A Knife in the Dark
The rain had been falling for three hours straight, long enough to turn the warehouse district into a maze of black mirrors, each puddle holding a fractured piece of sodium light from the streetlamps overhead. Liam Kade moved through it like something the water refused to touch, his boots silent on the cracked asphalt, his coat collar turned up against a chill that had nothing to do with the weather.
He'd been tracking Marcus Denny for six days.
The man was a shipping magnate on paper, a smuggler of arms and worse in practice, and tonight he was supposed to die in the back office of Pier 14's customs warehouse, surrounded by manifests that would never be filed and money that would never be laundered. Liam had planned it with the precision of a surgeon: entry through the loading dock's blind corner, three minutes to cross the yard unseen, ninety seconds to disable the cheap Chinese-made camera system Denny's people had installed to save money they didn't need to save.
He'd done the math. He always did the math. It was the only thing that had kept him breathing for thirty-one years in a business that buried most men by thirty.
The warehouse smelled of salt and diesel and old…
