm and telling me I had been poking around where curious girls didn’t belong.

That would have been almost comforting.

Obvious threats were simpler than that. You could point at them and say, there, that is the thing trying to kill me. Then you could plan accordingly.

This was worse.

This was absence.

The man in the gray coat was gone. I had first clocked him on Tuesday at the café, three tables behind me with no laptop, no book, no meeting, and coffee he ordered but never drank. Mid-thirties. Dark hair. Cheap gray coat. Expensive watch. He looked like every low-level thug ever given a task slightly above his competence level and told to look normal while doing it.

He failed.

Most men like him did.

He came in nine minutes after me on Tuesday, eleven on Wednesday, eight on Thursday. He sat with a bad line of sight on day one, corrected it on day two, and overcorrected on day three. He watched my screen like he could read anything useful from that distance, which he couldn’t, because I was not an amateur and privacy filters were cheap.

I had filed him mentally as Orlov muscle. He wasn’t any smart or important Orlov, maybe a scout, a runner, or even a low-level grunt. Someone sent to confirm whether a woman in a coffee shop was the same woman whose digital fingerprints had been getting too close to Mikhail’s shell network. He had the smell of hired obedience about him, all nervous posture and borrowed purpose.

I had been building a plan to shake him. I wasn’t rushing it though. I wanted to see where he went afterward, who he reported to, whether he followed from the café or only watched from it. I had two routes mapped, three potential choke points, and a bookstore with a rear exit that opened onto a side street where his bad habits would cost him five seconds at minimum.

Five seconds was a lot if you used them properly.

Then Friday came and he was gone. I sat in my usual window seat, laptop open, coffee cooling beside my left hand, and felt less alone than I had when he was there.

That was the part that made my teeth grind.

The café was full of normal morning noise. Steam shrieked from the espresso machine. Someone laughed too loudly at the counter. A baby in a stroller made a sticky little fist around a muffin while his mother looked like she was regretting several life choices in a row. Two finance boys in identical vests said the word ‘leverage’ more than anyone had a moral right to before nine in the morning. Everything looked ordinary.

I distrusted ordinary most when it was trying too hard.

My gaze stayed on my screen. My attention did not. I watched the room through reflections. The dark edge of my laptop display. The glass beside me. The convex shine of the espressomachine. My phone screen when it went black. Every surface was a witness if you knew how to ask it questions.

Gray Coat didn’t appear and no one emerged to take his place.

That should have been good. One less Orlov scout meant one less immediate pressure point. It meant I’d been noticed and then deprioritized, maybe. Or he’d been reassigned. Or he’d been pulled back because someone higher up had decided he was too sloppy.