In fact, they had no social media. And outside of a few minor run-ins with law enforcement that were side notes in articles in the Arizona Daily Star, they had no online presence at all.
I looked anyway.
The reason I knew anything about them was because Knox came clean (his words, not mine) about them during one of our late-night, post-sex (or pre-sex, depending on how you looked at it), getting-to-know-you sessions.
This came after an hour-long deep dive of my history with Dream, and me using him to verbally try to cypher what her problem was with me (Knox also had no solutions to this dilemma).
His problems with his blood relatives were a whole lot more terrifying.
We could just say his dad was a member of that very rare breed who wasn’t proud as all get-out his child enlisted in the United States military.
We could also say, when his time in the army was done, his dad’s pupil, who had since become the master, was hip on recruiting Knox and his skills for the family business, using his sister as go-between.
Oh yeah.
This was jacked right the hell up, thus it wasn’t a surprise when Rocco and Gypsy didn’t feel like taking no for an answer.
Knox took pains to stay out of their lives and keep them out of his, so I didn’t know what kicked off Thursday night. I just got the intel at the hospital it wasn’t NI&S biz that got his ass shot, it was family biz.
And I wasn’t researching them to gain info as a launching pad for some half-baked Angels scheme to get Knox’s blood family (and one of their boyfriends) to back off, or better yet, caged so they could stop ruining lives with their shenanigans.
I was researching them to find fodder to warn the Angels off.
Sadly, I didn’t have the computer skills to come up with much, which made me move to the very top on my to-do list the item of recruiting a local Angels computer guru we could go to for such tasks.
But I did put a request into our Angels’ benefactor, Arthur, for whatever intelligence he could glean.
Arthur was super quick with intel, but sometimes not. And we’d never met him so he wasn’t around for us to badger him to go faster.
Byron was sitting in his corner at The Surf Club every day. We could badger him to our hearts’ content.
Frighteningly, Arthur had replied, Request already received. Will have a full report in 72 hours.
This meant one of the other Angels asked, and I decided to take that as good. Arthur could provide the substantiation we needed to stay well away from this and let the professionals sort it out.
And by that I didn’t mean the Nightingale men (though, I also meant them, I just hoped they kept their distance).
I meant the cops.
Knox had been shot.
Knox did not want to live what was sure to be a short life if he lived it in the criminal under-underworld.
So I had no doubt, when one of his sister’s scary beau’s henchmen shot him, Knox pressed charges.
But this was one of the two things that happened at the end of my shift on Monday.
See, Raye was in the employee locker room with Jessie, whispering, which I took to be whispering about Knox.
I understood this play and was even grateful for it.
In my head it was all Knox the vast majority of the time.
I didn’t need that leaking to my work.
The thing was, it was all Knox most of the time with me, so when I overheard them whispering (and as such, I suspected they were talking about him), I hid in the kitchen and listened.
This was what I heard.
