Thrill Ride (Black Knights Inc. #4)(66)
Because the moment she’d walked into BKI head-quarters, she’d only had eyes…er…ears for Rock. All it had taken that first day on the job for her to start salivating and imagining Cajun French–speaking babies was for Rock to open his mouth, and Carlos “Steady” Soto hadn’t stood a chance. From that very first word, she’d been toast. Complete and total toast.
She was still complete toast.
And he was never going to love her. Never. Capital N…And why should he? If he hadn’t had a good reason before, he certainly had one now. She’d nearly gotten him killed.
Another ravaging sob threatened in her chest, but this time she managed to hold it back.
“I just figured,” Steady began, tugging on his ear as he set out to explain his grand scheme, “that if we had any hope of making this thing work, of helping Rock out, we had to get the friggin’ Company off our backs. And the only way that was gonna happen was if Babineaux kicked the bucket. So we drew some blood, had Wild Bill fit him with explosives, let Ghost go out and simulate sniper shots, and voila!” he snapped his fingers, “Ding, dong, the Cajun’s dead!”
For a long moment after that rather short monologue, there was nothing but silence, each of the women staring at Steady, trying to determine if what he’d said made a lick of sense. Becky was the first to come to the conclusion that, no. No, it didn’t. Because she shook her head rapidly, like a cartoon character without the resulting eye-ee-eye-ee-eye-ee sound effect, and said, oh-so-eloquently, “Huh?”
“Yeah,” Vanessa nodded, a million questions spinning through her brain, but the most important one Becky seemed to have nailed. “What she said.”
Bill rolled his eyes. “I don’t know how the hell you managed a medical degree when you can’t explain yourself for shit.”
Steady’s face was wallpapered in big dollop of what-the-hell-dude. “I hit the high points.”
“Yeah,” Bill nodded then quickly shook his head. “Like that time you told me to take the high ground and cover you while you recon-ed that leafy foxhole in Colombia? When you just happened to leave out the part where you planned to toss a grenade in the sonofabitch, blowing it to Kingdom Come and bringing every FARC guerrilla within a quarter-mile radius down on our heads?”
“Ooh, ooh,” Ozzie raised his hand like a kid in a classroom. “I’ve got one. Like the time you told me to distract that Taliban warlord with my witty repartee so you could scout his compound for the location of his weapons stash. Only instead of marking the location of said stash, you called in an airstrike and watched it go kaboom while I was left to make like Usain Bolt and hightail it on outta there. That was classic.”
Steady waved an unconcerned hand. “Details are superfluous.”
“Jesus,” Bill’s expression was filled with disbelief, then he shrugged and turned back to the group at the table. “Steady drew Rock’s blood because we figured the CIA would want DNA evidence. Then I took a portion of that blood, put it into three bottle caps along with a small amount of plastic explosive, and set each with a charge before taping them to Rock’s chest. Ghost,” he pointed a chin at the man in question, “armed with blanks and the remote detonator for the charges, snuck out before The Company sent in backup. When Rock stepped out on the porch, ostensibly to give himself up, Ghost pulled the trigger on his sniper rifle and the remote detonator simultaneously, which resulted in the sound of gunshots and the high-powered bursts of blood you saw shooting out from Rock’s chest. Add a little more blood in a smear down the hall, fake a giant pool of blood with red food coloring, oil, and some thickening agent, and voila!” He snapped his fingers, grinning at Steady, who was now the one to roll his eyes. “Ding, dong, the Cajun’s dead.”
“Like I said,” Steady sighed, “superfluous details.”
“But—” Vanessa was trying to wrap her head around the complexity and brilliance of the plan. It wasn’t really working. Her head. Not the plan. Obviously, the plan had worked perfectly.
“Plus,” Ozzie added, “we figured they’d assume Rock had made enemies, being rogue and all—”
“I hate that word,” Rock grumbled, and Vanessa, even with her head spinning, once again experienced the overwhelming urge to reach over and grab his hand. But she figured she’d pressed her luck about as far as she could with that little move, so she laced her fingers together in her lap, squeezing them until the her nails bit into her knuckles.
“—so it’d be easy for them to jump to the conclusion there was an assassin out there looking to put an end to his life, which,” Ozzie frowned, “come to find out, is probably true. Dude,” he turned to Rock, eyes wide, “you’re unbelievably lucky you were already flopping around from those explosives, making yourself a moving target, or you’d probably be sporting a new hole in your head.”
“Don’t remind me,” Rock grunted, drawing a design on the tabletop with one long finger, frowning concernedly.
“And since we’re talking about that flopping around…” Ozzie continued, grinning like the cat who’d swallowed the canary. All he was missing was a feather sticking out of his mouth. “You could use some serious acting lessons. Daniel Day-Lewis you are not, my friend.”
Rock opened his mouth, probably to refute Ozzie’s aspersions upon his acting ability—after all, he had managed to fool the CIA and all the women present; Vanessa would not think about that—just as Boss’s phone began blasting the opening bars to “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”