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As I continued to explore, I didn’t find anything to indicate Remington had done business with Gayle. Everything I saw simply recorded things that had happened, but how did Remington know about those things?
Maybe he was a true-crime aficionado, but looking at the dates on the files, they were all before Gayle’s arrest, before he’d even been a suspect. I needed to know more, but there wasn’t anything else I could learn from the documents.
I looked at the other folders, and a wave of nausea hit when I saw one that clearly had to do with the three men the Theriot family had been suspected of killing.
I clicked on one of the files inside. There were notes there and a list of names. Three of them were crossed out and the word eliminated was written next to them. Remington was part of a powerful mob family. He was a murderer, but he’d been kinder to me than any other man I’d ever been with. I shouldn’t stay there knowing what I did, but I still wanted to, and I clung to the hope that there was a good explanation for the file on Gayle.
I was staring at the screen, willing it to tell a different story, when I heard footsteps on the stairs.
23
Remington
Corbin had shown up on time with the car, but on the ride to Metairie to pick up Lance and Dax, he bitched constantly about Beau and how he’d treated Corbin like a kid.
“You are a kid.”
“I’m twenty-two, and I don’t want to be treated—”
“Then don’t act like you’re fourteen.”
He slammed his hand against the steering wheel. “Why are you so fucking hard on me?”
“Because somebody has to be in order to keep you alive.”
He sighed but didn’t say anything else. When Lance climbed into the car, Tony was on his shoulder. “No. Hell no. I’m not going to be involved in another operation with that fucking monkey.”
“Tony’s my good luck charm,” Lance insisted. “I can’t leave him. Besides, he gets lonely.”
“I’m sure he can survive for a few hours tonight,” Dax said.
“No way. I’m not leaving him.”
I would’ve told Lance and the damn monkey to stay home, but Lance was much better at finessing his way into a house than I was. I needed him to be involved.
“Tony can sit in the car with me,” Corbin said. “You’re not going to let me go inside, so I might as well have Tony to entertain me.” The monkey leapt onto his shoulder and started playing with his hair.
“At least somebody appreciates Tony,” Lance said.
I might kill them both before the night was over. Surely no one would blame me if they knew how fucking obnoxious the two of them were.
“Watch out, guys,” Dax said. “Much more of this and Remington’s going to explode.”
I glared at him. “Are you trying to get on my bad side too?”
“You have a good side?” Lance asked.
“Not around you and Corbin.”
Corbin huffed. “I think we’re a lot of fun, and it would be even more fun if I went inside with you.”
Lance and I simultaneously said, “No.”
“When are you going to realize I’m all grown-up?”
“When you start acting like it,” Lance said. At least I didn’t have to repeat myself.
The drive back into the French Quarter seemed to take forever, but eventually, Corbin was parking in an alley behind Clark Landry’s house. Lance gave him a bag of snacks for the monkey and far more instructions than necessary. I told Corbin to call us immediately if he saw anything suspicious. If that damn monkey distracted him from his job, I didn’t care how lonely he got, he wasn’t coming on another mission.
Finally, we hopped the back fence of Landry’s property and made our way slowly through his wetlands garden. When we reached an open expanse of lawn, Lance brought out his night vision binoculars and took a look at the house.
“Can you get us in?”
He nodded and motioned for me to follow him.
Dax waited outside while Lance got us in through a first-floor window. We heard voices coming from a room down the hall. The men’s words were slurred, and their laughs were too loud, letting us know they were drunk. Hopefully they would keep arguing with each other and never know we were here. Just in case, though, I had several weapons stashed on me, and I would do whatever was necessary to protect us.
I followed him, wincing when one of the steps we were climbing creaked. Lance pointed to it, indicating I should avoid it and I did. We made it upstairs and quickly found Clark’s bedroom where we searched for the safe our intel said should be there. A few moments later, I located it in the floor of the closet. Lance made quick work of cracking it. The first thing he removed was a small notebook. As he flipped through it, I could tell he was fighting back a laugh.
