The funeral suit was navy blue. Pressed, spotless. Too clean for the man who wore it.
He sat at the bus stop across from Vincent with a suitcase at his feet and a tremor in his left eye that refused to sync with the rest of his face.
Vincent hadn't noticed him at first. But the system had.
Target acquired.Thomas A. Neely. Corporate litigation. Age forty-seven.Cleared three known money-launderers for organized crime syndicates.Two deaths indirectly traced.Reward scaled: 230 BP.Complexity Tier: C.
Vincent shifted on the bench. The man coughed into a silk handkerchief and tapped something into his phone. His smile was brief, ritualistic. The kind used to seal lies.
It was 6:42 a.m. Neely's bus route pointed downtown. Court hearing at 8:15. A driverless vehicle would collect him in six minutes.
Six minutes.
Vincent scanned the street. A fire hydrant. Slanted storm drain. Bolted newspaper box. An open trash can beside a crooked signpost for Bus 7.
He stood and bent to retrieve a discarded coffee cup, half-crushed and sagging from rain. Inside the lid: a plastic spoon. Handle cracked and twisted.
He walked across the street. Neely's eyes lifted.
"You dropped this," Vincent said.
"I don't drink coffee," the man replied, though he accepted the cup without thought.
As he peered inside, puzzled by the spoon, Vincent moved. His other hand slipped into the trash bin, closed around a broken shard of mirror. Palm-sized. Glass edge still clean.
The cup fell. The spoon hit concrete.
Neely opened his mouth to protest. But Vincent was already behind him.
The mirror pierced upward beneath the jawline. Not fast, but committed. The breath that followed was wet and final. There was no scream.
A bus passed. Empty. Indifferent.
Vincent eased the body down into a natural slump. Hands resting against the suitcase. He returned the coffee cup to the man's lap as if he'd never left it.
Blood Points surged. Influence climbed. The glyph under Vincent's wrist burned steady.
A line echoed across the silence. It did not sound like instruction. It sounded like scripture being written.
Silence can wear a tie and still stink of blood.
Lesson four: Even elegance rots from the inside.