by Nina West
I watch in a surreal fog as everyone sets into action to cover up a triple murder.
Beside me, Michelle trembles. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she whispers, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Get them away from here,” Caleb orders. It takes me a moment to realize he’s talking about us.
Moe nods, reaches for the suitcase.
“Not you.” Gabriel aims his gun at the bodyguard, and everyone in the room stops moving, along with my heart.
My thoughts echo Michelle’s words: Is this really happening?
Oh God. Moe may unsettle me, but I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to see Gabriel kill him. I don’t want to see Gabriel as a murderer. I want to keep wearing my blinders.
Moe slowly pulls his hand away from the luggage.
“Back away from him, Mercy. Now,” Gabriel demands in a harsh voice that doesn’t sound like him, easing in closer, his eyes never leaving the man.
I grab Michelle’s arm and herd her toward the elevator doors. I would drag her all the way upstairs if we could get past Moe without risking becoming a hostage, because that’s the only way Moe is getting out of this situation alive.
“Gabe?” Caleb watches his brother intently. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Stanley got a heads-up that the Feds have an informant here.”
Moe slowly raises arms in the air. He doesn’t even attempt to pull out his gun. “I’m not the rat.” He doesn’t sound surprised by the accusation, though.
“So you’re denying it? Are you saying that you didn’t stand watch while that fucking agent cornered Mercy and threatened her?”
Caleb’s gaze flash to mine, his eyebrows raised in question.
I push past the mind-numbing fear that has seized me and manage the slightest nod.
A hint of concern furrows his brow. It’s a rare sight, and I don’t know if it’s concern for me or himself, but it’s nice to see, all the same.
“Yeah, there was an agent in the restroom tonight, rattling her,” Moe admits calmly.
“And earlier, at the spa.”
Moe’s brow furrows. “I didn’t know about that one.”
“Bullshit. You brought her back because you were hoping to find something like this mess.” Gabriel aims the gun at Moe’s forehead. His finger hovers over the trigger. He looks seconds away from pulling it.
I wince, bracing myself.
“It’s not him,” Merrick calls out, stalling Gabriel’s itchy finger.
Moe’s eyes flicker between the two men before settling on Gabriel. “I brought Mercy back because they insisted, and because I thought she might be feeding the Feds information on you. I thought you’d want to deal with it. But it’s not her.” Moe releases a reluctant sigh. “It’s the other one.”
I frown. The other one? What does he mean by “the other one”?
Not until Moe turns to study Michelle does it click.
“Are you insane? She’s not an FBI informant!” It’s almost laughable.
That is, until Michelle starts to cry uncontrollably, a barely coherent “I’m sorry” slipping from her lips.
Icy dread slips down my spine as what she’s saying registers. “Oh my God, Michelle, what did you do?”
“My father… She said they’d drop the charges….” Her words break apart with her sobs.
“What the fuck.” Caleb studies the woman he’s been flirting with and bedding for the past few days as if she’s suddenly grown tentacles on her forehead and revealed herself in alien form.
Gabriel frowns as if trying to figure out a complex problem. His gun is still in hand, though lowered. I can’t even guess at what’s going through his mind right now. What I do know is that he was about to shoot Moe for being an informant.
Michelle just admitted to being an informant.
If he hurts her…
I do the only thing I can think of.
I step in front my best friend, shielding her from harm as I silently plead with those dark and stormy eyes for mercy.
18
Gabriel
“No reports of gunfire yet,” Farley confirms.
Caleb’s head falls back with his heavy relief. “Okay. Get working on the security system. We’re going to need some camera interference to pull this off. And I want the feed from the parking garage and the service elevator destroyed. Get details on all the guards.”
Farley nods and ambles off.
“It’s all gone to shit. Perris are dead, Peter is in hiding. The Feds are crawling up our asses. We have a fucking informant.” Caleb begins to pace. “This is why we don’t ever get involved with women. This is why we fuck and then they leave, and that’s the end of it. I told you we shouldn’t have brought them here!”
“They don’t know anything.”
He stops abruptly to glare at me. “You mean besides the three dead bodies? They’re both goddamn witnesses!”
“Because you couldn’t control yourself! You just couldn’t wait until the timing was right.” I sigh. Getting in a screaming match won’t do anyone any good. “Mercy’s not going to talk. She’s smart, and she wants to protect her father.” And she’s in love with me.
At least I hope she’s still in love with me after seeing that side of me.
My gaze shifts to the terrace, to where Mercy and Michelle sit huddled on the sectional couch, Terrence watching over them. I couldn’t get a read on Mercy other than to know that she’s terrified. Is she mad at her best friend? Feeling betrayed? Her initial shock wasn’t enough to stop her from jumping in front of Michelle to protect her from us. That was some brave shit, but I shouldn’t be surprised.
“Yeah? What about the other one, huh? The one that’s already sitting nicely in the Feds’ pocket? What the fuck are we going to do about her?”
“Maybe if you’d kept your dick out of America for two minutes, she wouldn’t be so eager to crucify you,” I mutter.
“Give me a break. She was already talking to them before that. She was screwing me while trying to fuck me.”
