“We pulled everyone but a few guys in. They’re going over every single inch again, checking for anything suspicious. I’m gonna pull all this out, rerun upgraded cables, and then install the new panel. Jury will be working behind everyone, repairing damage as we go instead of waiting till everyone is done.” He ran his hand over his head. “Fair warning, if it doesn’t fix things, you may not be able to open tomorrow.”
Shit.
“Let’s hope you’re as good as your ego thinks you are,” I said.
He shot me a distracted middle finger before using the band at the back of his tablet to secure it onto his wrist.
“Normal calculator watch not nerdy enough for you? Have to go full dweeb?”
That got double middle fingers.
“I need to pull Lo into this,” I said.
“You don’t think she bought my bullshit?” Glitch asked.
He’d been convincing. Anyone else would’ve taken it at face value.
Lo wasn’t anyone else.
Which was why I said, “Not for a second.”
“Before you do that, we need to talk about who would do something like this.” Judge folded his arms over his chest. “A lot of people have access, but not a lot of them would know what to do with it.”
“If we were talking employee poaching, fake code violations, and fake online reviews, I’d have a long list of suspects.” I stabbeda finger toward the wall. “With this, I got no clue who, how, or why.”
He tilted his head, thinking it over for a few beats. “You never had beef with Nash, did you?”
“By proxy beef since he’d fucked with my friends, but nothing on my own. Our target customers don’t overlap.” My brows lowered. “Anyway, I thought he was …gone.”
Elliot Nash ran a mini empire of drugs, women, and fuckery. He’d made a play to recruit Court of Mayhem into his organization. One of his henchmen had tried to take Harlow as payment for a debt that wasn’t his. He’d used an in to steal money from Lars’s strip club and had offered to buy him out to expand his own clubs to that prime location.
After having his guys break into Ophelia’s apartment because he got his intel from an escort to the elderly, Nash had gone missing. I hadn’t asked specifics, but I’d assumed Mayhem had a hand in that. If not them, then Killian Nox—a Scottish-Irish man who was tight with Jury and Judge from way back, and with Kase and Lars from their time in a cell.
“As far as we know,” Judge confirmed. “No idea how long he’ll stay gone, though.”
“So it wasn’t…”
“Nah, none of us have that nasty blood on our hands.”
“Unfortunately,” Jury spat out.
Judge held a grudge for Nash trying to fuck with the brotherhood he’d worked so hard to build and for the apartment fuckery with O. Jury’s was a lot more personal than that.
With all the adversaries Nash had collected like trading cards, disappearing into the wind was the first smart thing the bastard had ever done. He was likely pulling the strings from some remote beach since his strip clubs were still running, but I didn’t know or care how that was going. I made it a rule to steer clear of places where venereal disease clung to the air with the scent of body odor and desperation.
Hollywood paused from whatever he was helping Glitch do. “At the risk of complicating this clusterfuck even more… Any chance this is Lo’s work?”
Glitch answered for me. “The feed was messed up when we watched her do her hype dance before she came inside.”
“I’d pay to see that footage,” Jury said.
I thought about her ass shaking in that uptight outfit. “Not fucking happening.”
The antagonizing bastard just lifted a shoulder in a half-assed shrug. “Maybe I’ll catch it in real life.Afterthis is done.”
There’s a reason I shouldn’t ban him from the premises, but I don’t know why.
“She’s been here before that, right? The night of the shooting.” Hollywood touched a light scar he’d gotten courtesy of a surprise two-by-four to the head when he and Haze were jumped down the street. “Not to mention, all the other cops and whoever else you’ve had in here for the raid and surprise inspections.”
