Page 396 of Devil’s Disciples

If he couldn’t be truthful with me about his endeavors, I couldn’t trust him with the details of mine. “Then I can’t answer your question.”

He looked at me. “Are you serious?”

“You either trust me, or you don’t,” I said. “Whatever you say stays between you and me. I won’t jeopardize my relationship with you—or yours with your men—by letting anyone know what we’ve discussed. You’ll have to agree to do the same.”

He stared blankly.

“You’ve heard the phrase, ‘there’s honor amongst thieves’?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Do you know what that means?”

He shrugged. “Never gave it much thought.”

“The Omerta,” I explained. “The code of silence. One thief will never reveal the activities of another. Ever. To anyone. There’s honor amongst thieves. I’m a thief.”

He studied me for a moment, and then let out a sigh. “I went to dispose of a body last night. I can’t tell you where, but I’ll say it went well. We went to do a job after that, as a group. This job included cutting into a safe and taking the contents. The only problem was that after we spent four or five hours cutting into it, it was fucking empty.”

I gulped a breath. “What uhhm. What time were you there?”

“Got there about one in the morning. Maybe a little before.”

It wasn’t coincidental. It was fact. We were both at the same place, with intentions of doing the same job. I simply arrived long before he did.

“Huge house?” I asked. “Driveway about a half mile long, lined with palm trees?”

His filthy face went pale. He swallowed so heavily that I heard it.

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes’,” I said. “Sounds like we might have been at the same place at different times.”

He seemed mortified. “I know you weren’t there for the contents of the safe,” he said. “Because it was pretty obvious we were the first ones to cut into it. What were you after?”

His tone was flat. He wasn’t upset. At least he didn’t seem to be. Shocked? Yes. Upset? At least not yet. Overall, I was pleased.

I reached for his knee and rested my hand there. “I manipulated his safe.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” His brows knitted together. “Manipulated?”

“I cracked his safe,” I said.

He returned a puzzled look. “Like, turned the dial and opened the door?”

“Pretty much.”

“You knew the combination?”

“I didn’t.” I drew a long breath and then let it out. “I figured it out, though.”

He coughed out a laugh that nearly brought him to tears. Tears that I imagined were a result of frustration. “You’re fucking serious?”

“My father was a locksmith, and a master at safe manipulation. He taught me. He could manipulate a lock in minutes. For years, he held the world record on manipulating a four-number combination lock.”

He laughed. This time without nearly crying. “There’s a world record for that?”

I nodded. “There is.”

“How long did it take you to crack it?” he asked.