Famous Last Words # 5
Title: Famous Last Words
Fandom/ Pairing The Losers (comic 'verse, with some help from the movie), eventual Jensen/Cougar
Rating: R overall
Summary: Cougar was bleeding all over the bomb in his lap, the last time Jensen saw him. But that was then.
Link to Master List & Previous Chapters
Some nights, Cougar slept, and some nights he stretched himself so thin that he could see an entire village at once. The latter proved more restful, but it was too easy a habit to fall into, becoming a ghost. Most nights, he'd simply drift through walls until he found an empty hotel room, and lay down on the bed until the nightmares came. When they did, he'd sit and stare out the window picturing explosions falling from the sky for hours, until the eventually resolved themselves into the rising sun.
Sometimes he'd vanish into the ocean for days on end, but it felt like cheating.
---
The first time he'd ever had the dream, too many long insane hours after the children had fallen, he'd woken in the back of a truck to find Roque and Jensen shouting his name, shaking him awake as they flew over the rough road.
After that, it was variations on a theme. Clay, in the corner with a bottle of whiskey that he'd pass over. Roque grumbling and turning over, telling him to go back to sleep. Pooch was the worst, always asking him if he wanted to talk about it, concerned and tired-eyed. Most of the time, though, it was Jensen, who just slept through it all.
He bunked with Jensen whenever he could, right up through the end. After the end, he'd thought the nightmares had been killed in the blast, to the point where they were just memories. He'd even begun to hope that maybe the past was finally done with him.
Antigua changed that, though, on so many levels. Maybe it was the familiarity, maybe it was something that Jensen had said that knocked the memories loose. Maybe it was just being on the run again.
The nightmare hadn't changed much, though the blast at the end, now, was bright enough to blind out the rest of existence, leaving him scrabbling blindly for tiny vaporized hands. They still burned when he found them, but he could no longer grasp them, and the new silence that followed was worse than the roar of the burning wreckage had ever been.
And now, when he awoke, his eyes opened to an empty room. No whiskey, no complaints, no questions, and nobody sprawled snoring with their glasses in their hand.
---
In Prague, Aisha walked right through him, her phone to her ear, talking angrily.
"I'm less than two hours behind him. It's the closest I've been in a month. If the money had been deposited when it was supposed to, I could've been on the same plane, but that's just water under the bridge, now, isn't it? He has to know I'm still tailing him."
When she turned the corner, he followed, listening as she stalked into the plaza. "Of course, Mister Borodin, but if I find you hobbling me in this fashion again, I am certain that I will find Goliath's competitors much more amenable to honoring their agreements. Is that understood?"
After she finished the call, Cougar followed her for three hours, waiting to see if he could learn anything more. Eventually, though, she checked into a hotel. She perched on the edge of the bed, methodically stripping down the gun she'd bought down in the warehouse district, and there wasn't anything more to see that he didn't already know.
Cougar eased through the wall of the first empty storefront he could find. The phone was for emergencies only.
This counted.
It had been nearly two weeks, and dialing Jensen's number should've been easy.
---
"Cougs?" Jensen sounded worried. "You okay?"
"I'm fine. Have information for you."
"Oh, man, my nipples are getting hard. Whatcha got for me?"
There was nobody here to see him. Cougar could smile if he wanted to. "Aisha's working with Goliath, contact's a guy named Borodin. Heard her on the phone."
"So she is still after you, then. Shit. I was kind of hoping she'd gotten bored, you know?"
"Sí. What about you, have any luck?"
"Not much, I'm packing right now, getting on a flight to meet up with Stegler first thing tomorrow," Jensen said. "Hey, you know that ear? Belonged to one of Stegler's inside guys at Goliath."
Still trying to catch up, Cougar didn't respond, but Jensen didn't seem to be waiting for one. "So. If she's gone over to Goliath, now, well. That would explain why she took the double agent out, wouldn't it? Not that she ever needed a motive beyond, hey, it's Tuesday!, but hey, it's a start, right? Is she still hot? Because man for a crazy bitch, she could wear the hell out of some-"
"Hang on, you re-upped?" He didn't know why, but the thought of it made him uneasy.
"Ah. Yeah. I mean, it's just for the short term." Jensen obviously wasn't enthusiastic, either about the idea itself, or admitting it. "One gig only. Stegler's got resources, I'm out of the loop, and-"
"Good idea," Cougar assented, covering his sudden irritation. Stegler was a good guy. He'd gone out on a limb for them more than once and had been holding his own longer than anyone. More importantly, he had Jensen's back. It was stupid, unprofessional, to feel jealous. "Is there a plan, yet?"
