“Well, as always, nice doing business with you,” Roof says.
All four girls, dressed in white shirts and plaid skirts, the schoolgirl outfits the Russian had made the Crockett boys buy for them, are seated next to each other on a long couch, all of them with their hands folded in their laps. Staring straight ahead. In their usual fog.
Petrov pulls out his phone and jabs at it with his index finger, even looking impatient doing that. A few seconds later Roof hears the helicopter start up.
Roof walks over and kneels in front of Holly Ridenour.
“How about one last kiss before you go?”
When he leans in, she spits in his face, shocking him. She’d looked as out of it as the girls sitting next to her.
“You little bitch,” he says, and starts to give her a good slap until Ahmad grabs his hand and jerks it back so hard Roof is worried he’s pulled his damn arm out of its socket.
Quietly Ahmad says, “You break it, you own it.”
Petrov tells Ahmad to get the girls into the helicopter, which Roof knows is a Bell big enough to seat six.
When Ahmad and the girls are gone, Petrov turns at the front door.
“You take care of that problem we talked about?” he asks Roof.
“Working on it.”
“Work harder,” he says. “Or the next time that bird takes off, you and your brother might be on it.”
Petrov walks out the door then, leaving it open behind him. The gun guys out front are already gone. Less than five minutes later,Roof and Lynyrd stand on the front porch and watch the lights of the Bell as it lifts into the night sky, banks, and then disappears.
“Have a nice flight, asshole,” Roof says.
He goes back inside to count the money.
All there.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
NASH HADER HAD been kicked out of his house same as he’d been kicked out of his office after his wife had caught him cheating on her—with a waitress from Rowdy’s this time, and one time too many.
For now, he is in a small one-bedroom apartment on the south side of Cross Rivers, living off the last of the offshore money that the bitch, Helene Mayes, hadn’t frozen—and what he’d managed to save from what Briar Crockett had been paying him on the side until Hader had gotten fired as sheriff and Briar had said, “You are of no further use to me.”
In a few weeks Hader will be moving to the small house he’d purchased in Key West a few years ago when the dirty money was still rolling in, ready to put Cross Rivers in his rearview mirror once and for all.
He’s still hungover this morning from the bottle of Maker’s Mark he’d killed the night before, needing coffee badly when he finally drags himself out of bed.
When he walks into the apartment’s tiny kitchen, Roof and Lynyrd Crockett are sitting at his table.
“We let ourselves in,” Roof says calmly, as if dropping by like this is as natural as it could be.
“Your father send you?” Hader says, scratching the part of his gutvisible over the drawstrings of his sweatpants. “He said he was done with me.”
“Not only did he not send us,” Roof says pleasantly, “once we’re gone this morning, it will be as if we were never here at all.”
“Not for nothing, Nash?” Lynyrd says. “You look like shit.”
“Thanks for noticing,” Hader says. “Now, what exactly is it you boys want?”
“Intel,” Roof says.
“Intel so important you felt the need to break into my house to get it?”
