Dez…

Excerpt: Dez pushed his chair back as far as it could go and still couldn’t fit his legs up onto the seat, much less the dashboard. He’d been sitting outside of Larke’s red brick townhouse, right off the beltway, for the past six hours. Two lights were on—the living area and the upstairs master bedroom—which he knew because he’d had Julien get the floor plans to her place. He’d requested them after Joni had let him know that Larke and her husband had been going through a “rough patch,” and he’d automatically decided the man was an abuser. Nothing had come up to prove it, but he’d kept the information just in case.

He had half a mind to just walk up and knock and the door, but he was sure her husband would have never approved, especially with it nearly a half hour past midnight.

He and Larke had known each other for the better part of five years, most of those of him trying not to salivate over her whenever they ran into each other on his increasingly frequent visits to Joni’s office downtown. She had lush, walnut-brown skin and a cute, short haircut that she wore in a neck length bob. Her deep, brown eyes sparkled like the champagne he wanted to drink off her stomach as he trailed his tongue from her sternum to her bellybutton, and then further south until she erupted on his lips.

But she was married and his life wasn’t conducive to relationships. Families needed stability and no matter how much he desired to have one, it was never going to happen.

He tilted his head towards his watch, but something moving out of the corner of his eye caught his attention. Two large men approached the townhouse, outfitted from head to toe in black, and walked directly up to the front door. With the way the houses were pressed together, lining the street like books on a shelf, even at this hour going up to the door was still bold—unless Larke and her husband were into some nighttime proclivities that none of their associates were privy to.

Dez continued to watch as the men engaged in brief conversation, and then the larger of the two—he put him at about six-six, three hundred pounds—reached into his pocket and stuck a key into the lock. Immediately, Dez reached into the hybrid’s glove compartment for his 45mm. Something about the men was suspicious, and he would never leave Larke’s safety up to a paper-pushing businessman named Kenneth Richmond just because she wore his ring.

The two men pushed their way inside and he exited the hybrid, ran up the walk, and squeezed through the door. He quickly scanned the front room to find everything undisturbed although the light from before had been turned off. As he turned to the stairs to make his way up, he heard a loud thump on the ceiling from the floor above them. Two shots went off, something shattered, and then there was silence.