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“We’ll get one around Lake Salvador,” Bobby said with a careless shrug. “Tourists renting those camps leave their cars unlocked. Hell, we could find an occupied camp and take their food. No need to go showin’ our faces in a country store.”
“Fine,” Ed snapped. “But we need to figure out what we’re going to do about the Doyle job. If we’re tagged as ‘persons of interest’ or plain old suspects—which we will be—we need to either bail on the job or do it fast and run. One or the other.”
Bail? What? Hell no.
“We ain’t bailin’,” Corey said flatly. This was his business. He’d built it from nothing and, at this point, it was all he had left in the world. He’d been the one to approach Trevor Doyle and he’d also been the one to convince the director that they had a foolproof plan for eliminating Bella Butler before the trial. I am not walking away. “I got too much money sunk into investigating Bella Butler’s security team.” Finding Allyson’s and Zach’s secrets had cost a considerable sum of his own money. “Her court date is next week. She needs to be shut up before then anyway.”
“And we can’t move until she does,” Bobby added. “Unless we want to attack her in her safe house, and that’s not smart. She’s got too much security there. We need to wait until she’s on her way into the city before we set the charges and plant the bomb-making supplies in Comic Book Guy’s car. By the time the cops trace the online threats to the Discord server and Comic Book Guy, Doyle will have already paid us for a job well done and we’ll be long gone.”
“Yeah, I know.” Ed rubbed his temples. “But this was not supposed to go this way.”
“That’s for damn sure,” Corey muttered. “Bobby, check with your buddy again. Find out when Jace talked to a cop, because he must have led them to the camp. Allyson didn’t because she was blindfolded. Nobody else knew where we were. Nobody that’s still alive, anyway.”
“Aaron did,” Ed said.
“He wouldn’t tell.” Corey was sure about that. “The cops would have found his lab, his cash, and his stash. He doesn’t know we took his money, and he’ll be wanting to protect it. Bobby, make the call.”
Corey ate his breakfast while Bobby made his call. When he hung up, he looked satisfied.
“Jace found a beat cop in a convenience store parking lot at four o’clock this morning. Told him everything. Cried like a little baby.”
“I’ll make him cry more than that,” Corey said darkly.
Bobby nodded. “Save some of him for me. My buddy says that he’s been taken into protective custody and stashed in a safe house. That information was just released.”
“Where’s the safe house?” Corey asked, because he was paying that place a visit.
“My buddy’s finding out.” Bobby laid his phone on the table. “He’s going to text me, so you watch for it. I’m going back to bed for a little while.”
Ed turned to Corey as Bobby left the room. “We need to get to Jace soon. He could jeopardize the Doyle job.”
“He can’t do any more damage than he’s already done. He’s probably told them about Dewey and Rick. We know he told them about the camp, but he doesn’t know anything about our other business.”
“Are you sure? None of us thought that Jace was smart enough to get away. We shouldn’t underestimate him again. What if he overheard something we said at the office? He was hanging around all the time and Bobby talked about Bella Butler sometimes. You know that Bobby runs his mouth when he’s bored.”
Goddammit. That was true.
“I heard that!” Bobby called from the bedroom.
“I don’t give a fuck,” Ed called back. “Go to sleep and let the grown-ups talk.”
“Fuck you!” Bobby yelled angrily.
Corey growled impatiently. “Shut up, both of you. What could Jace have heard, Ed?”
“I don’t know and neither do you. And that’s my point. We don’t know what he heard, and he isn’t under our control any longer. He could be saying anything.”
Corey hated to admit that Ed was right. “We have Bobby’s NOPD friend looking for Jace and we’ll take care of him as soon as we can.”
“I still say we should walk away.”
Corey glared at him. He could tell Ed that Trevor Doyle had threatened, in so many words, to kill them if they failed him. But that wasn’t going to be a worry because they were not going to fail. “So noted. But we’re still not going to.”
“Fine,” Ed grumbled. “So where are we going once the Doyle job is done? We have enough to retire now, especially since we’ve taken over Dewey’s offshore accounts. We could go to the Bahamas like Aaron was planning to do.”
They had money now, it was true. But it wouldn’t last forever, and murder for hire would provide work for years to come. Especially once he’d come through for Trevor Doyle. Everyone would know that someone had intervened to silence Bella Butler, but the cops wouldn’t be able to pin anything on Doyle. It was a brilliant plan. And all mine.
He’d had nothing when he’d come back from Iraq. He hadn’t been able to get a decent job. His ODPMC discharge had seen to that. Damn army shrinks. He hadn’t been the only one to rough up the locals. Other soldiers did it all the time. But they made an example out of me.
