Page 137 of The Grave Artist

Worse, they were a show of weakness.

And in his real-life world too. This had always been the case for Tristan Kane. He spoke the truth and too bad if nobody liked it.

The meat, it’s too salty. Your cooking sucks.

The dress, it’s too tight. And yes, it makes your ass look big.

The sex was okay until you started faking your orgasms. Better for me if you just lie there and shut up.

I’m smarter than Dave Crenshaw, but he got an A. I know you’re the teacher, but you’re fucking him, aren’t you?

The list of Kane’s blunt observations was endless. And accurate.

Just like pulling the trigger in first-person shooters, Kane had spewed rapid-fire facts and destroyed with words people who were, to him, no different from faceless, expendable non-player characters in the games.

This philosophy informed him to his soul.

His skills took him into the world of computers and once there his outlook stood him in good stead. Unbound by propriety or the law or morality, he fell into hacking. At first for the fun of it.

Then for profit.

Setting up shop in the dark web, making a name for himself as a hired gun.

He liked that phrase. And chose handles to reflect it.

Hired gun . . .

A few years ago his online nick was “Ironsights,” as in the notch and blade atop a rifle barrel. Then, more recently, he was “FeAR-15,” a triple win, as it contained not only the name of the famed assault rifle, but also the word “Fear” and letters “Fe,” the atomic symbol for iron, from which the first firearms were made.

And now, of course, “DR-one,” the quiet deadly weapon of choice on today’s battlefields (plus the twisted experimenting MD).

Whether he was hired to hack banks or crypto accounts, or to track down an elusive whistleblower a company wanted dead, he did the job efficiently, on time and with virtually no risk to his clients. Smooth sailing.

Until Jacoby Heron.

And so the real-life, blood-and-guts FPS game between the two continued. He had once thought of Heron as a thorn in his side, but that wasn’t right. The man was far more dangerous. He was like one of those bullets he had once helped someone buy on the dark web—they contained a small charge of explosive.

How does it feel to kill ...

A beeping came from Kane’s smallest laptop. It was a soft sound but, to him, it blared like a Klaxon. He slid the rolling chair toward it and squinted. He was looking at seven windows on the screen, each depicting a security camera covering the front and interior of Damon Garr’s house.

Well, shit.

Homeland Security Investigations and LAPD SWAT were moving up the front walkway and through the back garden.

No! Kane raged. How the hell had they found the man’s identity?

And how would this affect his own reason for his involvement here in Southern California: to gain access to—yes, to intrude upon—Jake Heron and kill him?

Then he calmed and thought: Strategy?

The officers, armed with guns very much like the fictional Bullpups, were moving slowly, suspecting either armed resistance or a booby trap, neither of which was a threat.

He picked up one of his burners and sent a text to Garr, explaining his house in Malibu was compromised.

The man immediately texted back, the sloppy keyboarding suggesting utter panic, but Kane paid no attention. He could waste notime. He normally would have chained together proxies, but the officers were minutes away from breaching the door and searching the house. He began sending signals that wiped the information in Garr’s hard drives and in the cloud. People think you hit the delete button and data on your computer disappears. But that’s not the case. The data itself remains. Awipingprogram, on the other hand, does what a demolition company does in taking apart a house: dismantles the structure, board by board, before turning it into unidentifiable splinters.

Unfortunately, since that takes time, Kane would not be able to shred all Damon’s data, but he would have the chance to destroy anything related tohimself.