Chinese neck tattoo. I don’t know what else I was expecting. Freddie was a middleman, nothing more. A weaselly little guy who had his ear to the ground and passed on whatever he thought might be valuable to me, which in turn was valuable to him. He wasn’t going to launch an investigation into every new contact he made, nor had I ever expected him to.
It didn’t matter anyway. Identifying the person who fed Freddie intel on Leon White’s station in the criminal underworld wouldn’t change the fact that the people he referred me to were expecting candidates for their job, and the quicker I produced some, the quicker I could be done with the whole thing. Then it would be time for damage control.
If my candidates successfully completed Trish’s contracts—and they would, I had no doubt—then word would soon spread that Rick Carter had started taking on searches he’d previously turned down. It would be harder to back out of those conversations with clients. Those bridges I’d managed to keep intact would begin to smolder.
Candidates would start asking questions, too. Both new and ones already on my roster. Wanting to know if it was true that I’d started handling those types of jobs, which often paid better than the ones I’d become known for. If I told them that no, it was a one-time thing, that might not sit well with all of them. Especially if the steady stream of work I promise, the thing I stake my reputation on, starts to dwindle because clients start to utilize my competitors as retaliation for doing a job for Trish that I refused to do for them. Wouldn’t happen with all my clients, but I’d be a fool to think it wouldn’t happen with any. Dominos would fall. That much was inevitable. The only questions would be how many and for how long.
Or, alternatively, Trish’s job becomes but the first step over a line I soon leave far in my rearview. I prove as successful finding candidates for similar contracts as I’d been in the others so far. More clients come my way. More jobs. More candidates. More money. And more notoriety—more visibility—at the agencies that employ people whose job it was to put guys like me away for a long, long time.
Both options sucked. And in either scenario, the agents on Trish’s list—six people who put their lives on the line every day to uphold justice—would be dead. Because of me.
Happy fucking Wednesday.
CHAPTER SIX
The tail was on me the minute I stepped out the front door of my building. It was Guy #2, the smarmy lawyer look-alike, keeping pace about twenty feet behind. He had on a similar suit to the one he’d worn yesterday, except he’d added an earpiece to the ensemble. The small white cord curled down noticeably from his right ear to the tiny microphone clipped to his shirt collar. I couldn’t be sure if he wanted me to know he was there or he just sucked at his job, but either way, even on a sidewalk swollen with weekday foot traffic, he stood out.
After a few blocks, it was apparent his task was merely to observe, rather than intimidate. There really was no need for the latter. Trish had delivered that message loud and clear during our meeting.
When I ducked into the emergency clinic—a nondescript sliver of building tucked between a butcher and a hookah shop—he crossed the street and parked himself on a bench. He didn’t bother pretending to read a newspaper or check his phone. Just lit up a cigarette and watched me through the clinic’s front window. It wasn’t much of a show. I was the last scheduled patient, and the physician on duty had sent the office staff home thirty minutes ago. He ushered me into a back room before I could enjoy the three-month-old magazines and stale coffee in the meager waiting area.
“What the fuck did you do?” the doctor asked as he removed the bandage from my pinkie. The space heater in the corner of the exam room was set to high, pumping out tropical waves of hot air. Sweat glistened from the thick black hair on his arms, but he never washed up before snapping on his surgical gloves. I bet the butcher next door had better sterilization practices.
“I slipped and fell,” I said.
“Uh huh, we get a lot of those.” He rinsed the wound with alcohol and called me a pussy when I winced. Or to be more accurate, he called me a kut as he didn’t speak a word of English. I’d moved to Brussels from Germany a little over three years ago and my Dutch was still choppy, but getting better. I knew all the curse words, though.
“I’m assuming you didn’t save the tip?” he asked.
“Sold it for beer money,” I replied.
