Chapter 1

As Lawton reached the outskirts of Chicago, he mentally reviewed his preparations for the job. Though he owned two cars, he left his flashy Mercedes at home in St. Louis, and instead was driving his non-descript Ford sedan. The license plates that normally went with the Ford were in the trunk. About an hour after leaving St. Louis, he had pulled off the road, removed the original plates and mounted a set of fake plates. If a cop happened to run the fake plates, they would come up in their database as legitimate, and show that they were registered to Charles Phillips. Which was the name on his fake driver’s license, with an address in Boston. If a cop were to run his driver’s license, it too would show up as legitimate in their database. In reality the chances of being pulled over were almost nil. When Lawton was on a job, he followed the speed limit religiously.

Lawton was a very careful man. Being careful was how he was able to continue his successful career as an assassin. He’d started as a youth in a couple of different criminal gangs, and he learned quickly that small jobs made small money. The real money was in murder. At 32, he started his career as a gun for hire. Now 42, he was at the top of his game.

He used the dark web to prepare extensively for each job. It would start when he would be contacted for a job. He would get a message through the dark web from someone, usually anonymous, that wanted someone killed. Lawton would research the potential target before accepting the job. He always had his client send him everything he knew about the target. Lawton generally stuck to criminal rivals. Criminal rivals usually had a treasure trove of information about each other. Lawton had a reputation on the dark web of someone who always succeeded in the hit, and always protected his client’s identity. That was often very attractive to someone who wanted a criminal rival to be suddenly dead. Lawton’s fee was one million dollars, paid to his account in the Bahamas. No one ever failed to pay after the job. Two reasons. One, they might want Lawton’s services again. Two, no one wanted an assassin with Lawton’s reputation coming after them to collect a debt.

Lawton never took a job to kill a political figure or anyone in law enforcement. If a criminal died, even violently, the law didn’t look very hard for the killer. But killing someone in politics or the law would garner more attention than Lawton wanted. In the case of this job, Lawton was after Salvadore Infante, an old time Chicago mob boss who his new client wanted out of the way.

Lawton had selected St. Louis as his home several years ago. It was nearly in the center of the contiguous United States. That meant that wherever the job was, he could drive to it in a day or two. That allowed him to avoid flying with all of the security that was at airports these days. He especially wanted to avoid facial recognition technology, which was showing up in more and more airports. He had a Post Office Box that he had only been to once, when he set it up. He had used a fake name, which was easy enough as the Post Office workers don’t ask for ID when renting a box. He had a source on the dark web for fake licenses, credit cards and whatever documents he needed for the job at hand. The usual job cost $10,000. That was a lot, but the documents were always perfect. His source would prepare them, hack into the necessary databases to back them up, and mail them to Lawton’s PO Box. Lawton didn’t pick them up himself. When he knew that he had been mailed a new set, he would drive to a home improvement center looking for day laborers. He would easily find someone who was happy to make a quick hundred bucks. He would drop him off near the post office and observe him from a safe distance. As the laborer picked up the package and walked to the intersection that they had agreed on, Lawton would look to see if anyone was following him. Only when he was sure that the laborer was unobserved would Lawton go to the pickup point. The laborer would give him the package and his PO Box key, Lawton would give him five twenties and they would part company. Careful.

Lawton had a reservation in Chicago at a mid-priced hotel. He had selected it as close to the hotel where Fuente would be, and close to a nightclub that he would go to tonight. That’s where he would indulge himself. Lawton avoided personal relationships in St. Louis. In his line of work, he didn’t want anyone getting close enough to ask difficult questions about what he did. So, when he had a job, he would go to a nightclub where he was likely to pick up a girl for sex. Not just any girl, though. A fat one. That was Lawton’s preference, kink, indulgence or whatever. He liked girls that were at least fifty pounds overweight. In the US where there was an obesity epidemic, there were lots of them. He almost always found a nice fat one that wanted to take him home for the night.