Chapter 20
Chapter
Twenty
F or a second, I thought about playing dumb. The kids are in the back! They’re learning how to fry cook with all the… knives and hot oil.
Nope. Okay. I grimaced.
“Iris Milner has them.” I watched Candace’s face.
For a second, she was completely still, her cheeks slack, her mouth open for a short gasp before her eyes lit, her lip pulled back in a snarl. “That cow Iris Milner took my kids ?”
I had never seen another human being torn apart before, although I had seen some grisly sights that were the result of magical artifacts. But with that expression on her face, we were about to see what happened when mama bear met the new mob boss in town, and it wasn’t going to end well for Iris Milner.
“I have a plan,” I said quickly.
“You have a plan for getting my kids back and showing Iris Milner what happens when she messes with the Reyes family?” Candace glared at me as though I was now a member of Milner’s gang and had personally taken her children.
I tried not to feel the truth of that. Leonard had said Milner was after me, and if she couldn’t have me, she would take my family.
“I can handle this on my own. Leonard said that Milner is after me, not anyone else. I should handle this myself.” I watched Candy’s face, ready to see her rage turned on me.
Instead, she laughed. “Boy leaves town for twelve years and thinks that everything is about him now that he’s back. There are other reasons the Milners might have it out for us. What’s the play?”
“Why would the Milners be after us?” The ‘ us ’ was easy now because I was back home, and I was a Reyes, no matter how much I tried to run from it.
“Don’t worry about it. Get my kids back, and then we’ll talk.” Candy crossed her arms, tapping her foot. If she had gum, she would have been snapping it. “Well? The play?”
“It’s a variation on Click and Clack.”
Candy stopped tapping her foot. “I’m listening.”
“Instead of a smoke machine, we’re going to use firecrackers, and it would be me and Cassander. Leonard is going to be at the back, opening the door and getting the kids.” I glanced at Betty because I hadn’t cleared this next part with her, but we had been friends too long for me to think she would leave us out to dry. “Betty is the getaway.”
“Click and Clack.” My sister blew out a breath. She looked up at the yellow lights hung in the ceiling of Betty’s bar. After a second, she said, “I’ll go with Leonard. No offense, I don’t want some pothead responsible for getting my kids out.”
“No offense taken. I wouldn’t want me responsible for taking the kids out either. I don’t even want to be responsible for the houseplant I got for Christmas, but like, what can you do when one of your clients gives you an African Lily? You can’t throw it away—that’s like, animal cruelty.” Leonard pulled an Altoids tin out of his jacket, opening it to reveal a few joints. When Candy turned to him, plucking the tin out of his hands before throwing it across the room violently, he winced, putting up his hands.
“Don’t think I don’t know who in this room is in bed with the Milners, Leonard.” Candy got closer to Leonard, and he shrank in on himself, shoulders going up, chest curving back. “You will be sober until the end of this job, then you can smoke as much as you want, curl up in some small hole, and die for all I care.”
“Charming as ever, Candy,” Betty said, but she was grinning.
Someone knocked on the door, and we all tensed. This time, Betty pulled out her phone, checking the screen to see her security camera before she opened it.
On the other side, Hudson looked exactly the same as he had in high school. He was a man who should have been starring in GAP commercials. Blond hair, perfectly symmetrical face, white teeth, and brilliant blue eyes made him look exactly like a million dollars in advertising revenue.
“Hudson!” Betty said. She opened her arms, accepting the large box he held out.
“I have another one in my truck. Let me go get it.” Hudson waved at the rest of us, eyes widening when he saw our eclectic group. He jogged out to his pickup, coming back with another cardboard box. He kicked the door closed behind him, and I walked over to take the second box. Betty was already putting everything out on the table from her box, trying to organize it in some way that made sense. When I brought over the second box, she finally gave up. Hudson wandered over, his eyes tracing over the pyrotechnics, the costumes, the makeup, and the Bic lighters.
“Are you running a con, Damian?” Hudson grinned, wrapping an arm around my shoulder. “How long have you been in town, man? We should have caught up.”