"Hoping to have one in a few days, that's why we're getting together. Ah. I'll call you if we get something that we can move on, otherwise, we'll meet up at the time we agreed on, is that cool?"
Cougar nodded. In a minute, he'd hang up, but in the meantime, maybe, if he was lucky, Jensen would keep talking for just a little while.
---
At the outset, all they managed to agree on was the fact that they'd need to find someone to replace Eric Marsden, the dead earless wonder, Stegler's inside man.
Stegler had rented out an office in London. Small, unimpressive, but the building was secure and it had all the resources Jensen could've wanted, and a bunch that he didn't need. Jensen spent the first day or so stripping and rebuilding the computer that Stegler had provided, wiping the operating system clean and building it from the ground up, and really, he only needed Stegler for his passwords.
Cougar's intel only complicated things, at this point. If Marsden had been hit because Aisha had been following Stegler, and discovered Marsden's double-dealings, that was one thing. If, however, she'd been following Marsden at Goliath's instruction, it meant Goliath was a hundred times more prepared than Stegler had thought.
It didn't matter, now, though. Jensen had done what he could, breaking in to Goliath's systems, pulling HR files and emails and financials- anything that looked at all relevant. It was clear that they'd known about Marsden's death- a boating accident in Antigua, they were calling it- several hours before he'd actually died.
Borodin, Aisha's contact, was even more confusing. It was probably an alias. Jensen found nothing in Goliath's HR files, no job title, no contact information, nothing. He'd been assigned an email address, though, about five months back.
The account had only been accessed on three occasions, all of which were in the past month, and beyond the fact that Borodin had sent the messages via web mail from public computers, none of the messages were at all revealing.
Are you ready? the first one asked, and he'd answered yes. The second, a few days later, confirmed that he'd be leaving that week. The third, a few days before Marsden's accident had been announced, showed that he hadn't yet made contact with someone, presumably Aisha. There were no other messages, but there didn't need to be.
Because Jensen? Jensen was a fucking genius with a lot of time on his hands.
---
"Have any luck?" Stegler asked wearily, suddenly hovering in the doorway with a cup of coffee in his hand.
Jensen glanced up at the clock. He'd been at it for thirteen hours straight now, on top of yesterday's seven. Some evil bastard had come in and sandblasted his eyeballs a few hours ago. He didn't know exactly when he'd be capable of straightening his spine again, and his hands, he figured, were a loss, splayed useless appendages hanging off his wrists. When he stood to stretch, he discovered that everything below his ass had fallen into a light coma, and he lurched as he crossed the room.
He'd make a great henchman, though. It was almost a shame Stegler wasn't a criminal mastermind.
Still, though, this was kind of like henching.
"Took a while, but I got a lock on the locations where Borodin sent the emails. Nothing useful, really, they're all internet café's and a public library. But. The first time he was in, he accessed a database on Goliath's system."
"What was he doing?"
"No idea," Jensen waved at the screen. "There's layers and layers of encryption on this thing, I didn't get in until a while ago, and managed to pull it all down, but. Here's the thing. It's just numbers," he waved Stegler over to the computer to show him. "It looks almost like it's set up like a spreadsheet, but all eleven column headers are missing. Wherever the key is, it's not stored on this system."
"Shit."
"No kidding. Anyway. I've got a decent chunk of it being processed out over there," he stuck a thumb in the direction of his laptop. "Trying to see if there's any relations between the numbers that might tell us something."
"Okay, good," Stegler said, wearing the usual semi-boggled expression that arose whenever he had to examine anything that didn't have a narrative. Jensen suspected the man still had a typewriter in his main office.
---
Fuck, this was getting old.
The number crunching came up with miles of data, none of it useful, and for the most part, Jensen was at a dead end. There was no way they were going to get any further without walking into Goliath and hardwiring a connection. Not unless they had someone who could do it for them.
Stegler had been going through the personnel files, looking for prospective contacts, comparing clearance, management reviews, payroll, history, and everything else he could get his hands on. It was the exact sort of qualitative task that Jensen himself had no patience for, though he never mentioned it.
Mostly because he didn't have to. By the time he reached the chorus, Stegler had very kindly kicked him, his lovely singing voice, and his laptop out of the office.
It was a relief, mostly, but he pretended to more irritation than he felt, singing as he went down the stairs.
