Good.
I back-hand him again. “Shoulda asked for more, huh?”
His mouth screws up and he shakes his head. “I fucked up. I-I didn’t know-”
“I don’t give a fuck what you did or didn’t know. You’re telling me you went on your sister’s computer and changed the reservation and dresses delivered tomy woman.Ain’t that right, Tony?”
He nods, a whimper sounding low in his throat. “I needed the cash. There’s bookies after me and-”
“Save your sob story for someone who gives a shit about you. How did you know the address to change the reservation to?”
“She gave it to me. I just copied it exactly like she wrote it. Same with the dresses.”
“Was there a card you used to pay for the dresses?”
“It was a gift card. Bitch filled it to the penny. Nothing left over.”
That means I can’t track the order beyond Tony to get a location on Honey’s mother. Rosario Magdalena Martinez is her name. I know her fucking name. It’s burned in my memory from that one meeting. Charlaine has a file on her a few inches thick with information that she’s already dug up.
“She’s mostly small time. Failed singer that turned to petty larceny, identity theft, some charges from what I’m thinking are ex-lovers, embezzlement here and there but not enough to really get her any time. She was on the hook for some tax evasion until she got an infusion of funds. Don’t know where from yet, though. I’ll look into it.”
Small time that got a cash infusion. I know where the funds came from. Zeus. Why else would Honey’s mother be involved in any of this? From the little Honey has told me about her, she was a crap mother who’d never given a damn about her. Now here she is, hiring Addie’s brother to get into her computer, and that fucker that grabbed Honey at the theater?
That had to have been her, too.
What had he said?
“It was a woman on the phone. She said–she said I needed to grab the girl from the stage. That she was going to pay me twenty thousand to do it. Cash.”
He hadn’t known either, but twenty grand wasn’t pocket change for someone with Rosario’s background. That was a lot of money for her. Zeus had to have given it to her. Just like he’d given her the money for this. Zeus has his fingers in my world and feels comfortable doing it, if he has my assistant’s brother running errands for him.
Tony has told me everything he can that’s useful. He is just another cog in the machine Zeus has set into motion. There isn’t a damn thing Addie’s brother has to offer me. Not anymore.
I shove Tony away from me but not before I shoot him in the leg, meat and muscle, nothing terminal. The muffled pop of the shot rings through the apartment and Addie screams out, the sound muffled against the hand she has pressed to her mouth. I raise my eyes to see she is still standing with her back to the wall, rooted to the spot that hand covering her mouth as she hyperventilates. Her eyes are on her brother, who is making too much damn noise for my liking. He is curled in on himself, body doubled over where he’s pressing his hands to the gunshot in his thigh. Blood pours over his fingers, staining the couch he sits on. Good thing he’s sitting on the dirty clothes Addie had piled up earlier. It’ll at least mostly save her couch from her brother’s blood.
I lower my gun to nudge him in the shoulder. “Shut the fuck up or the next one goes between your eyes.” I give Addie a stern look and shake my head. “Get it together, Addie.Now,” I order her.
She nods and stops her screaming. She sucks in a deep breath and then drops her hand a second later. “What are we gonna do with him?”
“We aren’t going to do anything,” I tell her. “You’re going to pretend none of this ever happened. Do you get me?”
“But he’s-”
“He’s about to walk out of here on his own.” I reach down and grab a dirty shirt off the couch and shove it into his lap. “Wrap that around your leg. Stop the bleeding, then get your sorry ass up. You have one minute to grab what you can carry and then you’re done here.”
Tony does as I order but looks up at me. Snot is dribbling out his nose and mingling with the blood on his face. He wipes at it, smearing it into a damn mess as he shakes his head and babbles.
“I got nowhere to go. If I l-leave they’ll kill me.”
I don’t know if the ‘they’ is Zeus or someone else. I also don’t care. “Not my problem. You don’t have a sister anymore.”
“But they-”
“If you say kill, I want you to think carefully on who just shot you. I’ll do it again. You have forty seconds now, Tony.”
The little shit springs into action, tying off a sloppy tourniquet that will stop some of the bleeding. He’ll probably pass out an hour from now, but that isn’t on me. He can deal with his own mess when he comes to in a gutter.
Forty seconds later he is stumbling towards the door with a backpack stuffed full of dirty clothes. He opens the door, but instead of rushing out of it like I told him, he falls back a step. “You said, I had forty seconds!” He whines.
