Page 102 of Never Forget

“Did you get all that?” Scott asks, his voice sounding tired and strained through the car speakers.

“Yeah, we heard the whole thing,” Cory confirms.

“So, what do you think?”

“How do you feel about traveling to New York? Are you comfortable following this through and seeing where it leads us?”

“He’s setting me up to meet whoever this guy is in a public place, and I sincerely doubt anything would happen on the way there. Honestly, my biggest worry is wasting time taking a damn bus all the way to New York and then having it be another dead end.” Scott says over the rustling sounds of movement, and somewhere in the background a door closes.

Cory notices too. “Where are you right now?”

“On my way to the bus station. I looked online, and there’s a bus departing at 10:05. I figure I’ll sleep on the bus and get there ahead of time.”

Imagining someone as tall and bulky as Scott trying to sleep in a bus seat would be funny if this weren’t such a serious situation. “Are you sure you shouldn’t get some rest first?”

“It’s not like I’d be able to sleep anyway. I’d rather just get this over with, and the sooner I get there, the sooner Francis can set me up with whoever this meeting is with.”

“Do you think Francis will be there?”

“He said he’d be nearby if I need him. Whatever that means.”

“How kind of him,” I deadpan.

“At least now we know you were right about who it is.”

“Be safe, and keep me updated,” Cory says.

“Will do.”

I stew for a long time after the call ends. Fucking Francis. I fucking knew it.

“I fucking hate that guy,” I mutter.

“You’re not the only one,” Cory agrees, watching the rearview mirror carefully as he takes another random exit. We’re doing our third pass of the exit we need to take to get to the compound.

Not long after we drove away from Scott at that crummy motel, we got an alert that a call was coming through on Scott’s line. Cory pulled over so we could listen in, courtesy of the software the Waves App set up to mirror the phone’s screen and audio.

I’m seething.

Fucking Francis. That fucking scumbag. Just fucking wait until I tell Ari, and then promise him whatever he wants to make up for not standing up to Francis for all those years. I knew he was a smarmy asshole, but I had no idea he was as bad as he is. I didn’t like him, and I didn’t like the way he handled us, especially Jesse. He treated him like a puppet, pulling his strings this way and that, doling out his prescriptions as if he was Jesse’s personal keeper. By the time we all got with the program and banded together to ask for new representation, Francis had manipulated the entire label into thinking we were the problem.

“We have to keep this quiet, you know that, right?”

“Of course.” I pause. “Why do you say it like that?”

“Because I know you’re ready to do some kind of SWAT Team raid wherever Francis is hiding out, but we can’t go in guns blazing with this.”

“I know that,” I say, crossing my arms. “I don’t even like guns.”

Cory smirks and checks the rearview again. “This is a delicate situation. The less people know, the easier it will be to contain it.”

“The guys deserve to know that it’s Francis,” I tell him.

“I’m not disagreeing with you, but if you tell them, they’re going to want to help. And there’s really nothing any of you can do,” he says. “This might be a bigger operation than we thought.”

“Francis is full of shit.”

“He’s also very confident, which is how he’s always gotten away with stuff. This seemed like more, though.”