"And I would hack five thousand files, and I would hack five thousand more
To be the man who hacked a thousand files and sent your boss that porn…"
---
Another hotel room, this week, mostly done up in greens and grays, but bouncing between too focused and too tired, Jensen hadn't noticed until now. It was fucking ugly in here. He wanted out, thought about hitting the pub he passed on the way to the hotel, about all the people he'd seen inside, the redhead sitting with her girlfriends in the window, unaware that she'd rucked up her skirt as she'd sat down.
There was a lot Jensen could've done with that, if he'd been feeling up to it, but he'd kept walking. It would've been more fun with a wingman, someone to distract the girlfriends, and Stegler wasn't really the sort who would've been down to help a guy out.
The laptop was running every number crunching and data-mining program he could think of, just in case. For the most part, as soon as the programs were cued up, he could just let them go do their thing. All he needed to do was check the results when they finished.
Which was why he was mere inches away from losing his twitchy mind and staring at the wallpaper, deciding that it was the exact same shade of green as the redhead's skirt. Which was just as well, because he'd walked past less than half an hour ago, and couldn't remember- at all- what her face had looked like.
---
When Jensen slept, he dreamt about the convenience store he'd worked at in high school, of trying to ring up customer after customer after customer, while the register spat out emails instead of receipts, and giving ammunition out as change, instead of quarters and pennies. In the dreams, Cougar would be standing there, at the back of the line, with a rifle slung over his shoulder and an inscrutable look on his face.
---
It had been nearly a week since Cougar had called, and it was getting a little ridiculous, this constant needling thing in the back of his head that made him want to go in, run facial recognition on every camera he could think of, airport after city street after taxi stand, and just find the guy, already.
Cougar had been dead for a year. Only, well, not, but Jensen hadn't known that, then. He'd done the mourning thing- he'd been crappy at it, but he'd done it- and it had been a hell of a lot easier than waiting, not knowing.
Cougar was out there, somewhere, with Aisha on his tail.
They called it a burner phone because of the hole it was searing through his pocket, and because of the sharp flinch of his fingers, moving away from the danger every time he took it out.
He hadn't known that, before, when he'd first signed up.
Three buttons, in the right sequence, and he'd have Cougar on the line. He shoved the phone back into his pocket for the seventh time in an hour.
---
Cougar pushed his way through Harajuku Station and crossed over to Takeshita-Dori. It was easy to play the tourist, there, to pretend to be distracted by the colorful teenagers on parade, while scanning the area for any signs of Aisha.
It had been several days, now, since New Zealand, and he was starting to wonder if he'd done too good a job throwing her off the trail.
Staying ahead of her, just far enough that she wouldn't catch up, just near enough that she wouldn't abandon the chase, had given him a problem to solve, something to do, something to keep his mind busy.
Because his thoughts, left to their own devices, were even more unnerving. Endless rounds of questions- why am I here, why aren't I dead, what am I now- jostling against the closest thing he had to an answer. Jensen.
An answer that was a question itself was no answer at all, really,
-where is he, what's he doing, is he okay, what the hell is going on-
So he tried to stay focused. It had been five days, maybe six, since Aisha had vanished.
-did she get bored, did she decide that Jensen was an easier target, why didn't I kill her when I had the chance?
---
Jensen should've thought of it a lot longer before he did, and really, he wasn't about to admit the basis of his inspiration any time soon.
After dinner- kebabs from down the street- he'd jerked off. It wasn't particularly satisfying. Part of him kept worrying that Cougar would materialize out of thin fucking air, right in the middle of it. Part of him, though, really liked the idea, and his imagination had joined in, quite happily, even bringing along it's own backpack full of mental images.
Halfway through, he'd stopped pretending that he wasn't even trying not to think about Cougar's wiry muscles, the way he rolled his head to the side, exposing his neck when-
The shower was to clear his head, as much as anything. Afterwards, he opened up his laptop again to see if his niece had posted anything interesting on her Facebook page. Then his sister. Just the usual, totally mundane. A clip from the Daily show, an article from the local paper. The weather sucked.
He'd was getting really tired of missing people. Found himself wondering if Cougar'd ghosted back to check on his family at all.
And, shit. There it was.
Fuck.
Aisha was after Cougar, a man who'd practically been a ninja before he learned how to become invisible. She'd have a hard time tracking him, and wasn't exactly patient. She'd go after his family, if she thought she had to.
Jensen opened another tab in his browser and began to search, surprised when he found Cougar's family so easily.
They'd just made the news. Juarez. Murdered in their sleep, all of them. No witnesses, no survivors. Not even the baby.
