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No, he wouldn’t. Dornan would beat him to it. And he wouldn’t need a blade. No. Dornan would rip his pretty wife’s head from her body simply with the force of his rage, and then he would do the same to his best friend, the man he’d trusted more than anyone else in his entire life.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
MARIANA
I’d like to say we escaped, that our plan was brilliant, but our plan was hasty and panicked. John went first, sliding down the fire escape to the back alley below, hidden from street view. This was even better, I surmised, as I felt John’s hand on my ankle, guiding me down so I didn’t fall and break my neck in these ridiculous high heels Dornan insisted I wear to meetings. We could make a clean break while the others languished in police cells. We’d be in Colombia before some of them even made bail.
But that’s where the illusion shattered. Because I looked down, and the man holding my ankle wasn’t John. It was Lindsay.
‘Mariana.’ He smiled, pulling me down to the ground and then pushing me up against the wall, cold handcuffs wrapping around my wrists and clicking shut. ‘How nice of you to join us.’
In my peripheral vision I saw John, handcuffed and gagged, as he was dragged away. He hadn’t even been able to yell out to warn me of the danger below. Lindsay wrenched me away from the wall and pushed me forward. I moved awkwardly in my heels as he propelled me around to the front of the clubhouse, following in John’s footsteps, where at least fifteen police cars sat waiting to be filled. I looked on in horror as I saw John being wrestled into one car, Dornan into another, and Emilio into a third. Cuffs firmly in place, Lindsay spun me around to face him. He smiled again, and Christ almighty if he didn’t look like some Hollywood movie star who’d been plucked off the street and handed a gun and a badge. His bright white teeth were dazzling, and he looked clean. Too clean. Even his navy blue suit jacket looked freshly pressed.
We, on the other hand, we were all dirty, even if we didn’t look it on the surface. Emilio’s dirt was the poison that ran through his veins, the beady look in his dark eyes, the bit of phlegm that always seemed to be trapped in his chest, that rumbled when he spoke and made me want to scream at him to clear his damn throat every time he opened his mouth.
Dornan and John were dirty anyway, with their beard scruff, the tattoos that covered their skin in various stages of bright and dull colouring, the leather vests they never, ever washed, their palms stained with engine oil and probably blood.
We were all dirty, dishevelled, less than.
Lindsay, though, was resplendent. He had us now, and he knew it.
And he beamed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
LINDSAY
Divide and conquer – that was the key to getting people to turn on each other. Lindsay was well versed in this technique, and it was perfect for today’s situation: a group of highly paranoid criminals with shady moral codes who would just as soon rat on someone as take a bullet for them. It was the law of averages. Eventually, one of them would turn on the rest.
Speaking of. In front of him sat Mariana Rodrig– no, it was Ross now, wasn’t it? Mariana Ross. Didn’t roll off the tongue as nicely as Rodriguez, but Lindsay suspected that she’d roll off his tongue nicely no matter what her name was. He tried not to think about how beautiful she was, though. It had already made him go softer on her than he should have, when he gave her the gun back in Vegas. It was a dumb move. He knew the second she got out of that car that she wasn’t going to testify for him.
He’d been questioning her for at least thirty minutes but the woman was like a vault. She wasn’t saying anything, and she looked bereft. Lindsay suspected he’d interrupted her escape plans. Well, he had literally interrupted her shimmying down the fire escape in heels and a pencil skirt, but he suspected she’d planned to be on her way to some exotic locale by now, instead of sitting chained to an interrogation table inside the LAPD’s downtown station. As much as Lindsay loathed this place, the FBI headquarters simply couldn’t handle this volume of arrests at one time.
‘This is your last chance at getting immunity,’ he reminded her. ‘I mean it. Just because I feel sorry for you doesn’t mean I can make the murder charge go away.’ He slid a piece of paper over to her side of the table. ‘We know you killed Allie Baxter. You’re going away, for twenty-five to life. Not that you’ll survive that long. The cartels run the prisons. You’ll be dead before you get to dinner on your first day.’
It was only then that she started to communicate.
‘You’ll never get immunity approved for a cop killer,’ Mariana said to him. ‘Why would you offer such a thing?’
Lindsay smiled. ‘Killing a dirty cop isn’t quite the same as killing, say, a cop like me.’
Mariana raised one eyebrow. ‘A cop like you?’
‘Exemplary. Unblemished record. Solid cases. You definitely don’t want to get caught for killing a cop like me.’
She didn’t look convinced.
‘Your testimony could bring an entire cartel to its knees,’ Lindsay said. ‘It could dismantle their drug operations. Their arms deals. Their human trafficking.’ He saw her flinch. ‘You want to help the women and children Emilio is selling, don’t you? The babies? The babies he sells while they’re still in their mothers’ wombs? Mariana, don’t you want to stop those children from being sold to porn rings and paedophiles?’
‘Stop,’ she said, covering her ears. ‘Please stop.’
‘Do you think anyone stops when those children beg them to stop?’
Mariana glared at him. ‘John and I are a package deal,’ she said. ‘We both get immunity, then I testify.’
Lindsay laughed. ‘What? You’re kidding, right? Immunity for the president of the club who was running the trafficking in the first place? I don’t think so.’
‘He didn’t have anything to do with it,’ she said forcefully.
