End Game (Will Robie #5)(83)

Robie looked at Reel. “Well, that wasn’t particularly helpful.”

“She looks like she’s about to crack under the strain.”

“Cassidy is tough, but she’s new to the role and she doesn’t want a cock-up in her first few months in the job. Losing Blue Man would be catastrophic. Her detractors will be armchairing that all day long. Why he didn’t have security when he came out here, stuff like that.”

“Scott Randall,” mused Reel. “If he’s involved somehow, I would be more than willing to cut his nuts off. After I strangle his wife,” she added.

“Lambert threw him the birthday party probably as a thank-you for purchasing a doomsday condo. Beverly Drango worked the party, and then she comes home from it to find Lamarre has disappeared. Coincidence or not?”

“Wait a minute, Robie. That’s what she told us. She’s the only one we have who can vouch for when he disappeared. What if he’d already been taken and she just fed us a lot of shit about the timing?”

“Okay, now I know it’s how she earns extra money. But how likely is it she would be working a craps table at a birthday party for Scott Randall paid for by Lambert? Coincidence?”

“Maybe she helped them somehow and her being there wasn’t a coincidence. And I can think of one reason why she might want to be in the same room with either or both men if she had helped them somehow.”

“To get paid off for whatever it was that she did,” said Robie.

Reel nodded. “You wouldn’t want any money trail to follow. But if she surreptitiously got paid off in cash while working at a birthday party? Who would be the wiser?”

“But what would she have done for them?”

“Lamarre told her about the van with the prisoners in the back.”

“And you think she told Randall or Lambert? But why would she know they might be connected to that?”

“That’s the piece I don’t know. But she might have put two and two together, somehow. So she contacts one or both and tells them what Lamarre told her. He might have also told her that he had let it slip to Holly in rehab. They could have found out the same thing we did: that Holly called JC Parry and then Blue Man came to visit her. They might assume it had to do with what Lamarre told her.”

“That seems to add up,” agreed Robie.

“Or it could be all wrong,” conceded Reel.

“Well, we figured out what happened in Mississippi with my family. So we can solve this. I mean, in Mississippi and right after, anything seemed possible. Right?”

Reel turned away from the blank screen to find his gaze fully on her.

“I thought we had put this behind us,” she said.

“We’ve done nothing. It takes at least two to be a ‘we.’”

“What’s going on with you and Malloy?”

He blurted out, “I slept with her. Okay?”

There was a long moment of silence as Reel stared at Robie and Robie stared right back at her. It was impossible to tell which one was more surprised by his admission.

“We’re on a mission, Robie,” she said tersely. “And you just broke a cardinal rule.”

“And can you point to anything that I’ve done or haven’t done to prove that I’m not doing my job to the best of my abilities? Because I can point to at least one time where you screwed up and almost got us killed.”

She seemed taken aback by this. “I . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You froze. When Dolph’s boys were bearing down on us, you froze.”

She looked away, her distress evident on her features.

“I know what that’s like, Jess. I froze in the middle of a mission too. Right in the middle of a damn shot. I put someone in the crosshairs who was simply not there. He was in my head, but he wasn’t in the line of my shot. And I screwed up.”

She looked back at him. “You can’t compare the two,” she said dully.

“I am comparing the two,” he retorted.

“No, I mean mine was much worse.”

Now Robie looked taken aback.

Reel rose and started to head to the door.

“Jess, can you at least tell me what changed between the time we got back from Mississippi and right now? Things . . . things seemed so . . . perfect. For the first time in my life. And I thought it was the same for you. I thought that—”

“What? What did you think?”

He glanced up at her. “That I wouldn’t have to be alone anymore.”

She looked away from him. “That was an illusion, Will. That wasn’t real.”

“No, Jess, it was. It was real. We were both there for each other.”

She shook her head. “Have fun with Malloy. Let’s find Blue Man. And then we can get the hell out of here.”

“And then what?”

“You go back to being Will Robie. And I go back to being Jessica Reel. Because, at the end of the day, that’s all either of us has.”





CHAPTER





48


It was midnight when the knock on the door came.

Robie was up in an instant, the pistol held loosely in his right hand.

He approached the door of his room and, standing to the side of it, said, “Who is it?”