Off the Clock by Brett Battles Read Free Book Online

 
     
    Jonathan Quinn was angry and frustrated when he returned home to Los Angeles. To say the job he’d just been on hadn’t gone according to plan would have been doing the colossal disaster an injustice.
    Lives had been lost, unnecessary ones, a list that could have very easily included his own name. That he got away uninjured was due purely to luck, and had nothing to do with his skill. It had been a badly planned mission right from the start, one that finished with the body Quinn was supposed to have gotten rid of still alive and well and walking around.
    Not his fault, but his jerk client didn’t seem to be on the same page when Quinn called him from the airport while waiting for his flight home.
    “Why should I give you the full amount when you didn’t clean anything?”
    Quinn, whose specialty was making bodies disappear, held his anger in as best he could. “Terminating the target is not my job. I laid out the rules at the beginning. Whether you end up using me or not, once you hire me, you pay me.”
    “You’re going to make it very hard for me to ever hire you again,” the idiot said.
    “No. I’ll make it easy. You will pay me, and you will never call me again. I have no interest in working with amateurs.”
    “Who the hell do you—”
    “ And ,” Quinn said, “if you think you can just skip out on your obligation, think again. It’s not just me who will stop working for you. I’ll spread the word as quickly as possible, and once that happens, good luck getting anything done.”
    “You don’t have that kind of power.”
    “Go ahead and think that. There’s one way to find out, though.”
    It still remained to be seen whether the guy was going to pay him or not. By the time Quinn landed in Los Angeles, the final payment of his fee had yet to be transferred into the appropriate account. He almost hoped the money wouldn’t show up. His threat wasn’t an idle one, and eventually his former client would figure that out, but by then it would be too late.
    Why couldn’t all Quinn’s clients be like Peter at the Office? While Peter might be a little gruff at times, he was professional and always paid when he was supposed to. Hell, Quinn would be better off if he only took the Office’s assignments and said no to everyone else. God knew Peter had enough work.
    He dumped his bags just inside the door of his Hollywood Hills home, and turned on the TV in hopes of finding something that might relax him. No such luck. He ended up pacing next to the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the back of his house and looked out on the city. Only he wasn’t paying attention to the view.
    What he really needed was to vent, and release some of his anger. But when you worked in a world of secrets, there weren’t a lot of people you could vent to.
    In Quinn’s case, there really was no one.
    If his old mentor Durrie hadn’t been killed at a warehouse outside Chicago on a job they’d both been on, maybe things would have been different. Not that Quinn would have talked to Durrie. His late boss was not big on chitchat. It was Durrie’s girlfriend, Orlando, who Quinn would have called.
    Would have, but not now. Durrie’s death put a stop to that, driving a wedge between Quinn and Orlando that had kept them from speaking for nearly two years now. He wished he knew how to bridge that divide.
    Eventually, he got in his car and drove, not sure where he was going. Or maybe he was and just didn’t realize it at the time, because as he pulled to the curb on a side street just off Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, he knew he’d come to the right place. Ahead on the corner was Taste of Siam, Quinn’s favorite restaurant in the city.
    It was late, almost 10 p.m., a time when most restaurants in L.A. were closing or at least thinking about it. Not Taste of Siam. It sometimes stayed open until four or five in the morning, frequented in those later hours mainly by members of the local Thai population.
    Even before he got