“I’ve only been in town a few days.” I looked over everything, mentally checking it off.
“And you’re already working a job. You always were an overachiever.” Hudson grinned, but his lips were closed over his pearly whites, and I could read the hesitation in his expression. He was curious. He wanted to know what we were up to, but he understood that if he asked, he was inviting himself along for the ride. And he was not sure he wanted to waste his carnival tickets on something as dangerous as the old, wooden roller coaster that I was.
It was all in the shift of Hudson’s body, the tense way he held himself next to me, slightly apart but still with his arm wrapped around me.
Hudson was strong, strong enough that he would be good to have with us, but one more person who knew what we were planning was potentially one more person who could warn Iris Milner we were coming for her.
I glanced at Candy, who was clearly having the same internal debate. Finally, she shook her head once.
“You know me,” I said noncommittally. “I really appreciate this, Hudson. Consider us even. We’ll catch up the next time I have a free minute.”
Hudson nodded, squeezing my shoulder before letting go. Then he was out the door, Betty locking it behind him.
I looked down at the gear, then up at our unlikely team. “All right, this is the plan.”
“Are you sure this will work?” Cassander asked.
“I’m sure I have enough plans to get us through this.” I hefted the guitar case, adjusting my hat so that it shaded more of my face. It was amazing what careful application of makeup could do to someone’s features. But it didn’t hurt to also have a hat hiding most of my face.
“Well, as long as none of your plans have me getting killed.” Cassander looked at me out of the corner of his eye, his black suit seeming to absorb the evening light. With the white shirt, top button undone, he looked exactly like the rock star he was going to play.
“Only one-third of the plans have you getting killed.” I stared at the door to the pool hall, checking up and down the street again. I could see the lookout, but he hadn’t clocked us yet.
“One-third?” Cassander turned to actually stare at me.
“Another third have you getting badly mangled or permanently injured. Sometimes both.” I grinned at his tight eyebrows. “Have some faith. We are going to get out of this. One-third of my plans say so.”
The pool hall across the street was set into a strip mall, but the shops on either side were both for lease, and based on the dust caked on the windows, they had been empty for some time. Black paint covered the plate glass windows in front, so we had no way to get a good situation check, and I was nervous relying on Leonard’s memory of the place. His map was tainted by weed, anger, and poor recall.
“It will be all right,” Cassander said.
I put my free hand in my pocket, dragging my fingers over the coin, trying to figure out if it was the raven or the dragon. It wasn’t quite nerves. I didn’t get nervous. I had been doing this too long to get nervous.
“Let’s go.” I checked for traffic, then started across the street, pulling on the character as I walked. I began leaning forward more, putting myself just slightly off-balance, changing my stride and opening my mouth more as I talked.
“And I’m telling you, Kyle. I am telling you, this is going to be your big break. This is going to be your chance.” When I looked back at him, I no longer saw Cassander, the man I was beginning to know, the man I could feel against my flesh like we were still in bed together, still pressed together warm and an ache of something like longing hanging between us.
Instead, I saw a country music star, just this side of famous, all rolling loose hips. The girls would go crazy for him.
The lookout finally pinged to us, stepping forward out of the doorway he had been lingering in. But we were too fast, opening the door to the pool hall before he could even reach us, much less stop us.
Showtime.
“And here he is, ladies and gentlemen! Kyle Reeves! Ready to perform!” I shouted.
The room turned to look at me, and I got a quick head count. Leonard had been mostly accurate. There was one guy at the door, one guy guarding the back, another at the bar, and a fourth was lingering over a warm beer at his table. It was more prop than drink; all of the condensation had disappeared, so if there was anything even in it, it wasn’t even cold.
An empty beer bottle made a good weapon.
Besides the four people working for Milner, there were another five people spread between the tables. One woman was playing by herself; the pool cue in her hand looked custom, black and chic compared to the wood on the walls.
A group of four was playing at a table, their expressions puzzled when they turned to us. There was no suspicion in their gaze, which made me think they were just customers who didn’t realize they’d wandered into Al Capone’s desert lair.
