Free Cover of Night by Linda Howard Page B

the destruction of his life. His mother had been devastated by her husband’s murder; on the day Goss returned to his college classes, a week after the funeral, she swallowed a bottle of pills. Goss had found her body when he got home that afternoon.
    Something in him, something human, had died when he stood in the kitchen doorway and saw his mother’s body on the floor. Coming so brutally close on the heels of his father’s murder, losing her, too, had pushed him to the wall.
    He’d been nineteen, too old to go into the foster system. He dropped out of college, walked away from the suburban house that he never wanted to reenter, and wandered. He supposed the house had long since been sold for back taxes. He didn’t care, had never gone back, had never driven by out of curiosity to see if someone else lived there now or if it had been torn down to make room for a service station or something.
    After about a year, the idea of revenge, which had bubbled on the edge of his consciousness since his father’s murder, began to firm and take shape. Until then he’d been too numb to plan, to have a direction, but now his life once again had a purpose—and that purpose was death. Yuell Faulkner’s death, to be precise—though for a long time he hadn’t had a name for his father’s killer—and if it meant his own death, too, Goss didn’t worry about that.
    First, though, he’d had to reinvent himself. The boy he’d been, Ryan Ferris, had to die. Figuring out how to accomplish that was easy. He looked for a street kid, an addict, roughly his height and age, and stalked him; when he saw his chance, he jumped the guy from behind and knocked him out, then beat the hell out of his face before killing him. He put his own identification on the body, dumped it in a neighborhood where the corpse wasn’t likely to be robbed, and took off for another part of the country.
    He knew, with that first killing, that he’d crossed a line he would never be able to step back over. He was on his way to becoming what he hated.
    Send a thief to catch a thief. To deal with death, he had to become death himself.
    Building his new identity took time and money. He didn’t immediately return to Chicago and try to find his father’s killer. He established the new self, Kennon Goss, with multiple layers of certification. He ruthlessly pushed aside his own identity and became Kennon Goss, not only to others but to himself.
    By the time he returned to Chicago, not even the FBI could have proven he was anyone other than who he said he was.
    Finding out who had been behind a murder over five years old hadn’t been easy. No one had fingered Yuell. Finding out his father had been a hired killer had been yet another shock to a psyche already battered beyond recovery, but it gave him a direction. From there, he was able to find out that his father had worked for a man named Faulkner, and it had seemed to Goss that maybe the best way to find out what his father had been involved in would be from the inside of Faulkner’s organization.
    He’d managed to bring himself to Faulkner’s attention, because he was too streetwise to just walk in and ask for a job. Let Faulkner approach him.
    Once on the inside, Goss had done his job and taken care not to screw up. Over time he had earned trust, not just from Faulkner but from the other men who worked for him. It was Hugh Toxtel, who had worked for Faulkner the longest, who had given him the piece of information he wanted. It had been more in the way of some friendly advice: Don’t let a target get to you. Get in, do the job, get out. Don’t listen to some sob story. One guy, Ferris, had let someone soft-soap him and hadn’t done the job, and Faulkner took him out because he’d let his emotions get the best of him and, by letting the target live, established a trail that led back to Faulkner’s company. Not only that, not doing the job was bad for business.
    So Ferris had been disposed of, and Faulkner