Witness

3. Kaiden

Damien Mierro follows a regimented routine every Friday evening.

Having a routine makes someone vulnerable.

Easily traceable.

Good for me - not so good for Damien Mierro. 

He leaves the house at eleven in the morning flanked by two burly twin brothers who have arms bigger than their waist measurements, stops at a coffee shop and orders an iced cappuccino, sits in the same seat each week - back corner, facing out to the rest of the shop, one brother either side of him without drinks of their own, and stays there for approximately thirty minutes. 

He then drops by the warehouse for an hour or two, disappearing behind rusty silver garage doors and always reappearing with a scowl deeper than he'd gone in with. 

Business for Damien is consistently going well but he prides himself on always wanting more. 

After that it's back home, presumably for lunch, before three hours of punching the shit out of his trainer in the gym. Friday evening at the Mierro household consists of loud music, hookers, and more drugs than sense. 

Considering he's currently London Metropolitan Police's biggest current problem, following him around sure is fucking boring. 

Call me egotistical, but I thought I was past this part of my career. 

It's tedious. Repetitive. Dull. 

Slitting my own throat sounds more appealing than another hour of watching big, bad Damien Mierro do absolutely fuck all. Slitting his throat sounds even better.

Damien is at the warehouse right now. 

He's been inside for around an hour and a half which means he's due to go back home for lunch imminently. I find myself impatiently checking my watch every few minutes. 

My problem with Damien is that he's had enough time in the big leagues to learn how to keep his fingers clean. You wouldn't catch him killing a fly, but you could be certain that fly would die if it pissed him off enough. Guys for everything. Old, young, home-grown, immigrated - he'd hire anyone as long as whatever they did couldn't be tied back to him.

He probably doesn't even chew his own food, much less wipe his own ass. 

It's why he's boring. 

So carefully trained after years of scaring and beating and drug dealing that he's taught himself how to take the shape of a normal human being. 

Three weeks of watching this faux normal human being has started to give me gray hairs. Bored of anticipation, bored of surveillance, mind-numbingly bored of waiting. 

One truck came out of the warehouse entrance thirty six minutes ago, loaded with dodgy characters but with no Damien in sight. It's the most exciting thing to have happened in the past two hours.

Damien vehemently avoids the drug runs just like he vehemently avoids everything else to do with his own business, so the truck leaving the warehouse while he's inside somewhere doesn't seem in the ordinary. 

That's if there are drugs in the warehouse. I've never been able to get close enough to check, and the police seem to think its one of his legitimate business ventures.

Apparently, he has some good ones stuffed in amongst the bad. Who would've known? 

Men come in and out at all times, randomly. It's in the middle of a car park, surrounded by nothing but open space, littered with a few state of the art Range Rovers. The trucks leave at any time of day or night, seemingly driven by a different young lad each time.