Page 66 of The Grave Artist (Sanchez & Heron #2)

Tristan Kane centered the crosshairs of the gunsight on where he knew the individual would appear from behind a building.

Unaware and vulnerable.

“Come on, come on,” he whispered.

And then the target appeared.

Kane watched Jake Heron scan the parking lot as he stopped walking.

Now . . .

A three-round burst from the Bullpup.

Every round struck its target. Blood spurted and Heron dropped. He twitched once.

And, why not? Kane let loose with another stream.

Now, the figure was still.

Kane, not a smiler, smiled now.

If only it had been real.

In his modest bed-and-breakfast two-roomer not far from Damon Garr’s house, Kane was sitting in front of his Dell Alienware gaming computer with 64 GB RAM and a 24 GB Nvidia graphics card.

The game he was playing was his own version of Grand Theft Auto .

He’d scored the source code and hacked together some script that let him do deepfakes—swapping the faces of the characters in GTA for faces of those he wanted to shoot, bludgeon, stab, burn and blow up.

Jake Heron’s avatar figured in several of his games.

So did Carmen Sanchez’s.

To Tristan Kane, first-person shooter games were one of the finest creations in the history of .

.. well, he was going to say the computer gaming world, but he had to expand that to one of the finest creations ever.

He was too young to have played Maze War , the original Wolfenstein 3D (which put FPSs on the map) or the first Doom .

But at eight or so he jumped on the bandwagon, and lost himself in Homefront , Rainbow Six , Gears of War , Call of Duty , Far Cry . ..

His favorite, though, was Grand Theft Auto , which started as a third-person shooter, but was now a first person.

(And, yes, it was a shooter game but there were adventure and social simulation elements to it as well.) He did more than just kill prostitutes, police officers and passersby.

He was active in the community. The Hawk & Little arms company was traded on the game’s fictional stock exchange.

Kane could have made a million dollars a year on Twitch or another gaming channel, where people (and advertisers) paid talented gamers money while they sat on their asses and manned or womanned joystick and keyboard.

But that would have meant killing only pixels.

If Kane were to make a million dollars it would be from a real job—say, working for a hit man who needed help in breaking through his targets’ security system.

Sipping herbal tea—chamomile—he reflected on what he loved about first-person shooters: they were in perfect harmony with who he had been at a young age. In a shooter game there was no delicacy, no propriety, no coddling.

Through your moves you could unapologetically destroy your opponent. Make them quiver, make them cry.

Make them dead.

And in Mortal Kombat , say, rip out their spines and their beating hearts.

Politeness and, by extension, mercy were a waste of time in the FPS world.

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 no time. 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.

A wiping program, 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 to himself .

Which was all he really cared about anyway.

The bots had been released like hounds after foxes.

As he watched the progress, his anger began to grow once again.

Heron. He had to be behind it. He was the one who had identified Damon—and in doing so took him off the table as a weapon that could have been turned against the intrusionist and his likely girlfriend, Carmen Sanchez.

Thirty minutes later he was watching the police prowl cautiously through the house. He was calm. All the data mentioning him had been wiped.

Now, he could turn his attention to the question of how best to use their captive, Selina. One way would be to—

A voice behind him made his heart slam hard. “You really should have kept pinging the laboratory in Switzerland. But you didn’t, so it had to be misdirection.”

Kane shot to his feet and spun around.

Jake Heron stood in the doorway, lifted his arm and pointed a black device about the size of a stapler at him.

Heron did not threaten. He did not warn. Instead, he pressed a button with his thumb and fired two barbs into Kane’s chest, sending him falling to the ground, wrapped in a fiery shroud of pain.