Bowles and his partner hadn't been the instigators, though; they were middlemen, the ones responsible for tasking Oxford, for directing him at some other's request to clean up the mess that Alena and I had become. But Oxford had become a liability to them. In the end, Scott and I had persuaded Bowles and his partner to cut their losses. We'd watched Bowles make a four-second telephone call that terminated Oxford's contract, firing the assassin with all the ceremony and care of ordering take-out.

Oxford hadn't liked that. He'd liked that I'd stolen most of the money he'd made from two decades of killing people even less.

That was when he'd begun murdering anyone who'd ever had the misfortune of calling themselves my friend.

He'd killed Scott in Madison Square Park while I was close enough to see it and too far away to stop it. Scott had died in my arms while Oxford had fled, unnoticed and unmolested. The irony of that-if there was an irony to be found-was that I was now wanted for Scott's murder, for the murder of a federal agent.

There were ways out from beneath the charge, of course. Most obviously, I could just turn myself in to the authorities and confess the whole story of everything that had transpired. It could probably work. Until I'd disappeared to Bequia with Alena, I'd had a good reputation in the New York security community; I'd had some respect and even a modicum of brief fame. With a strong lawyer and a little good faith, the truth behind Scott's death would be revealed. At the least, I could be exonerated for the murder of my friend.