Chapter 1 The Fixer #2
“That’s the plan. One of these days, I’m gonna get lucky, and the Minoan’s gonna be mine again.” It was actually at this very table that I’d lost my final stake. Yeah, Dad had been pretty fucking pissed about that one. I didn’t actually want it back, but a little banter never hurt.
Ares snorted. Because that’s how this worked. I couldn’t just walk in and demand information. There were formalities to adhere to. Customs to observe.
Games to play. Literally.
Two hours later, I was down three hundred grand and had the information I needed.
As predicted, Billy Richards had offered to sell information about the Blacks and the Huntingtons.
And Ares, bless his dime-sized heart, had decided that keeping me happy was worth more than whatever Billy could offer.
“We didn’t buy shit,” Ares said. “The Blacks and us have done all right over the years. And we don’t mess with snitches or gossips.”
At the head of the table, Lis grunted in agreement.
What a fucking lie. This whole town ran on gossip, and the Antonis loved it as much as I loved blackmail.
I had no doubt that if I hadn’t shown up and paid them another way, Lis, Ares, or their thugs would have followed Billy Richards to whatever flea-infested motel he was holing up at and beaten the information out of him just for fun.
I laid my cards on the table, knowing the ten high was going to lose me another fifty thou but would get me the last bit of information I needed. “Location?”
Ares chuckled. “Oasis off Boulder Highway. Room 247.”
Yeah, they were definitely planning to get that story if my “bad luck” and I hadn’t shown up.
“Appreciate it.” I tossed the rest of the cards on the table and stood. “Nice doing business with you, Ares baby. Lis.”
The big man nodded as Ares stood to walk me out to where Mac was waiting by the door.
“Pleasure as always,” he said. “But, Jester?”
I paused at the door, bracing out of habit.
Most of the time, Ares actually had something to say, but I’d been punched in the face more than once just as a reminder not to fuck with the guy—or maybe just to prove to his dad he wasn’t going soft.
I got it, but I wasn’t in the mood to replace my veneers for the third time.
“Whatever you do, you do it clean. The mayor’s been looking around, and we don’t need anymore heat coming our way. Understood?”
I stood and straightened my tie. “Clean as a fuckin’ hospital OR, my friend. Now, if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I have an operation to get to.”
I learned three things about Billy Richards before I left him in the desert to die.
One: his last meal was a Big Mac.
Two: he had a thing for anime.
Three: he had a daughter named Lily he hadn’t seen in three years and was planning to put through Andover Prep with the payout from the Antonis.
Maybe I’d get the kid free tuition. It was my alma mater, after all. A sort of “sorry your daddy’s dead, here’s an education” kind of scholarship.
I didn’t speak on the drive back. I never did. Neither did Mac. It was as if we were both committed to a moment of silence for the man we’d just committed to darkness.
Or maybe we were just witnessing the darkness of our own ruined souls.
Tonight, though, was worse than most.
“Please.” Richards’s face folded with fear as he stood on the edge of the canyon. “I beg you. I’ll do whatever you want. You need muscle? Intel on the Huntingtons? I can do it, anything you ask.”
With every word, I grew more and more disgusted. He was maybe ten years older than me, but they looked like twenty, with years of abuse, hard living, and fear etching his features like a linocut. We’d found him chain-smoking behind a dumpster at the Oasis, acting like trash that had been taken out.
What’s more, the man was clearly a snitch. He’d been making the same offer since we’d wrapped his hands with duct tape and shoved him into the back of the Rover.
Mac waited in the car, like he always did. Not because he wouldn’t have stood next to me here on the edge of the desert, but because I wouldn’t let him. The “fix” was mine and mine alone. My old man had made sure of that nearly twenty years ago.
My soul was an oil spill, but that didn’t mean I had to pollute anyone else’s along with it.
“Please. I have a daughter. She’ll have no one.”
I grabbed Billy’s shirt, a stained white undershirt that threatened to rip at the collar, and thrust him back on his heels. Pebbles tumbled into the abyss, echoing through the canyon.
“Better she learn the truth about this shitty world sooner rather than later.”
“Any more stops, or back to the airfield?” Mac steered off a few exits before the airport, knowing I’d want a moment to decide. “The jet’s on standby.”
I swallowed. The hole in the pit of my stomach was proving a little harder to banish tonight than usual.
Every time I closed my eyes, I imagined a young girl.
Maybe she had brown hair, just like her dad.
Maybe tomorrow or the next day, when someone came to tell her what happened to her dad, she would beg in the same way he had before I’d left him in the desert to die.
Fuck. I needed a drink. Or a pill. Or five. Whatever it took to get Billy Richards’s fucking face out of my head.
As we stopped at a red light, a group of women crossed the street in front of us, laughing and stumbling like awkward flamingos in high heels and tight dresses—one of them was literally wearing hot pink feathers.
They looked like a bachelorette party, a pack of hens out for trouble the way millions were in Vegas every year.
One, however, stuck out. A pretty little nymph with chestnut-colored hair, swathed in a green dress that clung to her olive-toned body. She and her friends approached a club on the corner and got in line for entry. There she turned, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe.
Those eyes. Bright green, the color of polished sea glass.
Guileless and wide, like the succulents that lined the highways in the southwest and burst into a flush of color each spring.
She smiled at one of her friends, and I slapped a palm over my chest, wondering for a moment if my heart had literally stopped working.
The rhythm was doing something funny. Speeding up. Then not beating at all.
What the fuck was wrong with me?
Even on a street corner that was decorated with lights, attractions, and more moving pieces than Times fucking Square, that smile was a beacon through the chaos. Or maybe a siren beckoning me to the true depths a man could sink to in this pit of sin.
Whichever it was, I wasn’t sure I cared.
I watched the group disappear through the entrance like maidens entering the labyrinth’s first turn.
“Actually,” I heard myself say, “I’d like my daily dose of oblivion.”
Mac pulled the Rover to the curb. “How long?”
“Until I forget what I look like in the mirror.”