Chapter 121: Contract Job

TL: LittlePeach

The fact that someone completely unexpected had answered when I called Maximilien's number didn't sit right with me.

Especially since I had no way of knowing whether the young woman who'd introduced herself as his little sister really was his sister.

'I did hear he had a younger sister.'

For that matter, I wasn't even sure Maximilien had actually been abducted.

If he'd really been abducted, wouldn't taking away his phone be the first thing anyone would do?

For all I knew, some unknown party could be using Maximilien as bait to lure me out.

Either way, though, one thing was certain. Maximilien had gotten himself mixed up in something nasty.

'Well, then I guess I'll just fuck them up first.'

Whatever they were plotting, I planned to play along and let them lead me wherever they wanted.

If things went south, I could just beat every last one of them down, grab someone by the collar, and interrogate them about Maximilien's whereabouts.

And so, I boarded another train and returned to Italy.

[Italy, Naples, Piazza Ballarò Café]

After passing through Milan, I ended up in Naples again, of all places.

When I arrived at the café they'd sent me by text, the place was closed.

-I'm here.

Just in case, I sent them a quick text and loitered near the entrance.

Tap, tap.

"Here."

"Ah."

Someone tapped me on the back while I deliberately stood there with my guard down.

When I turned around, I found a woman a full head shorter than me staring up at me with her hood pulled low.

Jet-black bobbed hair, faint freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose, and a petite frame.

Her face looked every bit as young as her voice had sounded over the phone.

"This way."

Without another word, she took the lead.

We passed through a quiet alley in Naples and continued deeper until we reached an old backstreet where there wasn't another soul in sight.

Our destination looked like a shabby warehouse, one so gloomy that barely any sunlight reached it even under the blazing midday sun.

Creak.

The moment I opened the rusty iron door and stepped inside.

Bang!

'A trap after all?'

The iron door slammed shut behind me the instant I entered.

Maybe it was because I'd spent until yesterday acting out a full-blown spy movie.

The moment my hand reflexively slipped into my pocket, the Walther PPK rolled neatly into my palm.

Flash!

At that moment, incandescent bulbs flickered on throughout the dark warehouse, flooding the place with light.

"Oh."

The musty, filthy interior was, in a word, complete chaos.

Two or three laptops were strewn across a half-rotten table, with antennas and all kinds of communication equipment I couldn't identify connected to them.

At least it didn't seem to be a trap.

"Welcome, Sunny Kick. My brother was always telling me how incredible you were."

"...."

"This is a temporary base I set up. It's a dump, but make yourself comfortable."

The woman dragged over a thoroughly battered chair from somewhere and plopped herself down right in front of me.

"Like I told you, my brother's been missing for a week now. I want you to help me find him."

Now that I took a closer look, there were several things about her that resembled Maximilien, from her sharply defined eyes to the way she kept her lips firmly pressed together.

But that alone wasn't enough for me to drop my guard, so I stared at her skeptically.

Whether I trusted her or not, the woman abruptly held out her hand.

"My name's Veronica. You can call me Bella."

Maximilien had constantly bragged about his little sister using all sorts of strange nicknames like Bella, Belka, and Nicky.

Now that even her name checked out, there didn't seem to be much reason to keep doubting her.

"Sunny Kick."

I sat down as well on a wooden chair that looked halfway to rotting apart.

Bella immediately got down to business in her characteristically bold tone.

"I don't know if you knew this, but my brother retired from mercenary work a year ago and opened his own restaurant here in Naples. Apparently, word spread about it right from the start, and business was booming. But about a month ago, he started contacting me less and less. Then, at some point, he suddenly stopped altogether."

Bella released my hand and sighed again.

Her lips moved slightly as though she were wondering where to begin.

"At first, I figured the restaurant was just keeping him too busy. But when he kept ignoring me for days, I got a bad feeling and came to Naples myself. Do you know what I found when I got to the restaurant?"

"It was closed?"

"I wish that was all. The inside was completely trashed, and some thugs were drinking there in broad daylight and using the place as their hideout."

She chewed on her lip with a gloomy expression.

"I was alone, and those thugs scared me, so I had no choice but to get out of there for the time being."

"You did the right thing. If you'd gotten mixed up with them for no reason, Maximilien would be bawling his eyes out by now."

"Hah. Let him cry. I'm the one about to start crying tears of blood here."

With a hollow laugh, Bella pulled a phone from her pocket.

"His last known location was near the restaurant, so I searched around the area just in case. I found his phone smashed up and dumped in a trash can behind the restaurant. I recovered what I could and went through it, but there wasn't a single useful clue."

That was probably the phone she'd answered my call on.

After hearing the whole story, the situation seemed pretty clear.

The restaurant had shut down, its owner had vanished, and a bunch of thugs had taken over the place.

Everything pointed toward the same conclusion.

Maximilien had been abducted.

I leaned back in my chair and calmly worked through the possibilities.

"Have you checked where Maximilien lived?"

"My brother didn't have a separate place. He lived at the restaurant. Rent around here is really expensive."

"If business was going that well, he must've had people working with him. Did you track any of them down?"

"I called every number I could recover from his phone. I did, but.... None of them answered. A few people picked up, but every single one of them dodged the subject and said they didn't know anything."

"You reported it to the police?"

"Of course I did. But they said I'd have to wait more than a month before they'd officially treat him as missing."

"Yikes."

Bella's expression grew more and more dejected as she continued explaining.

She had been desperately chasing after traces of her brother without a single solid lead. No wonder the worry was eating her alive.

There were quite a few things bothering me, but for now, I nodded.

"All right. I understand the situation."

"Will you help me?"

"Whether I'll help you comes second."

