Free Double Play by Kelley Armstrong Page B

around. Everything seemed quiet, but that didn’t mean shit. He started in the direction of the GPS signal, his own phone out, using a tracker Felix had installed remotely. Evelyn followed. They were about five hundred feet out from the signal now.
    They’d barely gone another dozen paces before voices floated over, men speaking Spanish. Evelyn tried to catch his eye, but he ignored her. The men weren’t whispering so it wasn’t a trap. Maybe they’d come back for Nadia’s missing cell phone. Or a missing comrade she’d killed. Trap or not, Jack would still approach with care.
    He covered half the distance to the voices. He’d picked up some Spanish over the years—couldn’t really avoid it, living in the States—but fuck, it wasn’t like he’d studied it or anything. He wasn’t like Nadia, who learned new things just because she found them interesting. While he was more likely to pick up a novel than turn on the TV, he’d never been good at school. He’d dropped out to become a mechanic. That’s what he was good at—figuring out stuff like engines. Or how to kill people without them knowing they were about to be killed.
    From what he could pick up, the men were hunting for something or someone, which he’d already guessed. He looked at Evelyn. She knew more Spanish, but she was frowning, head tilted, and he suspected it wasn’t so much a language barrier as the fact she couldn’t hear the voices as well as he could. She was too vain to wear a hearing aid until her doctor recommended one. Which meant she got along fine in day-to-day conversation. But ask her to decipher one a few hundred feet away and she struggled.
    Jack hunkered down. Evelyn motioned to say she wanted to get closer. He raised his hand, telling her to hold on. He picked apart the voices and the sounds of movement. Two men talking. What sounded like a third searching without adding to the dialogue.
    He lifted three fingers and then pointed in each direction. Moving to the side, he scanned the best view of the playing field. Then he indicated a route they’d take. Evelyn didn’t argue, which was as sure a sign as any that she needed to rely on him to hear from this distance.
    Jack aimed for the silent guy first. When he drew close enough, he motioned for Evelyn to continue toward the other two, in hopes she’d overhear their conversation better, though he knew not to say so. Pointing out Evelyn’s weaknesses was like intentionally stepping on a tiger’s tail.
    He slipped through the woods until he could see the third man. It was a young guy, maybe mid-twenties. Not Hispanic, which may have explained why he wasn’t joining the conversation—most likely local hired help, not considered a real part of the team. He was clearly hunting for something, doubled over and pulling back shrubs and undergrowth. Paying absolutely no attention to his surrounding. That preoccupation meant Jack could get within ten feet. He lined up his shot and put a bullet through the back of the guy’s head, dropping him to the ground with a thump no louder than the suppressed shot. His two comrades continued talking, oblivious.
    Jack pulled brush over the dead man’s head to hide his light hair. As for the guy himself, the only thought Jack spared him was to wonder, for a moment, whether he
ought
to spare him a thought. Whether Nadia would. You couldn’t be a philosopher in this job. Or much of a humanist, for that matter. Only now that he was with Nadia did he pause to contemplate what
she’d
think. Because that was still the only criterion that mattered. Not whether it was right or wrong, but whether it might bother her. This wouldn’t. Yeah, the guy was young, but he wasn’t a child. He knew what he was getting into, and if he didn’t believe it could cost him his life, that was just stupidity. No cure for that.
    Jack remembered the first time he’d really understood the risks himself. He’d been sixteen when the group recruited him, and all he’d