Wet Work: The Definitive Edition Read Online Free PDF

at the drug house looked like it had been torn apart by an animal, but this was worse.
    Picking up the gun, he went back into the bedroom.
    Mitra had been systematically flayed alive, the skin from neck to vagina peeled away in strips. A deep six-inch gash incised her larynx and had sliced open the carotid artery, splashing the scythe-like blood spray on the wall. Whoever had done the work knew what he was doing; judging from the strain marks around her wrists and ankles, she had been conscious throughout the skinning.
    She didn’t deserve to die this way—no one did.
    Mitra opened her eyes.
    Corvino dropped his gun.
    Her deep blue eyes bulged in their sockets as she turned her head towards him. The stretched lips strained at the cloth gag, her body arching off the bed as her limbs pulled at the bindings.
    Mother of God!
    There was no trace of recognition in her eyes, just a glaze of insanity.
    The pain must be incredible.
    Corvino clenched his jaw as he reached down for the gun. Long-suppressed emotions clawed his chest. A sob caught in his throat. He placed the silencer against her head and looked away. The soft plop of the report was followed by a wet splat. Corvino squeezed his eyes shut and backed away from the bed.
     
    His arms trembled as he pulled the Ford out of the parking space, his instincts screaming for him to jam the accelerator to the floor. Self-control prevailed.
    Mitra.
    The street was almost empty of traffic, but he kept the car under the speed limit, slowing as he reached the stoplight at the end of the block.
    Mitra!
    The light changed and he eased the car across the intersection.
    There was something horribly familiar about the murder, the details echoing an incident in Nashville a couple of years back, and as he reached the end of Avenida 4, he floored the accelerator in rage.
    Nashville.
    He’d had his suspicions following the assignment, had discussed them with Del Valle, and although the murder had had no bearing on the hit, the section chief made inquiries. When the supposed killer was apprehended a month later, it appeared Corvino had been wrong. Yet doubts remained, questions raised by Skolomowski’s subsequent behavior.
    It was a two-man assignment, the target Luis Valencia, a Cuban responsible for a series of deaths amongst political refugees in Florida, and was designed to look like an accident, a drunken fall from a hotel balcony. Valencia had a passion for country music and was a regular visitor to Nashville, where he indulged his taste for flashy women, flashy hotels and bad music. Nashville had been the obvious location in which to terminate him. Corvino performed the hit with Skolomowski as the backup.
    The week before they arrived, however, Nashville had become the focus of national attention. The bodies of several young women, some of them hookers, had been discovered in a shallow mass grave next to the Cumberland River, and it looked like Country Music, U.S.A. was the latest city to add a serial killer to the growing list of metropolitan areas with a psychopath at large. The most recent corpse, which was not in an advanced state of decomposition, had been partially skinned before being raped with a blunt instrument. At the time, Corvino had taken no real interest in the case. Not until the body of a hooker was discovered in room 416 of the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza the morning of their departure.
    The hooker he’d seen Skolomowski with two nights before the hit.
    She was found strapped to the bed, skinned from sternum to crotch, her breasts hacked off and left in the bathtub.
    Skolomowski was a keen hunter who regularly stalked deer in off-duty spells at his cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and a man who expressed no respect for women. Like most assassins, who by the nature of their work are denied the comforts of normal relationships, Skolomowski’s contact with women was on a purely business level, either administrative or physical. Women performed functions, were vessels for