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Vince held his hand out as if to calm her down. “I told you when you recruited me that Percy Champion was not going to leave this alone. And thirty minutes ago, you were telling me we needed a miracle if we wanted this case to pull together now that your informant backed out. How about you ask him what they’re doing instead of pissing them off.”
Laurel turned her glare on Vince instead, but after a moment, she blew out a breath.
“Fine,” she said, folding her arms over her chest. “Impress me.”
Kev’s hand tightened in mine. Right. We didn’t exactly have a battle plan other than collecting the last of the Horn data to hand over to someone who had the authority to actually do something with it.
Enter the FBI.
“Yes,” I said, clearing my throat. “We do have a plan. But first, we need to know what Vince’s role in this is.”
“And Buck’s,” Kev added, seemingly remembering that Buck was in the wind the last time we’d checked.
“And I need to verify your identity. No offense, Laurel. I mean Camila. I mean OnCallWidow.”
Vince’s eyes kept flashing toward the door. “Yeah, well, I need to get back down there soon to meet up with Luis. Can we make this fast?” He turned back to meet my eyes. “Where’s Champ? He should be in on this conversation.”
“He’s on his way,” I said, assuming it wouldn’t be secret for long once my tall boss strode into any room where Vince happened to be.
He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, looking rumpled for the first time since I’d known him. “I cut a deal, okay? I’m working with the feds.”
“What kind of deal?” I asked.
He picked at a spot on his cuff. “The kind that keeps me out of jail.”
There was a knock at the door, and half the people in the room reached for weapons they weren’t carrying. Kev simply strode over to answer it before I could stop him. When the room service attendant laid out the food instead of opening fire, we all let out a collective breath and settled around the suite’s dining table.
Laurel started explaining. “Vince approached a trusted contact of his in the agency—”
“The FBI,” Vince muttered. “The DEA is an agency too, you know.”
“Fine. Whatever.” Laurel waved half a veggie wrap in the air as she spoke. “The FBI connected him with my boss since I was already undercover on the Cartel de la Luna case.”
Buck Nutter hadn’t uttered a word, but he kept dropping his fork, losing his napkin, and nearly knocking over his bottle of water. Squirrelly didn’t begin to describe the man, but I wasn’t sure whether that was because he was involved in a deeper con… or it was just part of his personality. I tried to keep one eye on him while the other was split between Laurel, Vince, and Kev.
Vince interjected. “Linus crossed too many lines. It wasn’t worth it anymore.”
Buck nodded around a mouthful of coleslaw. “That’s how I felt, bro. Too many. You know?”
No. I didn’t know. None of this made any sense to me. Thankfully, Champ showed up before I could lose my temper and scream the place down in frustration.
“What the fuck is going on?” Champ growled, walking into the suite like he owned the place. In a way, he did since he was the one paying for it.
“You made good time,” I said blandly.
Champ grunted in acknowledgment. “One of my team members hanging up on me after telling me Vince and his partner were on the scene and then threatening to go rogue tends to motivate me,” he replied without looking away from his alpha staredown with Camila. “We’ll be discussing that later.”
I shrugged, though he wasn’t looking. Champ could discuss it all he liked, but I was perfectly comfortable with my actions. I’d known Champ would head here immediately once I’d told him about Anomaly, and I was starting to understand that no matter how pissed off Champ got, he trusted my instincts and wasn’t going to fire me for using them.
Kev leaned a little closer to me. Vince sighed in resignation. Laurel sized up Champ’s tall, imposing form. And Buck grinned a goofy smile at Riggs, who’d entered the room on Champ’s heels. “Well, hey there, kidnap buddy! Long time no see.”
Riggs’s eyebrows furrowed. “I thought Champ was pulling my leg when he said Buck was here.”
Champ stood at the head of the table and pegged Vince with a glare. “Talk. Now.”
It took less than ten minutes for them to lay out the situation. Most of it was exactly what we’d theorized, but they filled in some holes for us.
Vince’s coworker Linus A. Dixon—A for Adam—had hacked into Vince’s personal finances and discovered some illegal money movement several months before. He’d used this information to blackmail Vince into tracking down the smuggled Horn. When they hadn’t been able to get at the corrupted data Kev and I had put on the Horn, the blackmail had continued. But when Linus had suggested that Vince should take Champ out in a late-night assassination, Vince had known real fear.
