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“Where does he operate?” Davy asked.
Beck shook his head in frantic denial. “As God is my witness, I have no idea. It’s been fifteen years since I spoke to him, and I—”
“Bullshit. You talked to him the day before yesterday, to sic a hit man on my wife’s sister. Give us the number you called,” Con said.
Beck kept shaking his head. His body shook with sobs. A puddle of urine pooled around one of his shoes on the gleaming blond parquet.
Sean sighed, and dropped him. The guy fell to the floor with a heavy plop, like an overripe fruit. He wept noisily, covering his face.
“This one’s played out,” Sean said wearily. “Let’s go.”
Davy gotthe SUV in gear and accelerated away from that place.
“Christ, that was depressing,” Connor muttered.
Davy shot a furious glance back at Sean. “You pushed him too hard. You need to use a lighter touch. Unless you’re practicing up for when you get tossed into a maximum security prison, of course.”
Sean was too lost in thought to respond. “Drunk off his ass, at nine AM,” he mused. “He smelled like fear. I scared him bad, but he still held back. Which means that this Osterman guy scares him worse.”
Miles swiveled around, his eyes big. “What was Plan B?”
Sean looked at him blankly. “Huh?”
“You told Beck that if he didn’t give you a name, you were moving on to Plan B. What were you going to do to him?”
Sean grimaced. Hard-core intimidation was tense, nasty work. He didn’t really have the stomach for it. “Fucked if I know,” he grumbled. “I don’t even have a Plan A, let alone B. Let’s get gussied up for Parrish.”
Cindy gulped her coffee,and tried again to plow through an article about general plane wave solutions to sound wave equations inSound Spectrum Journal,an egghead rag if she’d ever seen one. She’d even bought some intellectual horn-rimmed glasses, but she longed for aMarie Claire. An article on the cover had caught her eye.When He Just Can’t Forgive: Real Life Stories of Women Who Committed the Unforgivable Sin.Hah. Bet those real life women had nothing on her.
She was nervous, scared, and buzzed out of her mind on caffeine, but if she bagged now, she’d ruin all of Miles’s careful social engineering for nothing. This stunt might be monstrously stupid, but she wanted it to count for something. Especially if she was risking her life.
Her flop sweat was a clammy strip down her back. She was a pretty good liar, but how long could it take for that guy to figure out that she did not have Miles’s brain in her head?
She thought about how angry Miles would be if he knew where she was. She wished she’d managed to seduce him. At least once, before…well, before whatever was going to happen happened.
Things looked really poignant when a girl was going undercover to hunt down a killer—with no backup, no safety net, nothing in her purse but a dead cell phone and a tube of lip gloss.
A guy walked into the Starbucks, and looked around like he was supposed to meet someone. She gave him a sideways once-over.
Nice looking, in a bland sort of way. His nose was too small and pointy for her tastes. She preferred nice, big, hooked honkers. Same with his brown hair. Too short. He had an OK body, for a nerd.
His face looked nice enough, but then again, so had Ted Bundy’s.
His eyes slid towards her. She redirected her gaze at the magazine. He was coming her way. Oh, shit. It was him. She was on.
She missed Daddy so bad, she could have bawled. Daddy would have stopped her from doing such a stupid, butthead thing. She’d be sulking in her room at home right now, if Daddy hadn’t screwed up and gotten himself incarcerated. She tried to breathe. She felt dizzy.
“Mina?” the guy asked.
She looked up, into guileless hazel eyes. No blaze of festering hatred in them. No skin-creeping vibe. No bloodstains under his fingernails. Just a guy in a buttoned down blue cotton shirt and jeans. He could have been a manager in a stereo store. “Jared?” she asked.
The guy smiled. A nice smile, not a maniacal grin.
He slid into the seat opposite, and peeked at the cover ofSound Spectrum. He chuckled. “Picked up a little light reading, huh? I get that one sometimes, too, just for kicks. It’s good for the bathroom.”
Cindy tried to laugh. Black spots danced in front of her face.
“Oh, yeah,” she said, her voice hollow. “It’s a real hoot.”