“I think you have the wrong place.” The grizzly bear at the front of the room rose, his massive shoulders and thick torso taking up practically the entire door. I squeezed around him, slamming the guitar case into his knee. He hissed, moving to the side and wincing.
“No I do not . If you aren’t prepared for my client, that’s a breach of contract. I have it right here in writing.” I put the guitar case down next to the door and reached into my jacket, searching the inside pocket before beginning to dig into my pants pockets. “It is here. Where is the green room? He’s requested water distilled from the Alps.”
“This isn’t a concert hall,” the grizzly said, crossing his arms, although I noticed he wasn’t putting any weight on the knee I had banged the case into.
“What’s going on? Where’s my green room? Where’s the stage?” Cassander was getting louder, his drawl thickening, everything about him screaming diva like he was up onstage wearing a sequined costume and singing three octaves. “I want to speak to whoever is in charge.”
I gave up searching my pockets and pointed at the grizzly bear, pressing my finger into his chest sharply. “Yeah. Where’s the person in charge?”
“You have the wrong place,” the grizzly said, but he was looking between us. Two angry people sure that they were right were confusing enough for him. At the bar, the bartender had stopped cleaning and was looking between us and the guy at the back door.
“We most definitely do not. I am Adam Thomas , and I do not make mistakes like that. We need to see the stage right now because if you’ve already messed up the green room this badly, I don’t want to know how you messed up our two-thousand-pound lighting requirement.” I looked at grizzly, then at the man behind the bar, then at the one at the back door, making sure I had all of their attention, as though I was searching for whichever one of them was the boss. “Well? Go get the head honcho. Time is ticking, the concert’s in an hour, and we already have a guarantee that one thousand of Kyle Reeves’s fans are showing up right at this address. Trust me, you do not want to see what one thousand teenage girls are going to do to this place if you don’t have the proper security set up. I once saw them tear up seats that were bolted to the floor just to use them as battering rams to get into Kyle’s dressing room.”
I whistled. “We do not want a repeat of that experience.” I looked around, raising my hands. “Where is the person in charge?”
Striding through the bar, I headed straight toward the back room. “Are they back here?”
Mr. Warm Beer finally got to his feet. “You can’t go back there.”
“I am going to do whatever I can to keep my client safe. So if I have to go back there myself, you’ll see how I can use a battering ram.”
“I don’t think that will be necessary.” The woman playing pool picked up a piece of chalk, dusting the tip of her pool cue. “Will it, Damian?”
When she looked over, I recognized her immediately. She’d changed her hair—what had once been a mousy brown had been dyed platinum blonde, but she had the same nose, the same high cheekbones and narrowed eyes.
Iris Milner had always looked more like her mother than her father. Her father was the sort of man who was more muscle than sense, his beefy face and thick nose making it seem like every time he spoke, a mountain was moving. Her mother had once been a beauty pageant queen, all blonde hair and blue eyes and a mouth that looked like it was pouting even when she was all smiles.
There were rumors about her mother, that one day she just disappeared when Iris was in high school. Some people said that her father had something to do with it; some said she had just run away.
Either way, I had always wondered what it had done to her father to look at her, every day, seeing the wife who’d disappeared.
For a second, I hesitated, thinking through my options quickly. I could continue with the ruse, continue playing the aggrieved manager to the hilt. Cassander would go along with it. We’d been counting on her coming out at some point, but I’d hoped she wouldn’t recognize me, or it would at least take her a second to see Damian Reyes under the makeup and the disguise and the changed attitude.
But now that their real boss had spoken up, the four security guards had settled down. They would follow her lead, not ours. I could no longer keep them off-balance, keep them confused long enough for Candy and Leonard to make their own play.
Which meant I needed to draw everybody from the back out front quickly. It was time to move on to plan B.
“Hey, Iris.” I took off my wide cowboy hat, placing it carefully on a nearby table. Straightening, I let myself become Damian Reyes, the man who had seen more in twelve years than someone else would in three lifetimes. “I hear that you and me have a problem.”