Page 23 of Business vs. Pleasure

He switched to his own profile and pulled up his reviews. There’d been a few he’d gone back to read sometimes because they were funny or they boosted his ego just right—don’t tell August—and one in particular had been favorited.

That one was gone.

Like… gone.

“What the fuck?” he muttered. He scrolled through reviews by date. Yeah, he’d had a few less than perfect reviews. Not every job went to plan, and some clients could be dicks, so of course he had some lower ratings here and there. Nobody on the app had ever maintained a 5.0 rating past their first ten jobs.

The shit reviews he remembered from before were present and accounted for. Multiple positive reviews were missing.

Fuck. So it wasn’t that someone was coming along and leaving trash ratings—the five-star reviews were disappearing. Meanwhile NightRaven’s overall rating was climbing even while the tone of his reviews was B- at best. The math, as August would say, wasn’t mathing.

Without a second thought, Ricardo called Heidi.

“You’re up early,” she grumbled when she answered, suggesting she hadn’t been up early and wasn’t pleased that he was calling her.

“I’m sorry,” he said with total honesty. “But have you noticed issues with RateYourHit lately?”

“Issues?” she croaked. “What kind of issues? Because I was just thinking of putting that hit out on you for waking me up. I didn’t actually do it.”

He chuckled, but only halfheartedly. “No, I mean the ratings. They’re all fucked up.”

There was silence for a moment.

“Ricardo.” Her voice held an icy edge of warning. “Did you just call me at”—she paused—“8:02 in the goddamned morning to talk to me about your rating?”

“Well, about the part where it’s been coming down. Fast.”

More silence. “What do you mean, ‘coming down’? You haven’t done a job in years. Unless you’ve been freelancing?”

“No,” he said quickly, because she probably would put out a hit on him for that. “Last night’s job was the first since we retired.” He paused. “And it didn’t go well.”

“So I heard.” She sighed, though it was more of an exhausted, exasperated groan. “Fuck’s sake.”

“We’ve had five-star reviews disappearing,” he said. “And there’s another hitman whose overall rating seems higher than it should be.”

“You’re still number one and number two. So… who cares?”

He pursed his lips. “Well, I would like to hold on to my number one spot, but also, doesn’t that sound like someone’s fucking with the system? And if they can get in and fuck with reviews and ratings, what else can they get into?”

Heidi exhaled hard. “Shit. Good point. I’m… Let me get in touch with someone at admin. It could be a glitch somewhere.”

“Doubt it,” he muttered.

“Such a pessimist.”

“So are you, especially when you’re awake this early.”

She grunted. “And yet you still wake me up.”

“Would it help if I said August and I want to do another job?”

He could almost hear her perking up. “Do you?”

“You think we want to retire on the note we left things on last night?”

“Hmm, fair point. Okay, let me look around. I’ll find you a good one.”

“Thanks, Heidi.”