"What is it? Do you need money? Just say the word. I'll give you everything I have if that's what it takes."

"It's not about money.... Let's eat first."

Bella looked like she hadn't eaten properly in days. Both cheeks were visibly hollow, and dark circles had sunk deep beneath her eyes as though she hadn't been sleeping either.

At this rate, she looked ready to collapse before we even found Maximilien.

She gave a baffled little laugh at my completely out-of-nowhere suggestion.

"What? Food is important right now?"

"Of course it is. I came all the way here from Switzerland without eating a single thing. Take me somewhere nearby that serves good pizza."

"What the...."

"I don't work properly unless you feed me."

Maximilien's little sister was basically my little sister too.

"No...."

She muttered in disbelief, but getting properly fed was serious business.

***

We moved to a local pizzeria near the warehouse.

"Anything you can't eat? Any allergies?"

"None."

"Then I'm just ordering whatever I want, okay?"

"Not whatever. Order something good."

"You're pretty picky."

Had she changed her mind once we actually got to the restaurant?

Maybe, as someone from a country famous for its cuisine, she wanted to give me a proper taste of Italy. The moment Bella sat down, she started ordering one dish after another.

Before long, the smell of food filling the table must have overwhelmed her hunger, because the rigid tension in her expression melted away.

"So good...."

Munch, munch.

She began stuffing Margherita pizza into her mouth.

The way she ate so enthusiastically was adorably hamster-like.

"There was a lot of equipment in that room I didn't recognize. Can I ask what you do?"

"Can't you tell just by looking? I'm a hacker."

"Oh."

"That wasn't my place, either. I just rented it on Airbnb for a little while. I was staying in the UK before this."

It was the first time in my life I'd met someone who openly introduced herself as a hacker.

Seeing her lift her chin with such shameless confidence made me chuckle despite myself.

She really was Maximilien's little sister. She was quite the bold one.

"If you're a hacker, shouldn't you be able to track down your brother's location pretty quickly without my help?"

"It's nowhere near that easy. All the data on the phone my brother left behind had been wiped. Recovering just his contacts was hard enough."

"Ah."

"I was starting to get scared that I might never find him. Then you happened to call. My brother was always going on and on about what an amazing person you were, so.... I don't know why, but I felt like you'd be able to find him right away. That's why I suddenly asked you to help me."

"What did Maximilien say about me?"

For some reason, she suddenly looked at me through narrowed eyes.

Then those narrowed eyes turned into a glare.

"He said you were a lunatic who puts pineapple on pizza."

"Ah...."

I kept my mouth shut and stabbed innocently at the pasta noodles with the fork in my hand.

'Pineapple pizza is good, though....'

Not that the Margherita pizza I was eating right now wasn't plenty delicious too.

Anyway.

Munch, munch.

"So, what are you going to do first?"

"Intelligence gathering."

"Intelligence gathering.... How?"

"I'm thinking of paying a visit to the restaurant those thugs took over."

"Whaaat? Don't say something ridiculous!"

Bella's eyes went wide as if she'd just heard the dumbest idea imaginable.

I had no intention of entertaining objections, so I twirled some pasta around my fork and ate it.

"Just give me the address. I'll handle everything else."

There was no need to make things complicated.

Simple is best.

I could just ask them directly.

***

Just because I had a sturdy body didn't mean charging in fists-first was always the answer.

Let's imagine how things would play out under perfectly ordinary circumstances.

'I'm a friend of the owner. Did you guys happen to abduct my friend?'

'Yeah. And what the fuck are you going to do about it if we did?'

If the conversation went like that, things would get pretty annoying.

I'd have to beat down all ten or so of those big bastards one by one, tie them up so they couldn't pull anything, interrogate them, and if they still refused to talk, maybe even torture them....

Not only would it waste a ton of time, cleaning up afterward would be a pain in the ass too.

So all I had to do was change my approach slightly.

Jingle.

A small chime hanging from the restaurant door rang out brightly.

Even that sound somehow felt perfectly suited to an Italian restaurant.

"Huh? What the hell?"

"We're closed. Get lost."

Just as Bella had said, a bunch of shabby-looking thugs had taken over the restaurant.

One group lounged across tables that had practically been wrecked, staring at their smartphones, while another group sat in a corner playing poker and puffing away on cigarettes.

Ignoring them, I looked around the restaurant until one man loitering near the entrance rose to his feet and strode toward me.

"Hey, you monkey bastard. You fucking deaf? If you don't want to croak, hurry up and...."

Crack!

"Ghk?!"

Just as the man reached out to grab me by the collar.

Instead of bothering to answer, I immediately swung my fist and drove a clean uppercut into his wide-open jaw.

He staggered backward for several steps, arms flailing, before toppling flat onto his back.

Crash!

"Fuck!"

"Who the fuck are you?!"

The atmosphere turned hostile in an instant.

They grabbed anything they could use as a weapon, beer bottles, iron pipes, and the like, and rushed toward me in a mob.

Including the guy lying there with his eyes rolled back, there were exactly ten of them.

Click.

"H-Huh?"

"F-Fuck...."

I openly pulled a handgun from the inside pocket of my jacket.

My small and adorable Walther PPK, suppressor and all.

At the unexpected sight of a gun, they gulped dryly and began edging backward.

"I took a contract job from the Scampia apartment complex and came straight here."

A convincing performance needed a good concept.

By this point, it went without saying.

"T-The Scampia apartment complex?"

"That's right. My target is the owner of this restaurant."

My name was Nguyen Kodam.

A hitman who accepted blank checks.

"What is your relationship with the owner of this restaurant?"

I had come here to kill the owner of this restaurant.

*****

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