Walking into Nightmares

The Strategist

By this point, he didn't really care about keeping his movements a secret. He knew that he was being strangely candid about his safety, but all he could think about was that this was almost over. He needed to find the next person on his mental list.

Cyril Hillyer.

He needed to have a talk with the man. From the little that they had spoken, he knew that the man was smart enough to play Batty Matty like a stupid puppet, but was he smart enough to play Julian Vasos? For that matter, was Seth Wendell just sending him on a wild goose chase away from his true victim?

No, sadly, he knew that wasn't true. Seth Wendell was a lot of things, a possessive drunk who couldn't see what he had in front of his nose, the leader of several ghost assassins that no one knew if they existed or not, but, he never gave out false information. Ever.

If someone even tried to accuse him of lying, he would first prove himself, then leave the idiot with several of his associates never to be seen again. He may not always give people the answers they wanted, or even tell the whole truth, but he didn't lie. If he said that it was between Matthew Bates, Cyril Hillyer, and Julian Vasos, then it was.

He hoped that he didn't need to visit his friend at all, in fact, if he was really lucky, his one time best friend would never even know that he was a suspect for a few hours.

That decided, he unlocked the door and slid inside the sleek dark red car. He adjusted the mirrors and his seat, before locking the seat belt across his body and starting the car. It seemed to purr around him. He hid a smirk and put it in gear. He had a rat to find.

It took him several hours to finally get a hold of someone that had seen the rat, but that wasn't a surprise. Ridley knew that he had pissed off several dangerous people, including Liano, but was more worried about someone else finding him. Strangely enough, he also got a bite on the name Cyril Hillyer. One of his people knew of the man, but not much more than he dealt in information, and was frequently hired by gangs and other groups to plan out tactics that would take out their enemies.

He could admit it, if only to himself alone in a car, he was a bit jealous. He had to hunt down cheating spouses, while the other got to blackmail gangs and was apparently good enough that only a few of the people who hired him knew his name. The other also had a nickname of his own. The Ghostly Hill. It was just about as stupid as his own nickname, but it didn't mean that it was inappropriate. The man was almost impossible to track down by normal means.

But, Liano wasn't normal.

Liano spent several years building up a silent army that he had never used before. Now that he was, the information seemed to flood him. He parked in an garage in the middle of the city, leaving the keys inside the car on the seat, before smirking and walking with a small thud of his cane echoing through the building.

He had asked for a car that was registered under the name Milo Ramsey. That was the name he was using for now. Until he had a better idea of a name, then, maybe, he might use it.

Sure enough, there was a silver car parked exactly where he had asked for it to be, with the keys in the front seat. He opened the door, having ditched both the car and the body in the trunk, and started it. He needed to get his hands on a bit more information, and he knew who may have it. He glanced in the back seat, and sure enough, there was Don Ridley, tied up and clearly terrified.

He almost couldn't believe that these people were willing to help him, even if it included some less than legal things. One person, Avery Summers, had acquired the car from her husband's car lot and made sure all of the paperwork was in order. He had asked for the car the day before, and had originally planned to pick it up in front of his old office, until he had a better idea. He called another person, George Powers, and asked him to grab the rat and hand him off to Charles Black, who brought him to the car, and brought the car here.