“She had nothing to tell them. She doesn’t know shit.” Because Mercy doesn’t know shit. Nothing that could be used as a smoking gun against us, anyway.
Caleb shakes his head. He’s not convinced. “They’ve had that coming for twenty years. We are not getting buried for that.” He stabs a finger toward the games room.
He’s angry, I get it. If this were Moe or Vic or any other backstabbing two-faced prick, we’d be talking about how deep a hole we need to bury that secret. But even we have limits, and ending a woman who witnessed something she shouldn’t have because we were sloppy is not an option.
“We need to get more details. Find out exactly what she’s told them so far.”
“And then what?” Caleb pushes. “Sit back and hope she doesn’t crack under pressure? Fucking look at her!”
“Yeah, she’s a terrified mess.” The woman broke down in a hysterical fit the second Moe outed her. It’s no wonder this agent was able to coerce her into complying. Who knows what they have on her family, but it’d take nothing to sway her. That works to our advantage. I grit my teeth. This is the part of this dirty business that I hate most. “So we make sure she understands what happens to her and her loved ones if she says a word about this to anyone.” Strike the kind of fear in her that shuts her down.
And hope Mercy doesn’t hate me for it.
Merrick ends his call with this mystery cleaner then. “He’s on his way,” he announces, downing a shot of whatever clear booze Vince just poured him.
I’ll give it to these two—they have connections. “You told him to use the service elevator?”
“He knows. It’s not the first time he’s been here.” Merrick sounds robotic. They’re both stone-faced and operating in strict get-shit-done mode. I can’t blame them, seeing as they just watched three family members get gunned down, one by their own hands. Certainly not how we expected tonight to go. “He’s not cheap, especially given circumstances.
How much cash do you guys have on you?”
“We’ll have to check the safe, but enough.” Caleb never comes to Sin City without a few hundred thousand to gamble away.
“He wants payment upfront.” Merrick dumps another shot down his gullet.
“Hey, you want to ease up on that before you get railed and blow this for all of us?” Caleb warns.
I glare at my brother. Pot. Kettle. And so not the time to be scolding the man. He just put a bullet in his father’s head. Even I don’t have the stomach to do that, and I hate the bastard. I wouldn’t have thought Merrick had the stomach either, but I guess finding out that your father hired a hit on someone you love does strange things to people.
“No, I don’t fucking want to ease up,” Merrick snarls, turning on my brother, his hands twitching by his sides like they’re craving a weapon to fire or a face to smash. “There wouldn’t be anything to blow if you had just kept your big mouth shut.”
“Are you seriously trying to pin this on me?” Caleb’s shoulders stiffen. “You were here! He was going to kill us!”
“Yeah. Because you kept poking him. You knew where that would lead!”
“You know what? Why are you so fucking angry? You guys are free! We just solved all your problems and then some. No more dirty drug business. Merrick, you can fly your flag and suck all the cock—”
Merrick lunges.
Vince jumps in between them, grabbing hold of his brother and wrestling him away. “Enough! There’ll be plenty of time later for you two to beat the shit out of each other. Let’s focus on the task at hand.” He waits until Merrick nods before releasing his grip. “We took the service elevator up, so the Feds might know we were meeting here tonight, but hopefully they don’t have an exact headcount.”
Caleb adopts a casual stance, his arms folded across his chest. “‘Hopefully’ is a gamble I’m not willing to take.”
“That’s why we wipe all evidence that that were here. But they can’t just disappear off the map without a trace. That just guarantees that the Feds are up our asses for years, especially since they’ve already been seen around Vegas. And those two?” He points to Mercy and Michelle. “They’ll eventually crack under that kind of pressure.”
“So what are you suggesting?” I ask.
“They need to find the bodies.”
“You’re talking about staging it.”
“Yeah.”
That makes this entire cleanup process way more complicated. And expensive. But also probably smart. “You’ve got any ideas?”
“I do.” Vince’s jaw tenses. “I think it’s time to make use of this turf war with Navarro.”
Point the Feds toward the cartel. Definitely smart, if we can pull it off. “Okay. I’ll find out what I can from the ladies. You guys decide how we’re going to roll.” I head for the terrace, throwing over my shoulder, “And if you’re gonna kill each other, do it before the cleaner gets here so he can throw your bodies in with the others.”
I probably shouldn’t joke.
19
Mercy
“My parents have been having money issues over the past couple of years. I guess it got really bad, because my dad took out some bank loans. You know, to keep up appearances and lifestyle and all that. And to make sure he got what he needed, he fudged the store numbers.” Michelle blows her nose on a tissue and then balls it up to toss it onto the small mountain of others. After fifteen minutes of hysterical sobbing where she couldn’t string a sentence together, she has finally calmed down enough to explain herself. “They caught him and charged him with bank fraud.”
I can’t help my gasp. Mr. Banks always seemed like an honest, upstanding citizen. “When did this happen?”
“They arrested him about three weeks ago.”
Three weeks? “Why didn’t you tell me!” And how hadn’t I heard about it?
“Because I’m mortified! We all are. We’ll probably lose the store. My mom is talking about leaving him.”
