Page 75 of All That Glitters

“I thought you had her!”

“I was dealing with the drag queens!”

Craig closed his eyes briefly, as if praying for strength. “Ignore that,” he told Preston. “Focus on me.” He tapped the folder. “We got copies of all your shady financial records. We got witnesses willing to testify. Hell, we even got your ex-wife on our side.”

Preston’s jaw dropped. “Marjorie?”

“She was real helpful,” Craig nodded. “Especially after I told her about them photos on your secret Instagram account.”

“You’re bluffing,” Preston said, but his voice wavered.

Craig pulled out his phone, tapped a few times, and turned the screen toward Preston. “This your account? ‘HotProducerDaddy69’?”

Preston’s face crumpled. “What do you want?”

“Like I said. Our equipment back. Plus,” Craig consulted a piece of paper he pulled from his pocket, “fifty thousand dollars to cover lost production time.”

“Fifty thousand?!” Preston spluttered. “That’s robbery!”

“Nah, robbery’s when I have Roy here hold you upside down and shake you till your wallet falls out,” Craig said conversationally. “This here’s just business.”

One of the biker women cracked her knuckles menacingly. The sound was like walnuts being crushed.

“I... I need to make a call to my bank,” Preston said weakly.

“Good choice,” Craig nodded. “Oh, and one more thing. We want a personal apology to Carrie Thompson. On video.”

“For what?”

“For gettin’ grabby with her on some robot movie. Ya see, Carrie’s kinda become a little sister to all of us at Rif Raf. That’s when she ain’t tryin’ to kill us.”

Preston’s eyes widened. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Do I look like I’m kiddin’?” Craig asked, his face a mask of deadly seriousness.

There was another crash from the hallway, followed by the distinctive sound of something expensive breaking, then a bovine bellow of triumph.

“Okay, okay!” Preston agreed frantically. “Just get that... whatever that is... out of my building!”

Craig smiled, all teeth. “Pleasure doin’ business with you, Mr. Jordan.”

Tony and Carrie were deep in the weeds of their Monaco spy thriller, index cards spread all over the floor like a mosaic of plot points.

“Okay, so she’s placed the micro-tracker on his yacht,” Tony was saying, “but he knows. He’s been playing her the whole time.”

“And instead of exposing her, he invites her to his private island,” Carrie added, her eyes sparkling with inspiration. “He wants to know who she’s working for. It becomes this intense cat-and-mouse game of psychological warfare!”

Ding.

This time it was Carrie’s cell phone that dinged with an incoming notification.

“Hold that thought,” Carrie said, quickly pulling out her phone and clicking the notification icon. She tapped the link, and Rif Raf’s Instagram page pulled up with a video of Preston Jordan they’d just uploaded. She clicked the icon to let it play, and slowly her face broke into a warm smile.

“Aww... bless their little criminal hearts,” Carrie said fondly.

“What’s the video?” Tony asked, leaning over her shoulder to watch it. Carrie clicked the play button again and let him watch. It was a thirty-second apology from Preston to Carrie for the way he treated her on the robot film, and several before that.

“They extracted an apology from that scumbag,” she said, still barely believing it. “Oh, and look at this hashtag they added,‘Little Sister’. I’m sharing this with Eli.”