The man goes slithering to the floor. I stand over his cooling corpse, watching crimson pool beneath what remains of his shattered skull. The blood spreads in a perfect circle across the Italian tile, like a dark halo.
But when I bend down and rip the ski mask off, it’s not the grizzled Serbian face I expected to see. This boy—because that’s what he is, a f*****g boy, scarcely old enough for his beard to fill in—is still wide-eyed in death. He can’t be more than twenty-five at most. Local, by the looks of him.
There has to be something here—a phone, a note, some scrap of evidence linking this back to Dragan. The Serbs must have hired local muscle to do their dirty work.
But as I turn out his pockets, my certainty begins to waver. No burner phone. No orders written in Serbian. Just a che
