DYLAN.
She was sound asleep anyways so I could safely call her "My Kiera" without getting an eye roll in return. My Kiera was tucked in bed, peacefully breathing under the covers, when I turned out the lampshade and escaped to the one place where life secrets were hidden. If one document in that room got mislaid, I was dead. No wonder it was called a dead room.
Mitchell got in touch with me this evening as Joanne was a little bit on the cozy side. He'd dug up old dirt about Kiera. After three months. The girl pretty went off air, for sure. No social media handles, the TV show she was participating in had forgotten all about her, she was dead to the world. And then there were trails of message threads. Long, threatening, would make ice crawl in anyone's bones. All of them involved her and just one person: Nicholas Stoner.
My mouth went dry as warm air rushed over the tip of my tongue. Nick's buddies formed a strong chain around Estonia, Northwest Europe, Columbia, and Brazil. He was the drug lord of the underworld, half-American, half-Italian, with a cold calculating approach to deals that kept him out of prison. Nick knew the key ports all around the world, which exact officer to bribe with no less than one hundred dollars, the old rookie who just wanted his own kilo of heroin. Nick had been in the radar of the American government for fifteen years, probably before he had underarm hair.
Before Interpol found eighteen bricks of cocaine stashed in his house, he controlled the world's best organized crime gang with it's heart in Reggio. After that, he was still the best, most armed, most dangerous. How did Kiera get involved with him?
Mitchell attached links to his Instagram pages, underground safe houses, bugged conversations behind locked doors and between puffs of cigars. There was this calm and modulated edge to his voice that put me at the edge of my seat. They received drug shipments from Columbia and passed them to Latin America through Ivory Coast, where the security was always loose. Nick worked well with his barons, they sold the king of hard drugs__ fentanyl. In its purest form pressed inside fake heroin pills.
His picture. Mitchell was a skilled techie. No cap. The real Nick had his hands casually tucked inside nude pants, tattooed muscular arms and piercings and real diamond studs running from his upper to lower earlobes and a kinky nose hoop. Last seen at Texas Roadhouse.
Hungry for more, I listened to the past phone calls between Kiera and Nick and cried a tear. He threatened her, bullied her tiny voice into submission, pulled the "I own you" card whenever she misbehaved. She was his concubine while on the TV show, before love screwed things up and they started living together, fucking together, doing meth together.
The reports shook me to the cores. Files of lawsuits lay at the bottom of the emails, every single one of them was a case of the State versus Nicholas. All of them, filed by Kiera Matthews for rape, assault and battery. All of them, made it to the County court, rotated around the judges there and died there. The girl had suffered a lot.
In the last email, Mitchell added a kissing emoji and goo-goo eyes and dropped a comment about me finally finding "the one". He said I should take care of Kiera else he'd bust my ass himself. The bastard.
To: Mitchell Pilsen
From: Dylan Sanders
Date: Saturday, September 9, 2017
23:15:06 AST
One more thing... Every hero has a weakness. I need you to find out Nick's.
I hit the send button.
His reply flew into my inbox.
To: Dylan Sanders
From: Mitchell Pilsen
Date: Saturday, September 9, 2017
23:15:24 AST
Kiera.
I sat transfixed before the computer screen, staring meaninglessly at a thousand mails that proved beyond reasonable doubt, that Nick was the worst nightmare of the lady that was asleep in my bed upstairs.
There had to be another way. I would hunt Nick down ... Myself. And when that happened, Nicky boy wouldn't know what hit him. I would be the marksman, he the prey. Set the date, folks.
Rubbing my hands in devilish pleasure, I unwrapped the little package Mitchell had slipped amidst the files, so small that an outsider wouldn't suspect anything was there. I inserted a Sim card inside the Q-bug, hid it behind Kiki's dresser, sent a text to the device to let it know that I was it's owner. From now on, it answered to no one but me.
From now on, Kiera was under my watch.