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“Well… I guess I’m just unsure why I’m here.” Then I gesture his way. “With you. I came out tonight expecting to help my buddy shed some of his pre-wedding blues, drop a few dollars down the panties of a dancing girl, and make it home by midnight.” I set my hand in my lap and shrug. “I understand you may have heard of me in the business world, but I was never looking to buy any of your companies, Mr. Vallejo. So I wonder if there’s been a misunderstanding.”
“Good,” my father murmurs in my ear. “Good cover. Get him to talk. Trueman?”
“Fuller’s still where he started. Still with his girl. Hostiles are hovering nearby. But they’re not approaching.”
“I’m just gonna keep my head down,” Gord mumbles from the bosom of a woman who was a teenager a few short years ago. “Stay alert, Banks.”
“There has been no misunderstanding,” Vallejo inserts, drawing my focus entirely back to him. “Merely, curiosity on my part. You deal in business. I deal in business.”
“Get him to talk about his business,” my father barks in my ear. “Get him to talk, full stop.”
Swear to god, if he doesn’t shut the fuck up…
“Do you only own clubs, Mr. Vallejo?” I bring my leg up and settle my ankle on my knee, matching the other man’s pose, albeit unintentionally. “I must confess, I don’t know a lot about your ventures.”
He brings his cigar to his lips and inhales, while simultaneously chuckling low on his breath. “If you do not know, then perhaps it’s best left unsaid.”
“Push him!” Henry orders. “Get him to say it.”
I shrug instead and push my father’s voice out. “I don’t intend to pry. A man is entitled to his privacy.”
“You think so?” Vallejo nods toward the men over my shoulder, and though I’m too controlled to glance back and watch what they’re doing, I still catch movement in the reflection of a framed picture on the bookshelves lining the wall. I watch as soldiers file out, and pull the door closed. I hear the lock snick, and then a second, louder, and much more secure lock engage immediately after.
That door is no standard fucking timber sheet. But a steel-reinforced panic room kinda setup. Which means I’m not leaving until they want me to, and Vallejo isn’t at risk as far as they’re concerned.
“What secrets do you hold, Mr. Donner?” Vallejo takes another puff of his cigar and grins through the smoke that comes right after. “What kind of things do you know, but wish to keep quiet?”
“Abort mission!” Trueman’s shouted order makes me jump in my seat and adrenaline to surge through my blood. My eyes cling to Vallejo’s hand as he lowers it down and opens a desk drawer. “I repeat! Abort mission.”
“You come into my club,” Vallejo taunts, taking a Smith and Wesson 500 from the drawer and setting it on the blotter in the middle of his desk. Cover blown, I surge up from my chair and yank my service pistol from beneath my shirt, but he’s fast. He’s practiced, and already has his pistol pointing directly at my face. “You think you’re slick, Special Agent Banks?”
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!
“You want to speak of fathers and the family business?” Slowly, he rises from his seat, his aim firm and sure. “Mine made us very wealthy. Very, very wealthy.” He grins the grin of the devil himself, pushing adrenaline through my veins so I feel like I weigh a ton, while at the same time, like I could fly. “Yours is gonna be the reason you die today.”
“Abort!” my team shouts in my ear. “Our cover is blown.”
No fuckin’ shit.
“Henry Banks is your father, no?” Vallejo saunters around his desk and comes to me, unafraid of the weapon that hangs limply from my pointer finger. “Unfortunately for you, young Drake, you look entirely too much like him. And he and I go back a long way.” He comes to a stop three feet from where I stand and reaches out to relieve me of my pistol.
Its absent weight, like an anvil crushing my skull.
“I clocked you the first time you walked into my club, Drake Banks.” He tosses my gun onto his desk, then takes a step closer and sets the tip of his Smith & Wesson on my forehead. Cold sweat breaks out along my spine and makes my heart knock in my chest. “Henry Banks has been looking for me for decades. In fact, I recall him being up my ass thirty-five years ago, which is about the time you were born, no?” He sniggers so his body jumps and his gun scrapes across my brow. “The birth of a son didn’t even slow him down.” Hetut tuts. “It’s no wonder your mother left him.”
“I’ll kill you.” Panic makes way for anger, and anger makes it much easier for me to operate. “You speak of my mom, and you sign your own death warrant.”
He chokes out a laugh and cocks the hammer of his pistol. “I fucked your mother, son. I’ve been closer to you than you’ve ever been to me. I’ve been in your home. And not for a single second, not once in all the time you’ve been in this club, have you fooled me or my men. But I take personal offense to some low-rent cop whose rank is a result of nepotism and thinks he can walk in here and put a dent in my organization.” He lowers his pistol and shoots off a round so fast, I don’t even feel the slug pierce my leg, nor when it blows out the back of my thigh.
But I feel the fire. A moment after the explosion, I feel the heat and roar.
“Shots fired,” Trueman shouts from somewhere else in the club. More go off, but in my distraction, Vallejo swings his arm around my neck and spins me until my back slams against his chest, and the muzzle of his gun, still hot from the shot before, burns against my temple.
“Tell your daddy you’ve been hit, Banks.” He turns us until we face a fifty-inch flat screen TV embedded in the wall, and though he doesn’t touch a remote or bark out a verbal order, the screen flickers to life and reveals security footage of the club downstairs. “I said,” he squeezes my neck and cuts off my air, “tell your daddy you’ve been hit. Bring him in here. We’ve got unfinished business, and the fact he sent you to do the job he started only reinforces what I always knew: he’s a fucking pussy.”
“Fuck you, Vallejo.” I grit out, searching the room for an exit. “This is between you and me now.”
“Because Henry’s retired?” he laughs. “Come now, kiddo. Fifty-eight-years-old is hardly time to hang up the boots. I’d know,” he adds smugly, cocking his gun a second time so the click-click ricochets through my skull. “I’m two years his senior and have no desire to slow down yet.”
