Chapter 28

“I want to know…,” Marks began, his usually calm voice and exterior now blazing with impotent fury. “where those two sons of bitches are. Can any of you tell me that?”

It was the day after the attack and he was trying to pick up the pieces of his tattered operation. After waking up from the little nap his attacker forced on him, he went to his vault to check it.

Everything was gone.

His money.

His drugs.

All of it.

This was bad. It was bad for his business and worse, his reputation. He wasn’t sure how he was going to recover from it.

Now, he was staring down at the few men he still had left, the ones that were able to stand more or less on their own power anyway. Four others were in the hospital with serious injuries and Davis, the one with the gunshot wound to his knee, had to be put down. The last thing he needed was one of his employees showing up at the ER with a gunshot wound. It was already bad enough having police crawling all over his club, he didn’t need more questions he had no intention of answering hurled at him. Also, killing Davis gave him an excellent opportunity to recover some of that fear he’d so painstakingly instilled in his men. He put a bullet through the man’s head himself, in front of everyone to show them how he deals with incompetence and failure. No one questioned him, even though Marks himself had been completely overtaken by the two mysterious and seemingly indestructible assailants.

“So? What the hell do you have to tell me?” he said, his voice level but still holding a quality of cold menace to it. He stood at the edge of the loft, looking down at the dozen or so pathetically wounded thugs he employed. Just looking at them in that state infuriated him even more.

“We haven’t gone through all the security footage yet,” one of the men replied. There were cuts to his face and arms and a giant knot almost dead center on his forehead. He was the same man Darius had sent flying into the bottom of the second story loft and then crashing into the tvs and alcohol.

When he spoke, Marks' head snapped to him, his eyes narrowed and dangerous.

“Don’t waste your time,” he snarled. “The footage won’t give you anything. Both of them were wearing masks and gloves. They weren’t taking any chances they’ll be recognized. Are all of you morons or is it just him?”

“I was including the footage taken from the lot across the street, going back several days,” the man answered stoically, ignoring Marks' insults and hostility. “I’ll let you know when we find something.”

Marks slowly walked over to the stairs and just as slowly descended them. As soon as he was on the ground floor, he went over to the man with a dark, frightening look on his face.

“Are you confident of that, Carlos?” he asked.

“Yes,” Carlos replied, staring Marks directly in the eyes with his face set and firm. “Despite how well those two covered their tracks yesterday, they reek of being amateurs and amateurs make mistakes. I’m sure we’ll find that mistake and use it to track them down.”

“Good. Good.” Marks smiled but it looked off somehow. It looked more like a grinning skull’s smile, full of menace. Marks clapped his hand across the back of Carlos’s neck and then yanked him forward. Several of his injuries flared up in pain but he bit down on it, not wanting to so much as grimace or flinch from it. “You find them for me or you lose your life.”

He let go and Carlos staggered backward a bit. There was a flash of anger in his eyes, there and gone in a nanosecond. Marks didn’t seem to notice.

Marks waved his hand in an irritated, dismissive fashion and his men took off. He was left alone in the ruins of his club. The worst of the damage had been done to the bar, the wall of the bathroom, and his office. Thinking about it, about how powerless he’d been, made him not just angry but furious. He slammed his fist onto the bar and cursed, his anger threatening to make him completely lose all sense of control.

They killed Rich, a man who had been like a brother to him. Someone he had trusted without doubt. The cop, Terrence, he could care less about. He regretted that loss only because he no longer enjoyed the advantages of having such a high ranking detective on his payroll. He had others on his payroll though, maybe not as high ranking, but there nonetheless. He was also sure that in due time he could find someone to replace the late Detective Terrence Turner.

Rich, however, was irreplaceable.

Although Rich’s death was a major contribution to Marks' anger, another factor added fuel to the fire. He was supposed to be the one on top. He was the Quentin Marks! He was the head of a powerful empire he built with his own hands. He was cold, merciless, and ruthless, inspiring fear in others and using that fear to bend them to his will. He killed without thought or regret and those around him knew their place. There was no greater joy than to know how much people feared him. He used that tactic to build an empire and last night his empire collapsed on top of him.

And then two men…just two!..walked in and destroyed it all.

Now he was the one that was afraid. Two men were out there with his money and the worst part was, there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to stop them. They couldn’t be hurt. They shrugged off bullets like they were nothing. They were inhumanly strong and so fast that the men who tried to stop them last night were laughably outmatched. The two had used their insane power to bring down his entire empire in less than an hour. He spent his life creating that empire and for a long time he was the untouchable one. Now he was just as powerless and frail as the rest of the world.

He paced around, restless and angry. His mind was replaying last night’s incident over and over again. He couldn’t think of anything else.

