Free Airtight by David Rosenfelt

was a strange thing to say. “Complicated how?”
    He just shook his head very, very slightly. “He was my friend.”
    I took one of my cards out of my pocket and handed it to him. “Call me if you want to talk about your friend some more.”

 
    Tommy Rhodes considered that night’s job beneath him.
    It wasn’t a big deal, and he certainly wasn’t going to complain about it. He was only thirty-four years old, but he thought of himself as an old-school guy, which meant that you did your job and moved on to the next one.
    Of course, the fact that he was being paid enough money to last him until he was a hundred and thirty-four years old made him even more sanguine about the situation. He was a mercenary, pure and simple, and that was fine with him. As such, it wasn’t his job to strategize; it was his job to accomplish the mission.
    This was an easy assignment. He didn’t really need Frankie Kagan there. Kagan had no experience in these kinds of operations; his talents were more in the areas of guns and knives. In this case he was there to provide protection for Tommy while he worked, though it was extremely unlikely that any problems would arise.
    Tommy was resentful of Frankie’s role as leader of their end of the operation, but he realized that it was Frankie who had the connection, and who brought Tommy in. There might be a time when Tommy would try to move up in the hierarchy, but he would have to be careful; Frankie was very, very dangerous.
    So for now Tommy just focused on the work. The jobs he would be doing would grow progressively harder, and considerably more dangerous, but nothing that Tommy couldn’t handle.
    The toughest part was learning the terrain. His employers were smart enough to go outside the area to recruit, and had done their homework. Tommy was from Vegas, as was Frankie, or at least that’s the place they had been working. So finding their way around upstate New York was not that easy.
    They didn’t want to use a GPS; if it was ever confiscated, the fact that it contained addresses of all of these criminal acts would be rather incriminating. So they did it the old-fashioned way, with a map, which was a bit of a pain in the ass.
    Tommy didn’t really know what was going on, and he didn’t care. He had vaguely assumed that it had something to do with this mining thing, something about natural gas, and the fight that was going on over it. His target tonight confirmed that suspicion, but it really didn’t matter to him either way.
    The house was on a secluded street, which was understating the case. It wasn’t really a street in the normally accepted sense; it was an estate with no other houses within a quarter of a mile. Tommy parked outside the property, and they walked towards where they were told the house would be, though it couldn’t be seen from there.
    It was a long walk, and only when they got close did the lights from the house pierce the total darkness. It was certainly not a hardship for Tommy, who was in extraordinary physical shape, even though he was carrying a bag that weighed the equivalent of two bowling balls.
    The house looked massive, triggering a vague childhood recollection of his parents taking him to Virginia to see where Thomas Jefferson lived. Tommy remembered seeing the slave quarters on the property, and thinking that Jefferson must have been an asshole.
    Lights were on in the house, so Tommy assumed that people were home. He had no idea if Richard Carlton was there or not, and it didn’t matter to Tommy at all.
    The guesthouse was off to the left, and that was where Tommy headed. It was dark and hard to see; the sky was cloudy and moonlight was almost nonexistent. Tommy was sorry that he didn’t bring his night vision glasses, but it wasn’t a big deal either way. He could see well enough to know that he had never lived in a house as nice as this guesthouse.
    But those days were in the past. In six months he’d be living in a palace or, better yet, in a