He grunted and pulled several medical tools out of a drawer, each a little less shiny than I would have preferred. One of them was a needle full of novocaine that he jabbed directly into the exposed tissue without so much as a heads-up. Despite the nerve damage, it still gave me a jolt.
“Kut,” he muttered again.
Twenty minutes later, he was finished. He cut away the loose, dead skin around the edges and filed down the protruding bone until it was short enough to stitch the remaining flesh closed around it. Finally, he slathered the entire tip with antibiotic ointment and re-bandaged it. I paid him five hundred euros in cash, and he let me leave through the back door. When I emerged from the alley, Guy #2 was nowhere to be found.
I made it all the way to O’Reilly’s without seeing him reappear. It was my last stop of the day, so I’d soon find out if he called it quits or was waiting for me back at my apartment. In the meantime, I had one more meeting on my schedule.
I was at the bar, halfway through my first beer when Joey sat down next to me. He was carrying a cigar box, wrapped in brown paper.
“What’s a nice gal like you doing in a place like this?” he asked.
“Waiting for you, handsome,” I said. “Buy you a beer?”
“Heineken.”
I signaled the bartender and told her to put it on my tab. When she put the glass down in front of Joey, her name and phone number were written on the napkin underneath. He gave it a cursory glance and stuffed it in the back pocket of his jeans, where there were probably three more just like it. His ass hadn’t had time to warm the barstool yet and already that chiseled jaw and those baby blue eyes had worked their magic. Some girls just liked that ripped, 3 percent body fat look I guess.
“I’m going to start meeting you in places where the employees are all old and ugly,” I said, shaking my head. “Try to salvage what’s left of my self-esteem.”
“Could always hit up Delirium,” he said, “mingle with the tourists. Place is so thick with them, I’d get lost in the crowd.”
“Ten bucks says the hottest girl in the place finds you anyway.”
Joey chuckled and sipped his beer. “Twenty says we’re back here next time, so it doesn’t matter.”
He wasn’t wrong. O’Reilly’s was the only place in town where I actually had a tab. A traditional sports bar, the walls were lined with TVs and the waitresses poured into tight-fitting uniforms. It was filled with guys who didn’t give a shit about what I did for a living. Somewhere I could have a beer without worrying whether the couple at the next table were eavesdropping on my conversation. Which was good because Joey and I had a lot to discuss. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as fruitful a dialogue as I’d hoped.
“So you have no idea who they are?” I said, after giving him the CliffsNotes version of my past twenty-four hours. “Patricia Baum. Crooked Interpol agents. Safe house on Albert Street in London. None of this means anything to you?”
“Nada,” Joey said. “I wish I could help you out.”
I’d met Joseph Walls a little over a year ago, and I could count on one hand the number of times he’d disappointed me when it came to providing reliable information. Wouldn’t need more than two fingers, either. After getting dishonorably discharged from the Army for dealing hash on base, instead of going back home to Michigan, Joey decided to remain in Brussels and picked up right where he left off. Only now, unencumbered by the security protocols inherent to an active member of the armed forces, his client list was much bigger. He expanded his services, too, adding gunrunning to his thriving drug business. That made him a very well-connected individual. Way more so than Freddie. He was a golden goose to a man in my position.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Why fly you all the way to London and show off their operation instead of meeting at a neutral site?”
“Power play. Prove how big and resourceful they are, how far their reach extends, in case I have any thoughts about backing out or going to the authorities.”
“And you’re sure their guys were carrying Interpol creds?” he asked.
I sipped my beer, a delicious amber local brew, and nodded. “Yup. I thought at first they might be bogus, but I’ve been around enough corrupt cops to tell the real ones from the phonies. They knew all the moves, and sported matching hardware.”
“Looks like they weren’t afraid to use it either.”
I wiggled my pinkie. The novocaine was starting to wear off, but the beer was picking up the slack. “They could have done a lot worse.” I thought of the knife point pressed against my eyelid, that unwelcome, unpleasant little bump pushing through the skin.
