Smoke and Steel (Wild West MC #2)(14)

“I got a question for you,” Core said.

She gave him a let’s have it chin jut.

“What’s a Patek Phillipe?”

“A really expensive watch.”

“And another question,” he continued.

She sent him another jut.

“Why didn’t you call Jag in on this?”

“What?” she asked.

“Why didn’t you tell Jagger about this and ask him to handle it?”

“Why would I do that?” She seemed sincerely bewildered.

“I don’t know,” he returned. “Because he’s your brother-in-law and because he’s also Chaos. Chaos has had a charter in this city for six decades at least. They know everybody. If they don’t know somebody, they know someone who can find out, and then they can take care of business on the other end.”

“But…we can and are taking care of business on our end,” she asserted.

He didn’t know what to say to that. Or at least he didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t completely offend her.

So he kept quiet.

“He’s just a Tinder swindler,” she declared. “Marcy and I get some evidence, show it to Bree, Bree demands her money back and ends it with him. Done.”

Should he tell her?

She looked to Marcy. “I think he’s got more than one social media profile. Probably working with different names and pictures with his other victims. But I don’t know how to find them. I don’t remember any of those guys showing as friends of his, and I would have remembered them. I’m not sure what’s up with that house, but we need to get inside. We’re gonna have to figure out how to do that. I think damsel in distress, maybe a flat tire. You engage the guys with fixing the tire on your car, I’ll sneak inside and figure out how he pulls off the lives-alone thing when Bree is there.”

That answered that.

Fuck yeah, he was going to tell her.

But first…

“You are not fuckin’ doing any of that,” he declared.

He got both of their attention when he said that.

“Sorry?” Hellen asked calmly, but fire was flashing in her eyes.

“This isn’t a little scam, baby, this is a big one. This dude isn’t doing this to your girl and some others. All those guys are scamming chicks.”

Hellen’s eyes got big, and yeah, there it was again.

Cute.

She turned those eyes to Marcy. “Holy shit. I didn’t think of that.”

“I didn’t either,” Marcy replied, looking equally shocked. “Whoa. But it makes total sense.”

“Your problem is,” Core kept speaking and regained their attention, “you don’t know if this is a contained thing, or if this is a bigger deal. Guys like this can lay waste to only so many women before they have to move along. They’re too pretty not to be noticed. And there are a certain number of hours in each day, so they all might have several women on the go at once, but to keep them believing, they can’t throw them a bone every once in a while. This means there’s a limited amount they can handle at one time. You gotta put the effort in, and this kind of effort takes time. In the end, though, there’s only so much blood you can get from each stone, and once they’re tapped out, these guys are vapor.”

Both women didn’t take their gaze off him.

Core kept talking.

“They might be genius at this shit, willing to go the extra mile and invest some of their take in infrastructure to support the con. Better explanation, they bump a percentage to someone higher up on the food chain, someone who recruited and trained them for this deal. That someone builds websites and sets up receptionists that take messages and provides them with BMWs, expensive watches, and good-enough-to-fool-them knockoffs to give out as gifts. Or that gift is the real thing, they just scammed it off some other poor woman who fell for their shit.”

Neither of them said anything, but both of their eyes were even bigger.

Core got to the important stuff.

“In other words, you’re not gonna do dick to get on the radar of these assholes. You tell your girl what you know, minus the part where you saw his buds at his house, and strongly suggest she scrape him off. If she gets scammed from there, that’s her deal and at least you tried.”

“Okay, no,” Hellen refuted. “That’s not what friends do. She needs to know it all.”

“Sweetheart, I guarantee you this guy gives exceptional head. He’s so good at it, he might be even better at it than me,” he told her.

Color came up in her cheeks that belied her sharp tone. “Why would you say that?”

“Because you can get hooked to the car and the restaurants and the gifts. But if you start giving your money to some schmuck you’ve known a couple of months and think you’re in love, I don’t care how good-looking he is, you’re getting laid in a way you like a whole fuckin’ lot.”

“This is no lie. Remember that guy I dated, Hell? The one I got head from, and it was so good, if he asked, I would have given him a month’s rent. Wouldn’t even blink. Fortunately for me, he didn’t ask,” Marcy put in. “Unfortunately for me, that was all he did well. Still, I considered hanging on, just for the good part.”

Hellen didn’t pipe up, which made Core look to his lap while he did a slow grin, because he knew then she’d never been gone down on that good.