Free Cover of Night by Linda Howard Page A

information he’d spent the last couple of hours compiling. “This is everything I’ve got on the guy.”
    Hugh spent a long time looking at the photo Bandini had provided, committing Layton’s face to memory. Then he read over Layton’s background, education, everything Yuell had been able to find above and beyond the dryness of numbers. Watching his face, Yuell saw Hugh come to the same conclusion he himself had reached. “In over his head,” Hugh finally said, “but not stupid.”
    “That’s what I think. He charged a room at a bed-and-breakfast in Trail Stop,
Idaho
; now, you have to figure he knows he can be traced by anything he charges on a credit card, right? So why did he do it?”
    Before Hugh could answer, Kennon Goss arrived. There was a cold, unemotional, completely ruthless streak in Goss, though he usually hid it well; he was like a bulldog in accomplishing his assignment. Yuell used Goss when he needed someone to get close to a woman; he was blond and handsome, and something about him caused women to blindly respond to him. Because his looks also made him memorable, Goss had to be doubly alert, doubly agile in eluding suspicion. He made no bones, though, about preferring to have all modern conveniences available for his use. To him, a hotel was a dump if it didn’t have Ethernet connections, twenty-four-hour room service, and a chocolate on his pillow every night.
    Yuell brought Goss up to speed on Jeffrey Layton. Goss bent forward and buried his head in his hands. “Podunk,
Idaho
,” he groaned. “It’ll take us two days to get there. We’ll have to take a wagon train from Seattle.”
    Yuell fought a grin. He’d love to be along for this one, just to watch Goss handle Mother Nature. “You can get closer than Seattle. There are airstrips all over
Idaho
. You’ll have to take a prop job from Boise, probably, but the drive once you’re on the ground shouldn’t be too bad. I’ll arrange something with four-wheel drive for you.”
    There was a muffled groan, and Goss pleaded, “Not a pickup truck. I beg you.”
    “I’ll see what I can do.”
      
    While he listened to Yuell delineate the situation and possibilities, Kennon Goss felt satisfaction begin to well as other possibilities occurred to him.
    He hated Yuell Faulkner with every cell in his body, yet for more than ten years he had worked with and for the man, pushing his hatred aside so he could function while he looked and waited for the perfect opportunity. While he waited, he had in many ways become like the man he so hated, an irony that hadn’t escaped him. Over the years his own emotions had withered, and now he was just as cold and unfeeling, capable of snuffing out a human life with no more thought than he would give to stepping on a cockroach.
    He’d known it would be like this, known the price he would pay, but his hatred was so strong he’d considered the cost well worth the result. Nothing had mattered except getting close to Yuell, and biding his time.
    Sixteen years ago, Yuell Faulkner had killed Goss’s father. Goss was under no illusions now about the type of man his father had been; he’d been a hired killer, just like Faulkner, just like Goss himself. But there had been something electric about him, something bigger than life. A complicated man, his father; on the one hand he had been a loving husband, a stern but just parent—while on the other, he killed people. In some way his father had separated that in his mind and life, a way that Goss himself hadn’t been able to manage.
    His father had worked for Faulkner for a little over three years. All Goss had been able to find out, and that only after he himself had connected with Faulkner and joined his stable of killers, was that Faulkner had decided Goss’s father was a weak link, somehow—so he had executed him. What had triggered the action was something Faulkner kept to himself.
    To Yuell Faulkner, it had been a business decision. To Goss, it had been