She didn’t bother with a greeting. “You set me up.”
“Alex,” he chided. “I thought you will win.”
“How many did you send before me? How many didn’t come back?”
There was a slight pause. “Seven.”
She brushed fresh tears from her eyes. She wasn’t sure when she’d started crying again, but she needed to keep her voice steady. She could do that. The anger was with her, simple, familiar. She didn’t want to seem weak.
“Was there really a debt?” she asked.
“Not exactly. He is taking customers from me and my associates.
Foxwoods, Mohegan Sun, all good markets.”
Reiter was a rival dealer. Alex supposed even vampires had to make a living.
“Fuck you and your associates.”
“I thought you could fix. You are special.”
Alex wanted to scream. “You painted a target on my back.”
“Reiter will not bother with you.”
“How the fuck do you know?”
“I have guests, Alex. You want I should send you some money?”
She’d known for a long time that she might have to kill Eitan. She’d thought about doing it back in Los Angeles, but he was always surrounded by guards like Tzvi, men with guns who wouldn’t think twice about putting her down. And the deal Eitan had proposed had seemed so simple, like something she could handle, just one job. Do this and you’re done. Good girl.
But of course that hadn’t been the end of it. She’d gotten Eitan’s money and she’d made it look easy, so it was always going to be one more favor, one more job, one more hump who owed, one more sob story. And what about her mother? What about Mira going for power walks to the farmers’ market?
Going to work every morning thinking her daughter was safe at last, and that she was safe too?
Alex hung up and stared out at the harsh lights near the pumps, the gleaming sign ablaze with gas prices, the shine of flannel guy’s truck. It felt like the service station was some kind of beacon. But what were they calling out to with all of this bright light?
Killing Eitan would free her, but she’d have to be smart about it, find a way to get him alone, make him vulnerable the way she was. And she had to take her mom out of the equation, to make sure that if she screwed up, Mira wouldn’t pay and that she couldn’t be used as leverage again. To do that she needed money. A lot of it.
“Do you want me to stay with you?” the teacher asked.
“Would you? Until my ride gets here?”
“You’re going to be okay.”
Alex managed a smile. “Because I seem like a good kid?”
The teacher looked surprised. “No, kiddo. Because you’re a killer.”
When Turner’s Dodge arrived, Alex waved goodbye to the teacher and gratefully slid into the passenger seat. He had the heater on and the radio was tuned to some local NPR station describing the day in the markets.
They drove in silence for a while and Alex was actually nodding off when he said, “What did you get yourself into, Stern?”
There was blood on her clothes and a bandage on her neck. Her shoes were covered in mud, and she still smelled of smoke and the booze she’d splattered all over Linus Reiter’s living room.
“Nothing good.”
“That all you’re going to say about it?”
For now it was. “How’s your case going?” She hadn’t told him about her suspicions regarding the Praetor and his rivalry with Beekman yet.
Turner sighed. “Not well. We thought we’d found a connection between Dean Beekman and Professor Stephen.”
“Oh yeah?” Alex was eager to talk about anything that wasn’t Linus Reiter.
“Stephen blew the whistle on data coming out of one of the labs in the psych department. She had concerns that it was massaged by at least one of the fellows and that there’d been shoddy oversight from the professor who published the findings.”
“And the dean?”
“He headed up the committee that disciplined the professor in question.
Ed Lambton.”
“Judges,” Alex murmured, remembering Professor Stephen’s finger resting between the Bible pages. “It makes a kind of sense.”
“Only if you’re being literal,” Turner replied. “Judges isn’t about judges the way we think of them. It was just another word for leaders in biblical times.”
