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streets. A dead end forced the operative to turn away from Grady, and he floored the bike down the perpendicular street.
Goddamn it.
The first left turn available was no good; a delivery truck sat partway back, blocking the whole alley. He slowed when he spied the next opening. Free and clear. He gassed the engine, but immediately backed it off. The back of a police station loomed into view with various marked and unmarked cars parked in the parking lot across the street.
    Son of a bitch!
He’d better not have lost Grady. He cruised past the station and turned up a side street. When he reached the road Grady had been traveling on, he scanned left and right. Empty.
    Every inventive curse word and phrase he could think of floated through his mind as he turned again to backtrack to where he’d last spotted the guy. A flash of black caught his attention, and he steered the bike down another side street.
    Gotcha.
    Grady was just turning into a parking lot for a quaint park. The operative gunned it up a parallel side street, looking for a place to park on the opposite side. He found a nice little niche near one of the ball fields and settled the bike out of sight.
    He took his helmet off, hung it off a handlebar, and pulled out a pair of binoculars he had in a bag strapped onto the rear seat. He’d barely gotten the lenses to his eyes when he spotted movement in the park. Following the person’s progress he narrowed in and was finally able to get them into focus.
    Holy shit.
He almost dropped the binocs. His heart thundered against his rib cage, and black spots appeared before his eyes. His trembling fingers yanked the phone from its holder, and after a few tries, he finally got the text message—
Round of Crown Royal on me
—to go through
.
    Five seconds later his phone vibrated. “Wraith is still alive,” he answered, not allowing the caller a chance to speak. The operative barely listened to the caller sputtering and telling him to go sleep off his bender. Wraith’s exquisite beauty captivated him like it always did every time he saw her.
    The operative continued before the caller could protest anymore. “I challenge you to get your ass to Ridge Creek, North Carolina, and prove me wrong. Text me when you get here.”
    He hung up the phone and dug a tracking device out of the bag. Slipping into the shadows of a line of trees, he made his way toward the Range Rover. He’d learned a long time ago it was better to find out everything he could before he approached.
    Intelligence and assassination. Two of his favorite aspects of being an SBG operative.
    ***
    Sandra crouched behind a plastic Porta-Potty in the park across the street and studied the blue Victorian with maroon trim. The old, stately home had been broken up into eight apartments back in the eighties. Four apartments per floor and a loft in the attic now occupied the once-grand home of a bank owner who had no children to pass it on to when he died.
    Two porch lights blazing from beneath ornate glass domes revealed an empty front porch swing. Unusual. Normally the newlyweds from the second floor hung out on the wooden swing at night, talking the hours away. She had asked one time why they were always perched there, and they had both laughed, saying they never bothered to buy a TV since they couldn’t afford cable and had other activities to occupy their time (of course, the new bride blushed and gave Sandra a wobbly smile). So cute were they.
    The bushes edging both corners of the house were in full bloom. Usually Sandra admired their beauty, but not anymore. Now they potentially hid an assailant from her view. Damn. She craned her neck but couldn’t see a thing. Double damn.
    No cars had passed for the last eight minutes, and all was quiet. A dog barked a few streets over, but that was nothing new. Bowser always barked until his owners finally gave up and let him inside. She studied the street. Nothing seemed out of place, and all the cars and trucks present