Vice(29)

“God,” Harrison snaps. “Fucking pathetic. One of you guys just f*cking deal with this, okay? None of us can leave until we’re sure he’s clean.”

I survey the other men. None of them are volunteering to be next in line to have their fingers broken. Harrison sighs, lifting up his gun. He aims it at my head, his finger on the trigger.

“Be a good boy and bend over now. This will all be over in a moment.”

I take three long steps forward, so that his Glock is pressing up against my forehead, right between my eyes. “No. Fucking. Way. You’re going to have to kill me first.”

“Don’t tempt me, friend.”

“If Fernando wanted me dead, he would have shot me himself the moment he laid eyes on me. Or maybe later, here at the house when I broke his rules. But he didn’t. I guess that means he wants this deal to go through, friend. So do what you have to do. But I won’t be cowed by you. And I sure as hell am not letting anyone stick anything in my ass. It’s your call.”

Harrison’s eyes lower until they’re no wider than slits. He isn’t happy, not one bit, but I know he isn’t going to shoot me. Not yet anyway. He lowers the gun and spits onto the floor at my feet. “It isn’t often that someone refuses me something, Mr. Garrett. I’m not a fan of rejection, and I’m not a fan of being told no. I assure you I will get what I want. Either now, or later, when Fernando’s tired of the little charade you’re playing.” He holds up my cell phone in his hand for me to see. “Tell me the passcode.”

“Why?”

“So I can read your messages and confirm you’re acting on behalf of this New York banker, moron.”

“There’s personal information on there.”

“I’m counting on it. Don’t worry. I couldn’t give a shit about your * pics and your stashed porn files. It’s your conversations with your boss I’m interested in. Give me the f*cking code.”

“No.”

“I mean it. This isn’t a f*cking joke, okay? You haven’t just checked in for a spa weekend at the Ritz Carlton. Your life is on the line right now.”

I make a show of thinking for second, and then I hold up my hands, surrendering. “Okay. It’s five eight five nine. But seriously, man. Don’t look at my private photos. They’re pretty graphic. I’d hate to think of them in the wrong hands.”

Harrison smirks, and I know all too well that he’s going to make a big deal out of the files he finds in my gallery. He’s in for a f*cking surprise. When he rifles through my phone, he’ll find about seventy pictures of a naked eighty-three year old woman at various stages of undress as she obviously performs a strip tease. It’s quite disturbing. In the text messages, he’ll find the most sordid, graphic sexts between myself and Mavis—texts so nasty and dirty they’d even make Carnie, the Widow Makers’ recently promoted prospect, blush. In my emails, he’ll find eighteen folders of spam, and a number of coded, confusing messages from a contact called “Trident,” that will leave him scratching his head for days.

What he won’t find is anything incriminating about Laura, or any correspondence between Jamie and me. It’ll drive him crazy. The code I just gave him is the key. If the code “five eight, five nine” is entered into my cell, my real phone screen isn’t unlocked, but a proxy screen complete with apps, contacts, notes and photos. He’ll never be able to tell it’s not real. And he’ll never gain access to the stored information I have on countless different South American cartels, the places I’ve buried bodies, or the entire towns I’ve razed to the ground on my journey to find my sister.

Harrison taps the code into the phone and swells up when it unlocks, his chest puffing up with pride, like he hacked into the damn thing himself. “I’m sure Fernando will be discreet,” he says, but he and I both know Fernando will only be looking at it once he’s been through it with a fine tooth comb. “Get dressed,” he tells me. “Everyone’s gathering outside. Fernando wants you down there, too.”

“What for?”

Harrison rolls his eyes, pocketing my cell phone. “Just do it, man. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

It’s only after he leaves, the rest of his men following behind him, that I realize how badly this could have gone. I’ve been facing Harrison and his guys the whole time. I didn’t turn around, and none of them tried to sneak up behind me to get a jump on me. If they had, they would have immediately known I was lying to them.

They would have seen the huge Widow Makers MC tattoo that sprawls across my shoulder blades, and I, my friends, would have been f*cked.





CHAPTER SEVEN





THE HOUSE OF WOLVES





I find some clothes that haven’t been completely destroyed, and I head outside. On the lawn in front of the huge mansion, a small crowd of people are gathered together, looking uncomfortable and frightened. It hits me then—at least five or six of them have red hair. How strange. They’re dressed in white robes, men and women both, clutching the material tightly closed up around their chins. Their feet are bare in the short, neatly cut grass. These are Fernando’s Servicio, as Plato called them.

Off to the right, another crowd of people hover—a mix of men, all dressed in expensive clothes from suits to leather jackets, jeans to Georgio Armani slacks. They have this lean, hungry look about them that sets them apart from the other group. These are obviously Fernando’s guests, his players? the men who have paid to use and abuse the other human beings a few feet away from them.