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Don’t trust anyone.
Don’t. Trust. Anyone.
25
Justin
Blasting the horn, I swerved around a Mazda doing about twenty down the highway. The weather was getting worse. The flurries had turned into sheets of snow propelled by blustery wind. The temperature was dropping too.
I was wild with fury, the kind of unrestrained rage that reminded me of my time in Zambia.
My brother had beenmurdered.
The boy I used to walk home from school to ensure he made it okay, the boy I sat next to until his tears from his first heartbreak dried up, the boy at the center of the first prayer I’d ever said in my life.
The funeral had been a closed casket. Looking back, something in my gut knew that the information his commanding officers told us was bullshit, but because I understood, from being a SEAL, how many things happened “under the radar,” I didn’t question it.
Also, I was too goddamn paralyzed with grief to care about the details. Nate was dead, that was all that mattered. What difference did the circumstances make? I couldn’t bring him back.
Hearing this new information felt like I was reliving his death all over again.
There was a split second when I was staring down at the bullet hole in Leo’s forehead that I considered leaving again, just like I’d done after Nate had died. Leaving everything, catching a flight back to the Galápagos Islands, and wasting away until the devil finally—finally—decided it was time to meet my fate.
Only one thing kept me from doing this. Sophia Banks.
I was desperate to find her. Desperate in more ways than I cared to admit. She was the key to everything; there was no question about it. Get her, get the bastard who killed Leo, get the bastards who killed my brother.
After fleeing the coffee shop, moments before Leo’s body was spotted by one of the coffeehouse staff, I sped back to Falcon Creek, Sophia’s last known location.
I had a lead, a good one—the telephone number of the person Leo was communicating with when he was shot between the eyes. Something told me that the person he was talking to was the same person who had tried to kill Sophia.
And he was a dead man.
It was time to bring in the big guns.
“Come on, come on,” I spat into the phone.
“Yo, J.”
I could barely hear Mack over the crack of a cue ball in the background.
Mack McCoy was a mercenary like me. He’d worked for Astor Stone since the beginning, though you wouldn’t know it. While Ryder, Roman, and I had become hard and calloused over the years, somehow Mack was able to compartmentalize what we did for a living. He was always the first one to crack a joke, always wildly inappropriate. He was the first to interrupt a meeting with a case of beer, or to bring twins home from the bar. We needed him. We all needed a reminder that somewhere outside the hell that was our job, there could still be laughter.
Mack was also our most valuable computer geek. Before accepting a job with Astor, Mack worked for the Cyber Crimes Unit in the FBI. There was no system he couldn’t hack into, and if there were, he’d work tirelessly to figure out how to.
“I need you to ping the location of a cell phone number for me,” I said as my truck swerved around a corner. “I just texted the number to you.”
“On it.” Mack covered the receiver, saying something to the people he was with. “Sorry,” he said when returned, his hasty footsteps echoing in the background. “We got a new pool table for the break room.”
“Glad to know something’s keeping you busy.” I spun out going up a hill. “Shit.”
“I’m in my office now,” he said. “Give me a few minutes with this number. In the meantime, tell me what’s going on. How’s the case?”
“Upside down. It’s a shit show.”
“What happened?”
“For starters, Leo, my local contact, just caught a bullet between the eyes.”
