“Whatever,” I said, pulling an envelope from my jacket pocket, swollen with $20,000 in cash. It had been earmarked for cheap Mexican hotels and expensive tequila that I would never get to drink. In the same envelope was the plane ticket I bought what seemed like a lifetime ago. Useless now. I counted out $5,000 each for Joey and Erica. They’d earned it. “Thanks for helping me out tonight, but I don’t need anything else from either of you.”
I held a wad of cash in each hand, and winced as Erica took hers from my left. It was barely strong enough to grip the money.
“Looks to me like you could use one more favor,” she said. Then, still holding my hand, she pulled my arm hard toward her. The pain was blinding and only got worse as she manipulated it up and then backward until the shoulder joint popped back into place. I dropped to one knee when she let me go, my right hand pressed against my shoulder, which still hurt like hell but not nearly as bad as before. I took a few breaths as the pain subsided, then got to my feet.
“Thanks,” I said, slowly rotating my arm.
She nodded. “Your ex-wife’s fiancé, is he a good man?”
“I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t really care about him. I mean, I do, but I care more about protecting my family. If he’s in danger then they may be too. I can’t just sit back and do nothing.” Then, quieter, “My wife already lost one husband and my kids lost their father. They don’t deserve to lose another.”
Erica considered that for a moment and then said, “You need to get to the United States, yes?” I nodded. “I may be able to help you with that, too.”
“How?”
“I still have some connections from my days with the KSK, could pull some strings,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.
“Erica, that would be amazing. Thank you.”
“One condition.”
“Name it.”
“I go with you. Your chivalry is admirable but fucking stupid. You can’t possibly do this alone.”
I was already shaking my head. “And I can’t ask you to get involved. I’ve already got too many dead bodies on my conscience.”
“You’re not asking, you’re buying.”
“What?”
Erica smiled. “You wanted me to do a working interview. Now at least I’ll get compensated for it.”
It did make sense. I’d walked through every possible course of action in my head, and going to New Jersey to alert Robert personally was the only one that felt right. I couldn’t just call him up and warn him. There was no way to guarantee that he’d believe me, and even if he did, the first thing he would do was tell the cops in his precinct. With what I now knew about Trish and her people, it was entirely possible she had somebody close to him, somebody who could walk him right into her crosshairs without raising any red flags. For all I knew, that could have been how she intended to tee him up for Ian.
Showing up in person was the only way to convey the gravity of the situation while also being on hand to make sure he and Denise took all the necessary precautions to stay safe, buying me enough time to figure out a way to call off the hit. Or, worst-case scenario, stop it before it went down.
On the latter point, Erica was right, much as I hated to admit it. I was a recruiter. My job was to find people who were good at pulling the trigger, not pull it myself. My recent foray into violence notwithstanding. This was going to be a lot more complicated than beating up some guy in the back of a car, or kneecapping a couple of cut-rate bodyguards.
“How much?” I asked.
She tilted her head side to side a few times, doing the calculations in her head. “A hundred thousand should do it.”
“Shit,” Joey said, “if that’s the going rate, count me in too.”
“Joey,” I started.
“Joey what?” he replied. “Cops are already looking for my car anyway. If I’m gonna lie low, might as well do it overseas with a fresh hundred k in my pocket.”
Two hired guns WERE better than one.
“They have my account information,” I said at last. “If I move that kind of money, they might be watching and see whose accounts I move it into.”
“There are ways around that,” Erica said, pulling out her phone. In a few seconds, she’d pulled up a cryptocurrency app and held it out to me.
“What the hell is Bitcoin?” Joey said, looking over my shoulder.
“A way for us to get paid without getting caught,” Erica said.
“How do you spend it?”
Erica regarded him like he’d just asked her how to program his VCR. “What kind of millennial are you?”
“Early generation.”
“Well, don’t worry Gramps, I’ll show you how to spend your fancy Interwebs money,” she said with dripping condescension.
“Kids these days,” Joey said, but he was smiling.
I wasn’t. I still didn’t want them anywhere near this, but I didn’t see any better options. My database was brimming with hired guns who would cost the same and had better credentials, but I couldn’t trust any of them. If Trish had hacked my old phone, there was no way to know who she’d gotten to. And she could outbid me for every one of them.
So I bought two of the ones she didn’t know about. A disgraced soldier turned drug dealer who’d fucked up his only attempted kill outside of the service and a former special forces operative who I’d just met and knew very little about. And all it cost me was half of my remaining net worth.
Team Carter, ready to roll.
Pretty sure we were all going to die.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