---
Chapter 6
Fandom/ Pairing The Losers (comic 'verse, with some help from the movie), eventual Jensen/Cougar
Rating: R overall
Summary: Cougar was bleeding all over the bomb in his lap, the last time Jensen saw him. But that was then.
Link to Master List & Previous Chapters
Some nights, Cougar slept, and some nights he stretched himself so thin that he could see an entire village at once. The latter proved more restful, but it was too easy a habit to fall into, becoming a ghost. Most nights, he'd simply drift through walls until he found an empty hotel room, and lay down on the bed until the nightmares came. When they did, he'd sit and stare out the window picturing explosions falling from the sky for hours, until the eventually resolved themselves into the rising sun.
Sometimes he'd vanish into the ocean for days on end, but it felt like cheating.
---
The first time he'd ever had the dream, too many long insane hours after the children had fallen, he'd woken in the back of a truck to find Roque and Jensen shouting his name, shaking him awake as they flew over the rough road.
After that, it was variations on a theme. Clay, in the corner with a bottle of whiskey that he'd pass over. Roque grumbling and turning over, telling him to go back to sleep. Pooch was the worst, always asking him if he wanted to talk about it, concerned and tired-eyed. Most of the time, though, it was Jensen, who just slept through it all.
He bunked with Jensen whenever he could, right up through the end. After the end, he'd thought the nightmares had been killed in the blast, to the point where they were just memories. He'd even begun to hope that maybe the past was finally done with him.
Antigua changed that, though, on so many levels. Maybe it was the familiarity, maybe it was something that Jensen had said that knocked the memories loose. Maybe it was just being on the run again.
The nightmare hadn't changed much, though the blast at the end, now, was bright enough to blind out the rest of existence, leaving him scrabbling blindly for tiny vaporized hands. They still burned when he found them, but he could no longer grasp them, and the new silence that followed was worse than the roar of the burning wreckage had ever been.
And now, when he awoke, his eyes opened to an empty room. No whiskey, no complaints, no questions, and nobody sprawled snoring with their glasses in their hand.
---
In Prague, Aisha walked right through him, her phone to her ear, talking angrily.
"I'm less than two hours behind him. It's the closest I've been in a month. If the money had been deposited when it was supposed to, I could've been on the same plane, but that's just water under the bridge, now, isn't it? He has to know I'm still tailing him."
When she turned the corner, he followed, listening as she stalked into the plaza. "Of course, Mister Borodin, but if I find you hobbling me in this fashion again, I am certain that I will find Goliath's competitors much more amenable to honoring their agreements. Is that understood?"
After she finished the call, Cougar followed her for three hours, waiting to see if he could learn anything more. Eventually, though, she checked into a hotel. She perched on the edge of the bed, methodically stripping down the gun she'd bought down in the warehouse district, and there wasn't anything more to see that he didn't already know.
Cougar eased through the wall of the first empty storefront he could find. The phone was for emergencies only.
This counted.
It had been nearly two weeks, and dialing Jensen's number should've been easy.
---
"Cougs?" Jensen sounded worried. "You okay?"
"I'm fine. Have information for you."
"Oh, man, my nipples are getting hard. Whatcha got for me?"
There was nobody here to see him. Cougar could smile if he wanted to. "Aisha's working with Goliath, contact's a guy named Borodin. Heard her on the phone."
"So she is still after you, then. Shit. I was kind of hoping she'd gotten bored, you know?"
"Sí. What about you, have any luck?"
"Not much, I'm packing right now, getting on a flight to meet up with Stegler first thing tomorrow," Jensen said. "Hey, you know that ear? Belonged to one of Stegler's inside guys at Goliath."
Still trying to catch up, Cougar didn't respond, but Jensen didn't seem to be waiting for one. "So. If she's gone over to Goliath, now, well. That would explain why she took the double agent out, wouldn't it? Not that she ever needed a motive beyond, hey, it's Tuesday!, but hey, it's a start, right? Is she still hot? Because man for a crazy bitch, she could wear the hell out of some-"
"Hang on, you re-upped?" He didn't know why, but the thought of it made him uneasy.
"Ah. Yeah. I mean, it's just for the short term." Jensen obviously wasn't enthusiastic, either about the idea itself, or admitting it. "One gig only. Stegler's got resources, I'm out of the loop, and-"
"Good idea," Cougar assented, covering his sudden irritation. Stegler was a good guy. He'd gone out on a limb for them more than once and had been holding his own longer than anyone. More importantly, he had Jensen's back. It was stupid, unprofessional, to feel jealous. "Is there a plan, yet?"
