“You at least get a few shots in, use any of the moves I taught you?” he teased, punching me in the arm. It hurt more than I bet he intended, but with the size of his biceps, there probably wasn’t much he could do about it.
“I held my own,” I said. “Broke a nose, popped a couple testicles.”
“My man,” he said, raising his glass. We toasted my dirty fighting tactics and laughed.
“I can’t believe Leon knows people that high up,” Joey said, shaking his head. “He’s a drug-running pimp, not a criminal mastermind.”
“I have a feeling Leon doesn’t know the first thing about who they are or what they do. He serves some useful purpose for them, but he’s a tool and nothing more.”
“You gonna go talk to him about it, see what he does know?”
I shook my head. “Thought about it, but I can’t trust that fat bastard not to blab to his buddies that I’m asking around about them. I just want to wrap this up without causing more problems than I already have.”
“Fuck it,” Joey said, raising his glass again. “At least you’re getting paid, right?”
I spun my pint glass between my hands and didn’t answer.
“I mean, it’s not like you had much of a—”
“They’re federal agents, Joe.” I looked up, wiping my hand over my lips, as if the words left behind a stain. “Six of them.”
Joey waited, his mouth hung partially open, before he exhaled and played with his own pint glass. After a minute he said, “What were you supposed to do, Rick? Refuse? They’d have slit your throat, found somebody else, and those agents would still wind up dead. Might as well do the job, take the money, and live to regret it.”
“Yeah,” I said, because there really was nothing else to say. This was happening. I’d just have to find a way to live with it. Christ, what a shitty fucking thing to say. I finished my beer in one long swallow, set the empty glass down on the bar harder than I intended, and cleared my throat. “Anyway, after this is done, I’ll be going away for a while.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Someplace with a beach. Europe’s been good to me, but I need a healthy dose of sand and bikinis, if you know what I mean.” I laughed to show I was taking it all in stride, but it was a feeble attempt. Joey’s expression didn’t change.
“You take care of yourself, okay?” he said.
“You too.”
“Here, this will help,” he said, sliding the cigar box over to me. “Maybe now you’ll take my advice and keep a spare around.”
I reached into my inside coat pocket, pulled out an envelope wrapped in a rubber band, and set it on the bar in front of him. He didn’t disrespect me by counting its contents.
“You got time to help me break this in?” I asked, holding up the box.
“Friday night at ten?”
“Works for me.” I stood to leave but he grabbed my arm.
“There’s something else in there, too. A lead.”
“Somebody good?”
“Somebody new. Never met him. He’s supposed to be young and raw, but brimming with talent. Just your type, right?”
I slapped him on the back. “You know me so well, buddy.”
I unwrapped the box back in my apartment and removed the new Glock 19 Joey had procured to replace the one Trish’s people had confiscated. Serial numbers removed. I dry fired it a few times then slid a fresh magazine in.
I had one more bit of housekeeping to attend to before I started contacting candidates, but so far I was stuck on hold, waiting for my guy to get back to me. Not that I was surprised. Techies can be notoriously fidgety, and this one was new to me. I’d been impressed with a hack he pulled last month on a dark web bidding site for stolen military goods and had been keeping him on the bench, waiting for the right job to come along.
Never thought the right job would involve him working for me, but my life was all about adapting to the unexpected.
It was a search for a similar type of candidate, a guy with computer skills who used them to do illegal online shit, that got me into this life. I didn’t go looking for the search. Rather, the client found me through an innocuous mutual connection, an accountant who did the books for the side of this person’s business that was legal and above board. When his boss said he was looking for someone with an IT background, he recommended he contact me. I’d done some IT recruiting for my firm, even though we didn’t specialize in that area, and my friend was always happy to toss me a bone.
What his boss told me was that he wanted someone to hack into his company’s servers to test their security measures. What I learned later was that he’d paid the candidate a helluva lot more to then hack into a bunch of smaller businesses in the area and steal their customers’ stored credit card information. What neither of them knew was that I was at a time in my life when financial circumstances left me prone to making bad decisions. The kind of bad decisions I would not normally have made otherwise. Like saying yes when the same client referred me to someone else looking for a similar candidate, even though by then I’d figured out what was really going on.
If I’d known then what I know now, about where that first bad decision would lead, would I have still done it? I’d like to say no, but that’s a lie. Or an optimistic assumption, at best. People who aren’t prone to making bad decisions often fail to foresee just how life-altering a truly bad one can be. How trying to do the right thing for your family can put them in more danger than you’d ever imagined. The kind of danger that makes your stomach clench and your bowels loosen. The kind of danger that robs you of any of the joy you used to have just by being with them, because all you could think of, every minute of every day, was what the people you now worked for would do to them if you ever tried to correct that initial bad decision. The kind of danger that leaves a man no choice but to disappear in the middle of the night, move half a world away, and set up an entirely new life, simply to protect the one he’d left behind.
Before closing my blinds and turning in for the night, I waved to the car parked across the street, the physical representation of my latest bad decision. It had been waiting for me when I returned from O’Reilly’s. In the dim light it looked empty, until a tiny orange circle appeared, just barely visible on the driver’s side. The cigarette was one of many that would be in a pile by the curb the next morning.
CHAPTER SEVEN
That cigarette pile was precisely why I needed to connect with my tech candidate. If Trish was going to the trouble of tailing me around town and staking out my place, then it stood to reason she was also listening in whenever possible. They might have bugged my apartment, but I didn’t care; they could listen to me drink and jerk off all they wanted. But if they somehow tapped my phone—or at the very least were tracking numbers and reading texts—then that was a problem.
All recruiters are protective of their database, so there was that initial, knee-jerk territoriality. But there was a bigger risk involved. If they were able to contact my candidates directly and bypass the middleman, then that not only saved them a hefty chunk of change, it also made me very expendable. I had no idea if tapping a cell phone to that extent was within their realm of capability, but I wasn’t rolling the dice to find out. I needed a new device.
Fortunately, when I got out of the shower that morning, I had a new chat message waiting for me. My tech guy had responded.
I’m interested, his text said.
Good, I wrote back. Where do you want to meet?
