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A gleeful smile spread across McMahon’s lips. “How ’bout a bigger towel?”
“Fuck you.”
The detective took the exit leading to the shipyard where this whole fiasco had started and hit the brakes a little harder than necessary. I scrambled out of the car to retrieve the clothes and boots I’d left on the concrete dock, hoping my car keys were still in my pants pocket and my car was still there. A yawn cracked my jaw as I bent to pick up the pile of clothing, and I turned back to see McMahon smirking from the driver’s seat as he rolled down the window. The pants he’d given me were clearly meant for a smaller man, and while they covered the important parts, I looked like I was ready for high water. I’d bet good money he did this shit on purpose.
But he was right. I was definitely getting tired of everything—the fugitives who were dumb enough to skip court but not to skip town, the early mornings and late nights, having to retrieve my clothes or what was left of them after they’d been picked through from various points around the city, McMahon’s goddamn smirks.
Maybe I had a future in bodyguarding. At the bare minimum, I had to go to SPD HQ anyway so the desk sergeant could give me the body receipt I needed to claim my cut of Valencia’s bond. I could meet the kid, see if he was going to be as big a pain in the ass as I thought.
McMahon leaned over the passenger’s seat as I dug through the pockets of my pants, my fingers curling around my keys. “Nero…”
I sighed. “Fine. I’ll come meet the kid, but I’m not making any promises.”
“Then I make no promises on the towel.”
I shot him the bird as he rolled up the window, laughing, and pulled away, knowing I would follow because I wanted to get paid.
CHAPTER
TWO
FELIX
Metal table boltedto the floor. Metal chairs. Metal door. Gray walls. Camera in the corner, red light blinking like some sort of sinister cyborg’s eye. Big glass window that showed my reflection but not whoever was on the other side.
FBI or local PD, it didn’t matter. All interrogation rooms looked the same.
At least this time, I wasn’t in trouble.
Or, well, not like the last time I was forced to sit in one of these rooms while the feds figured out what to do with me.
Good thing I’d been barely eighteen and too scared shitless to be anything but honest. It was a classic case of wrong place, wrong time, falling for the wrong guy and trusting when he said I wouldn’t get caught hacking into his employer’s system. Turns out, the aforementioned guy was running a Ponzi scheme, and I was unwittingly helping him fleece people out of millions.
For a genius who’d graduated college before I’d been old enough to vote, it had been pretty fucking stupid.
Luckily, the feds and prosecutor took pity on me, and instead of locking me up for my cybercrimes, they turned me into an asset and used me when they needed to do things that werejust this side of outside the law. They also loaned me out to law enforcement agencies as they saw fit.
Which was how I ended up here. In an interrogation room at Seattle PD headquarters.
Apparently, I’d gotten a little too close to finding something a little too carelessly, which I still didn’t understand because I covered my tracks like the pro that I was, but nevertheless, someone had found out who I was, and worse, where I was, and they’d sent a picture that quite frankly scared the shit out of me. In a moment of panic, I sent my SPD contact, Detective McMahon, a copy of the picture, and he’d shown up, sirens blaring, and pulled me out of my apartment well before dawn this morning.
And since then, I’d been sitting in this room, waiting—again—for someone else to figure out what they were going to do with me.
Every once in a while, it might be nice to feel like I was actually in control of my life, but the sad fact was, since I’d screwed up as a dumb kid five years ago, I wasn’t, and with a literal target on my head, maybe that was a good thing.
And despite the circumstances, they did pay me, so I wasn’t destitute. Could I make more money taking jobs from the dark web? Uh, duh. But I liked my freedom enough to deal with my two-bedroom apartment in a halfway decent neighborhood that I could stock with real food, not just ramen and microwave meals, and expensive vintage action figures.
Things could definitely be worse.
I ran my finger along a scratch in the table, tracing it up and down, up and down, while getting lost in my head. I wanted to go home. I wanted all this to be a bad dream that I’d jolt awake from any second.
The door to the room banged open, and I almost jumped out of my skin. No one had been by in what felt like hours, and thepaper cup of water they’d dropped off had long gone tepid. Now, though, Detective McMahon stood in the doorway, his jacket, shirt, and tie rumpled from what had clearly been a long day if the bags under his eyes and the deep grooves around his mouth were any indication.
“Sorry to keep you waiting so long, Felix. There were a lot of details to work out.” He fully entered the room, letting the door slam against the wall, then bounce back so it almost closed again. I caught a hint of seawater and kelp on the air. It was soothing and totally out of place for where we were, but still, it settled me a little, and I tried to smile, but it got stuck somewhere around a grimace.
“It’s okay.” I dug my nail into the groove on the table again, not looking up to meet Detective McMahon’s gaze that was boring into me from across the table. “Can I go home now?”
He hesitated for a long second, and I knew the answer before he uttered the words. “Uh, no. Not yet.”