"Hoping to have one in a few days, that's why we're getting together. Ah. I'll call you if we get something that we can move on, otherwise, we'll meet up at the time we agreed on, is that cool?"
Cougar nodded. In a minute, he'd hang up, but in the meantime, maybe, if he was lucky, Jensen would keep talking for just a little while.
---
At the outset, all they managed to agree on was the fact that they'd need to find someone to replace Eric Marsden, the dead earless wonder, Stegler's inside man.
Stegler had rented out an office in London. Small, unimpressive, but the building was secure and it had all the resources Jensen could've wanted, and a bunch that he didn't need. Jensen spent the first day or so stripping and rebuilding the computer that Stegler had provided, wiping the operating system clean and building it from the ground up, and really, he only needed Stegler for his passwords.
Cougar's intel only complicated things, at this point. If Marsden had been hit because Aisha had been following Stegler, and discovered Marsden's double-dealings, that was one thing. If, however, she'd been following Marsden at Goliath's instruction, it meant Goliath was a hundred times more prepared than Stegler had thought.
It didn't matter, now, though. Jensen had done what he could, breaking in to Goliath's systems, pulling HR files and emails and financials- anything that looked at all relevant. It was clear that they'd known about Marsden's death- a boating accident in Antigua, they were calling it- several hours before he'd actually died.
Borodin, Aisha's contact, was even more confusing. It was probably an alias. Jensen found nothing in Goliath's HR files, no job title, no contact information, nothing. He'd been assigned an email address, though, about five months back.
The account had only been accessed on three occasions, all of which were in the past month, and beyond the fact that Borodin had sent the messages via web mail from public computers, none of the messages were at all revealing.
Are you ready? the first one asked, and he'd answered yes. The second, a few days later, confirmed that he'd be leaving that week. The third, a few days before Marsden's accident had been announced, showed that he hadn't yet made contact with someone, presumably Aisha. There were no other messages, but there didn't need to be.
Because Jensen? Jensen was a fucking genius with a lot of time on his hands.
---
"Have any luck?" Stegler asked wearily, suddenly hovering in the doorway with a cup of coffee in his hand.
Jensen glanced up at the clock. He'd been at it for thirteen hours straight now, on top of yesterday's seven. Some evil bastard had come in and sandblasted his eyeballs a few hours ago. He didn't know exactly when he'd be capable of straightening his spine again, and his hands, he figured, were a loss, splayed useless appendages hanging off his wrists. When he stood to stretch, he discovered that everything below his ass had fallen into a light coma, and he lurched as he crossed the room.
He'd make a great henchman, though. It was almost a shame Stegler wasn't a criminal mastermind.
Still, though, this was kind of like henching.
"Took a while, but I got a lock on the locations where Borodin sent the emails. Nothing useful, really, they're all internet café's and a public library. But. The first time he was in, he accessed a database on Goliath's system."
"What was he doing?"
"No idea," Jensen waved at the screen. "There's layers and layers of encryption on this thing, I didn't get in until a while ago, and managed to pull it all down, but. Here's the thing. It's just numbers," he waved Stegler over to the computer to show him. "It looks almost like it's set up like a spreadsheet, but all eleven column headers are missing. Wherever the key is, it's not stored on this system."
"Shit."
"No kidding. Anyway. I've got a decent chunk of it being processed out over there," he stuck a thumb in the direction of his laptop. "Trying to see if there's any relations between the numbers that might tell us something."
"Okay, good," Stegler said, wearing the usual semi-boggled expression that arose whenever he had to examine anything that didn't have a narrative. Jensen suspected the man still had a typewriter in his main office.
---
Fuck, this was getting old.
The number crunching came up with miles of data, none of it useful, and for the most part, Jensen was at a dead end. There was no way they were going to get any further without walking into Goliath and hardwiring a connection. Not unless they had someone who could do it for them.
Stegler had been going through the personnel files, looking for prospective contacts, comparing clearance, management reviews, payroll, history, and everything else he could get his hands on. It was the exact sort of qualitative task that Jensen himself had no patience for, though he never mentioned it.
Mostly because he didn't have to. By the time he reached the chorus, Stegler had very kindly kicked him, his lovely singing voice, and his laptop out of the office.
It was a relief, mostly, but he pretended to more irritation than he felt, singing as he went down the stairs.
