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Stepping to the man, he squared off, wondering exactly when he thought he held the cards in the situation? What was the moment? Was it when he saw the kids, a fact very few people in the world knew existed? Did he not understand Ice would kill for his children? They weren’t a weakness. If anything, they were an amplifier.
“Kenny—can I call you Kenny?” Ice said, plucking at the man’s name tag. “You think you’re pulling strings your manager doesn’t control? Like Catrina doesn’t know what you’re offering to guests? When you can’t, I promise you, she does. She gets the really good shit from us. You, much like your job, are for the first-tier guests, second if it’s a slow day. I’m pretty sure she’s back from visiting family out east, which means you serve little purpose to me. Now, if you want to keep making that extra money, behave. But if you ever step to me again, nuts out, in the building or not, you will be dropped from the roof, and not one fucking employee will question your suicide.”
Color drained so fast from the man’s face Ice worried it had pooled into a urine-drenched spot on his pants. He’d gotten to the point he didn’t need to crush a man’s throat for them to understand he wasn’t the one you wanted to test. Kenny swallowed down his fear, only to have it bubble up again when he lifted his chin, and then he rethought his actions in a quick walk away.
Antiseptic hospital smell nauseated Ice. He wished it was from latent trauma so he could get the fuck over it, but sadly, it wasn’t. No matter how many stitches or broken bones set on him in the facility over the years, they weren’t what made him nauseous. Perhaps it was those he’d lost over the years and had to claim in the basement. They were medical doctors, not magicians.
“Time for your annual turn-your-head-and-cough?” Fubar said as he approached from behind. “How many times do I have to tell you, just go see that guy in the alley off the Boulevard. He started buying flavored lube.”
“There are times you frighten me,” Ice told the man since his straight-faced sarcasm made most do a double take to try to determine if he was joking or not.
“No, really, why are we here?” he asked. “Heard something about you and kids. They in the nursery?”
“My kids are five, and you’ve met them,” Ice said, questioning his thinking when tagging in Fubar for backup. At least he was the dumb stupid that would get in the middle of a battle without questioning until after why they were doing that.
“Oh yeah.” He nodded a few times. “I think your daughter slapped me and told me to stop being an idiot.”
“Well deserved,” he countered, and the guy shrugged. “There’s a guy in ICU under police protection I need to speak to.”
“You hate me, don’t you?” Fubar questioned. “You seriously hate me.”
“Come on, you know I love you more than peanut butter and jelly.”
“Fuck you,” he said, crossing the lobby to the elevators, “always calling on me for shit duty.”
“You can talk your way out of a losing spin on roulette and convince the croupier it landed on double zeros and pay out,” Ice challenged.
“Not if there’s a chance for bad juju after,” he said, and Ice shook his head.
They got off the elevator where a desk sat just outside two wings with locked doors. A quick tap to a release would let them in, but the woman behind the counter would need to give them access.
“Which door?” he asked, and Ice shrugged. If he remembered right, they looped around, so it didn’t really matter which end you went in on.
Slapping his hands together, Fubar approached the desk and began a brilliant conversation starting from him discussing the woman’s eyes. At some point he’d angled her just enough that Ice was able to press the button on the side of her desk and wander his way into the quiet ward. Light beeps and the sound of ventilators were the only thing filling the hallway. Another person sat behind a desk at what must be the nurses’ station, but they didn’t even lift their head as Ice came onto the ward, assuming he must be safe because he’d been buzzed in. At a far corner, a cop was doing his best to not pass out in the seat where he was sitting. Ice timed the rolls of his head as he nodded off and then perked back up. In the rooms with glass doors but drawn curtains, nurses scuttled around, but in John’s, there was no one.
Counting the steps needed and the continued up and down of the cop’s head, Ice readied himself. Then the asshole decided he needed to stand and stretch, anything to wake up, and Ice pressed himself by the door to a room only to see the cop make his way toward the front desk. A locked ward had its perks, he figured, and quietly made his way into the room where John lay.
The man was unconscious, but not on a vent. Ice had limited time to get him talking. Shaking him awake, Ice covered his mouth with his hand and then held a finger to his own lips when John groaned. Panicked eyes shot open as the half-drugged man began to struggle, then settled down enough to talk. There wasn’t even a mutual respect when it came to the two men, but at the moment, they had a common goal.
“Who did you borrow, steal, or otherwise fuck over, John?” Ice growled. “And don’t play innocent victim, because as we both can see, the security is a little lax around here, and I’m not the only one coming for you.”
John’s eyes cut down to his waist, then tears fell as he shook his head back and forth. Ice could sympathize since the man, more than likely, had fed the wildlife his own brand of Rocky Mountain oysters, but that didn’t mean his tongue didn’t work. The body dump by the ER was an olive branch in a way, saying,I’ll give you three chances, Little Bunny Foo-Foo.
“I only have about two minutes,” he said. “Misty’s dead, my children are targets, and I have a feeling what you owe can’t be found tucked in my mattress.”
“It was Misty. I was the backer,” John croaked out. “I’m the promise she made to them that it’d be repaid.”
“How much and to whom?” Ice asked, knowing it didn’t matter. There wasn’t enough money if a full-on hit was made. Those were warnings to others: I’ll kill you, your family, and then anyone you ever spoke to. A vision of Bree passed out in the hallway slammed into him. He’d thought she wasn’t the target and the Doctor was reducing his risk by knocking her out, but he might have been wrong.
“Brambilla,” he coughed out, the lone Sicilian in a mix of Italian mob bosses that had built Vegas, third generation at this point, born and bred.
Every inch of Ice went cold. The Sinners were a brotherhood, forged with fists, blood, and the skirting of the law. The mob was different. Memories were long, generational punishment played out in a complexity he didn’t want to experience.
“Why did she need money?” he snapped. Between John and him, there was no reason for Misty to reach out to anyone, especially not those fuckers. She was from Vegas. She knew better. Everyone knew better, and still they went, hat in hand, when under a slight amount of pressure.
“Please, our house is a Vegas show. All glitz, no substance.” He coughed a bit. “Private school, new cars, she shops in the Caesar and Venetian shops—not the edge ones, the good ones. First she stole from my campaign, and I had to get it back in the account before I was in handcuffs.”
“Nah, motherfucker, you did,” Ice said. The slime oozed from the man with every word the trained political liar spoke. “Misty ain’t smart enough to know how to steal from a campaign unless your dumb ass gave her a credit card to swipe from it. Bitch didn’t even know how to write a check.”