He heard footsteps coming up behind him and turned quickly, his heart racing a little too fast for comfort. Carlos looked at him inquisitively, noticing his boss’s wary silence. Marks restrained an urge to shoot the man through his kneecap. Instead, he donned an obviously false, rubbery smile.

“Back already?” he asked in a bored tone, trying to mask his fear. “What is it?”

Marks pulled out his overly large gun, set it on top of the bar, and pointed its barrel directly at him. In response, Carlos stared ahead without a word.

“We might have something,” he stated. “On the parking lot’s video feed.”

He gestured for Marks to follow and then headed for a secluded room to the right of the bar. Marks put his gun back in his holster as he followed behind Carlos. They passed the spiral stairs and as they did, he got a fleeting image of Rich’s corpse flash inside his mind, his old friend’s eyes glazed and empty.

The room where they were heading to was hidden by the shadows thrown down from the loft above. When they got there, Carlos opened the door and went inside. Marks entered the room behind him. It was no bigger than a walk-in closet and most of the wall to their right was taken up by eight mounted monitors. They displayed the various areas of the club. One showed a view of the stage and part of the dance floor. Another was set up to have a long range view of the bar. Another showed the wreckage inside his office. There was one that captured the entire span of the loft. Two were set up to view the inside and outside of Exclusive’s entrance. One caught a broad view of most of the club itself.

And lastly, there was the one that recorded the parking lot.

A long table built into the wall held two sets of keyboards, each with its own mouse, and two computer monitors with their towers standing upright next to them. Two of his bouncers sat in plain office chairs in front of it, their hands manipulating the keyboards to review all the security footage.

Carlos nodded to one of them.

The multiple screens suddenly went black. A second later, they flickered and showed one complete image of the parking lot. The bouncer rewound the footage, the timestamp showing that he had gone back to a couple of weeks ago. Cars came and went into the lot and when he failed to see anything significant, Marks' temper flared up. It didn’t help to have Carlos breathing down his neck in anticipation.

“What am I looking at?” he snapped, his voice loud in the small room.

Carlos, however, didn’t answer.

Marks felt more than saw Carlos step closer to him. There was a nervous anticipation about the man. A second later, there was the sound of a gun being cocked.

“I think it's time someone else stepped up…,” Carlos began, but the sharp blast of a gunshot interrupted him. His blood sprayed out of his back, splattering over the back wall in ugly patterns. Carlos abruptly collapsed to the floor in a limp heap with blood spreading outward from his fatal wound. The bullet hit him low and at an upward angle, ripping through his abdomen, his right kidney, and lung before bursting out of his back. He stared weakly up at Marks, who was now standing over him, and managed to get his gun all the way out. He brought it up, his hand shaking badly. Marks just stared coldly at Carlos, pointed his gun at the man once again and then coldly put a bullet through his head. He put his gun away afterward and examined the suit jacket he wore. Regrettably, there was a hole in it now with faint curls of smoke drifting off its edges. He had pulled his gun out, using the flap of his jacket to conceal it and fired the weapon upward, confident the whole time that he wouldn’t miss. Afterall, Carlos had practically been right on top of him.

He glanced down at the body in disgust. He wasn’t surprised at all. In his line of work, showing weakness of any kind would prompt the more ambitious ones to try and elevate themselves. Carlos was the first but he was not going to be the last. Ruthlessly killing him had been a necessity after what was done to him yesterday. He was made to look weak. The fool’s dead body would serve as a reminder of why it would be a bad idea for the others to get the same idiotic thought of trying to take him out.

“Show me what he found,” Marks told one of the bouncers. “And get someone in here to clean up this mess.”

The other bouncer, the one not currently occupied with the video feed, grabbed a phone off the table and dialed. Pretty soon he was talking in hushed tones to get the body removed and the blood cleaned up. The other one was staring intently at the huge bank of monitors attached to the wall, his face deep in concentration.

“We noticed something odd,” the man said, pointing up at the image of a car. From what Marks could see it was an older muscle car. He made a speed-this-along gesture, his patience quickly running out, and the bouncer began again. “That car shows up six times in one week.”

“And?” he asked, irritated. “Exclusive is a popular nightclub. Some of our customers spend a great deal of time here.”

“I know, sir,” the man responded. “But on five of those six occasions, the people inside the car never got out.”

He zoomed in, the picture gaining a heavily grainy quality to it before it was cleared up. Two men were seen inside, both of them watching the door to Exclusive intently. Their faces were heavily shadowed but Marks was sure they were the two that destroyed his empire. He felt a thrill rush through him, knowing his search was over.

He spent the next hour or two making some phone calls trying to trace the license plate number on the car. After a while, Marks was able to get a name.

Barry Carter, a college student at the university.

That’s who the car belonged to.