Despite the burn of betrayal, my heart aches for her. “Yeah, but I’m your best friend. We’ve been through so much together. You didn’t trust me?” She was my sounding board through the dark days after Fleet’s attack on me and my father’s arrest and conviction.
“I figured you had enough on your plate with your father and… other things.” Her green, mascara-streaked eyes dart to Gabriel, who just emerged from inside and now hovers over the terrace sectional like a sentry, his arms folded across his powerful chest. He hastily tucked his gun away the moment I stepped in front of Michelle. I assume that was a signal that he had no intention of harming her—or at least not yet.
He wouldn’t.
Would he?
Despite the warm, dry desert air, Michelle clutches her blanket as though it’s the dead of winter in the arctic. Sitting out here, with the muted sounds of Vegas’s bustling nightlife carrying from far below, one could almost forget that inside there are three dead bodies tucked behind the pocket doors.
Almost.
“When did they approach you?” Gabriel asks.
She bits her lip, hesitant to respond. “The day after Caleb drove me home from Empire.”
“That was a week ago!” Michelle’s been conspiring with the FBI for a whole week? Is that why she was pushing to hook up with Caleb? And why she came to Vegas to celebrate? And why she stuck close to me last night?
I pick through my memories, thinking back to all my conversations with her over the past three weeks. Frankly there weren’t that many, and when we did talk, it was usually about Gabriel or my father or my upcoming exams. It was always about my life, my problems.
“They must have had a tail on us that night,” Gabriel says.
“But why go after Michelle? Why not me?”
“Because they weren’t sure if they could flip you on their own. They found leverage they could use on her, and she’s a stepping-stone to get to you.” He’s so matter-of-fact about it.
“Seems like a lot of work.”
His responding chuckle is sinister. “Babe, you wouldn’t believe the lengths they’ll go to. They’ve probably been digging for dirt on you for weeks.”
Before last night’s explosion, then.
“They knew who you were,” Michelle confirms. “Lewis showed up at my condo and started asking all kinds of questions.”
Dread slides down my spine. I don’t want to be a part of any investigation. “About?”
“Everything. About your mom, your dad, about Gabriel. She wanted to know how you guys met.”
Oh, God. “And what did you tell them!”
She winces. “The truth? Sort of?”
My stomach twists. No wonder Lewis knew so much. She wasn’t guessing. She’d already mined private information from my best friend, who knew about the deal Gabriel offered me. Hell, she and I even sat at the coffee shop and mapped out my list of demands for staying longer. Is there a document somewhere that outlines exactly how Gabriel bought me?
A thought strikes me, and I panic. “Did you tell them about the money for my dad’s appeal?”
“No! I didn’t tell her about that.” She shakes her head furtively. “I swear.”
Still… “How could you?”
A fresh wave of tears erupts. “I’m sorry! I freaked out!”
Her words give me pause. I said the same thing to Gabriel earlier today when he asked me why I hadn’t told him about Lewis ambushing me right away.
That woman is intimidating, I’ll give her that.
“What did they promise you?” Gabriel is far more calm than I expected him to be.
Michelle takes a moment to collect herself. “She told me that she could make all the charges against my dad go away if I would tell her everything I knew, and if I helped convince Mercy to work with her.”
“And you agreed?” I can’t help the accusation in my tone. “I can’t believe you would do something like that.”
“I didn’t know you—” She stops abruptly, as if guarding her words. �
��I didn’t know how you felt about him. And I thought, given what you’d already agreed to for your father, that this wouldn’t be a big deal.”
“Informing on a crime family to put them away. Yeah. Not a big deal at all.” I shake my head at my best friend, my tone harsh.
“I’m sorry,” she whines. “I didn’t know what else to do! My dad can’t go to jail! I’ve seen what’s happening to your dad, and it’s horrible.”
“But it’s okay to help send us there.” I hadn’t noticed Caleb come outside. He settles onto the arm of the couch closest to Michelle. It’s a casual pose, and yet the way he looms over her, the way he stares down at her, is menacing. All traces of their playfulness have vanished.
Michelle shrinks in her seat.
“What exactly have you told them? We need to know everything,” Gabriel pushes, steering the conversation back to the FBI. “How you communicated, how often, everything.”
“Umm… sure. Yeah, okay.” She swallows hard. “By text, usually. Sometimes she calls.”
“On this phone?” Caleb slides the phone he confiscated from her out of his pocket.
She nods.
He holds the phone out. “Show me the messages.”
“I don’t have any. I delete them right away. She told me to.” Michelle stumbles over her words.
“When did you last communicate?” Caleb fires off questions as if by script, his demeanor cool.
She hesitates, her eyes flashing to mine. “When I was upstairs with Mercy. I went to the bathroom and I texted to tell her that you guys knew someone was talking to the FBI. I told her I was afraid, and I was renting a car and leaving tonight.” Her voice shakes.
Jesus. And there I was, warning her against mentioning Gabriel and Caleb’s illicit activities because of Moe, talking about how they were going to kill him because he was working with the Feds. No wonder all the blood drained from her face.
“Shit!”
Caleb’s sharp curse makes Michelle and me jump.
“Why?” I look to Gabriel. “What does it matter if they know that you know?”