"And I would hack five thousand files, and I would hack five thousand more
To be the man who hacked a thousand files and sent your boss that porn…"
---
Another hotel room, this week, mostly done up in greens and grays, but bouncing between too focused and too tired, Jensen hadn't noticed until now. It was fucking ugly in here. He wanted out, thought about hitting the pub he passed on the way to the hotel, about all the people he'd seen inside, the redhead sitting with her girlfriends in the window, unaware that she'd rucked up her skirt as she'd sat down.
There was a lot Jensen could've done with that, if he'd been feeling up to it, but he'd kept walking. It would've been more fun with a wingman, someone to distract the girlfriends, and Stegler wasn't really the sort who would've been down to help a guy out.
The laptop was running every number crunching and data-mining program he could think of, just in case. For the most part, as soon as the programs were cued up, he could just let them go do their thing. All he needed to do was check the results when they finished.
Which was why he was mere inches away from losing his twitchy mind and staring at the wallpaper, deciding that it was the exact same shade of green as the redhead's skirt. Which was just as well, because he'd walked past less than half an hour ago, and couldn't remember- at all- what her face had looked like.
---
When Jensen slept, he dreamt about the convenience store he'd worked at in high school, of trying to ring up customer after customer after customer, while the register spat out emails instead of receipts, and giving ammunition out as change, instead of quarters and pennies. In the dreams, Cougar would be standing there, at the back of the line, with a rifle slung over his shoulder and an inscrutable look on his face.
---
It had been nearly a week since Cougar had called, and it was getting a little ridiculous, this constant needling thing in the back of his head that made him want to go in, run facial recognition on every camera he could think of, airport after city street after taxi stand, and just find the guy, already.
Cougar had been dead for a year. Only, well, not, but Jensen hadn't known that, then. He'd done the mourning thing- he'd been crappy at it, but he'd done it- and it had been a hell of a lot easier than waiting, not knowing.
Cougar was out there, somewhere, with Aisha on his tail.
They called it a burner phone because of the hole it was searing through his pocket, and because of the sharp flinch of his fingers, moving away from the danger every time he took it out.
He hadn't known that, before, when he'd first signed up.
Three buttons, in the right sequence, and he'd have Cougar on the line. He shoved the phone back into his pocket for the seventh time in an hour.
---
Cougar pushed his way through Harajuku Station and crossed over to Takeshita-Dori. It was easy to play the tourist, there, to pretend to be distracted by the colorful teenagers on parade, while scanning the area for any signs of Aisha.
It had been several days, now, since New Zealand, and he was starting to wonder if he'd done too good a job throwing her off the trail.
Staying ahead of her, just far enough that she wouldn't catch up, just near enough that she wouldn't abandon the chase, had given him a problem to solve, something to do, something to keep his mind busy.
Because his thoughts, left to their own devices, were even more unnerving. Endless rounds of questions- why am I here, why aren't I dead, what am I now- jostling against the closest thing he had to an answer. Jensen.
An answer that was a question itself was no answer at all, really,
-where is he, what's he doing, is he okay, what the hell is going on-
So he tried to stay focused. It had been five days, maybe six, since Aisha had vanished.
-did she get bored, did she decide that Jensen was an easier target, why didn't I kill her when I had the chance?
---
Jensen should've thought of it a lot longer before he did, and really, he wasn't about to admit the basis of his inspiration any time soon.
After dinner- kebabs from down the street- he'd jerked off. It wasn't particularly satisfying. Part of him kept worrying that Cougar would materialize out of thin fucking air, right in the middle of it. Part of him, though, really liked the idea, and his imagination had joined in, quite happily, even bringing along it's own backpack full of mental images.
Halfway through, he'd stopped pretending that he wasn't even trying not to think about Cougar's wiry muscles, the way he rolled his head to the side, exposing his neck when-
The shower was to clear his head, as much as anything. Afterwards, he opened up his laptop again to see if his niece had posted anything interesting on her Facebook page. Then his sister. Just the usual, totally mundane. A clip from the Daily show, an article from the local paper. The weather sucked.
He'd was getting really tired of missing people. Found himself wondering if Cougar'd ghosted back to check on his family at all.
And, shit. There it was.
Fuck.
Aisha was after Cougar, a man who'd practically been a ninja before he learned how to become invisible. She'd have a hard time tracking him, and wasn't exactly patient. She'd go after his family, if she thought she had to.
Jensen opened another tab in his browser and began to search, surprised when he found Cougar's family so easily.
They'd just made the news. Juarez. Murdered in their sleep, all of them. No witnesses, no survivors. Not even the baby.
---
Chapter 6