Page 44

Junior

“ Here?” I asked Stefan.

He nodded.

I pulled my gaze from him and looked around.

We stood in the shadows of the old port, massive, industrial buildings rising like mountains around us in the darkness.

Our elected officials liked to call this part of town a scar on the city.

It was run-down , abandoned, a playground for criminals, the unhoused, and urban explorers.

Huge silos crumbled into the water. Thousand-gallon diesel tanks bore the tags of a hundred graffiti artists.

The concrete was buckled and broken, making driving all but impossible.

We’d had to leave our cars at a nearby shipping warehouse and hoof it in on foot.

According to Stefan, somewhere amongst all this rot and decay, a nosebleed poker game was taking place, ultra-high -stakes , invite only.

I had no idea where, since the lights meant to keep this place illuminated constantly got shot out, and the city had finally given up on replacing them, effectively handing this part of the port over to the underworld.

I kept looking for the outline of a doorway, or a lit-up window, anything to indicate there was life in this place besides us, but I saw nothing.

The sound of a slap had me turning my head to the five figures standing nearby, dressed in dark fatigues, enough weapons on them to take down an entire squad of soldiers.

I’d worked with them before, most notably when covering up for Aly and Josh’s crimes.

They weren’t associated with the mob, or anyone else in the city; they were hired muscle, glorified mercenaries, known for bouncing between one client and another depending on who was footing the bill.

The reason they were so in demand was because they kept their mouths shut.

That was why I’d called in a favor to get them down here with us.

Out of everyone operating in the city, they were the only ones I trusted not to go running to my father afterward.

Their point man, David, a squat bald guy in his mid-forties , held his hand to his neck. “Fucking mosquitoes.”

I nodded, hearing the low whine of more bugs descending upon us. We needed to get moving or we’d be eaten alive.

“Where?” I asked Stefan.

He waved me forward and walked to the side of the building we hid behind. Together, we peered around the corner.

“There,” he said, pointing.

I followed the line of his finger. Instead of a building, I was looking at a four-hundred -foot derelict freight ship that had been rotting here since the late ’80s.

It rose from the night-black water like a ghost, its once-crisp white paint weathered to a muddled gray, rust spots crawling upward from the hull all the way to the deck.

The massive chains mooring it to the steel cleats on the dock flashed silver in the moonlight, groaning as the boat bobbed on the tide.

It looked like the least-inviting place for a poker game I could have imagined.

My gaze swung back to my brother. He’d never given me a reason to distrust him, at least not any more than I distrusted everyone in general, but I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect setup for an ambush if I tried.

“You trying to get me killed?” I asked.

In answer, he flipped me off and walked away, disappearing into the darkness like the phantom he was becoming.

David stepped up next to me and glanced around the side of the building, eyeing the ship. “I don’t like this.”

“Me neither,” I said, retreating into the shadows.

His four other guys ambled over, quiet, letting the boss do all the talking, their eyes constantly shifting as they looked for threats.

Every single one of them came from spec ops military units, and it showed.

The only time I’d seen them slip up was when Josh tagged along with them, and I blamed that on the fact that he never shut the fuck up and had driven them to distraction.

Every other time I’d worked with them, they’d been flawless.

David glanced around the side of the building at the ship again and then turned back to us. “One, north silo,” he said, and a man peeled off into the darkness. “Two, south silo. Three, diesel tanks. Four, grain barge.”

The men disappeared one by one, leaving David and me behind.

He turned my way. “You good here on your own?”

I nodded. “I’ll probably find some way into the building and see if there are any windows or cracks that face the ship.”

“Good,” he said. “I’m going to take point and get as close as possible. Radios only from this point out.”

With that, he turned and melted into the night.

I adjusted the battery pack hooked to my holster and fastened the attached throat mic around my neck. A thin but ultra-strong braided fiber line led to the earbud, which I fit into place before flicking it on.

“Testing,” I said, keeping my voice at a whisper because I knew firsthand how sensitive this gear was.

The rest of the men checked in, and we went quiet as they got into position.

I turned and inspected the building at my back.

It was squat, constructed from concrete and metal, its bunker-like structure making me think it used to house flammable materials before it was decommissioned.

The moon hung low over the harbor, out of sight on the other side of the building, casting my immediate surroundings in dense shadow.

It made seeing anything difficult, and I was forced to pick my way around the perimeter slowly.

Close to the front, I found a door, its black outline the only distinguishable marker.

It was wide open, a gaping maw of darkness, whatever wood or metal that had once stood sentinel in its frame lost to the elements or vandals.

I paused at the sight of it. Anyone or any thing could be inside—a murderer, a cannibal, thousands of tiny spiders waiting to crawl all over me.

I don’t know what it said about me that the last possibility was the only one that freaked me out.

Another bonus of working with David was that he always kitted me out in their gear: mic set, night vision goggles, even a soft red flashlight that was hard to detect from more than a few feet away.

I unhooked it from my holster and clicked it on, crossing over the threshold into a large, open room filled with the signs of its industrial past. Broken tables lay in pieces on the dirt-covered concrete.

A row of metal cabinets lined the far wall, either too big or too heavy to be carried away by looters.

Overhead, busted-out fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling.

No signs of a murderer, but I didn’t let my guard down. The spiders could be anywhere.

A narrow set of open stairs climbed the wall opposite the cabinets.

I beelined toward them, watching my step, skirting all the trash on the floor.

The stairs looked rickety as fuck when I got to them, but I didn’t see any other options.

Moonlight filtered in from above, meaning whatever window or hole was up there faced the ship.

I ascended carefully, testing each step to see if it would hold before putting my full weight on it, and even then I was ready to leap backward at the first sign of collapse.

The second floor seemed more stable than the stairs, made of poured concrete like the one below.

I paced across it to the hole in the roof, a narrow gash too thin to fit through.

Didn’t matter. All I needed was a line of sight to the freighter.

I slipped on my night vision goggles and peered out into the darkness. One look at the boat deck was enough to tell me we were fucked. I noted five men standing guard in the shadows, and it looked like they had—

I ducked before getting spotted. “They have goggles, too,” I warned the others.

“Roger that,” David said. Everyone else remained quiet.

The silence held for what felt like an hour but was probably no longer than twenty minutes.

Finally, David’s voice came over the line.

“They have half a dozen men waiting on the deck alone, and there’s no way to know how many more are below.

I don’t see a way to approach the ship without getting spotted. Confirm?”

Four confirmations followed, one after another.

“I have to give it to the guy,” David said. “This is a genius location for a black-market poker game.”

Despite my annoyance, I was impressed, too.

No wonder the other bookies had a hard time tracking him down and were always a step behind and a day late.

The fact that Stefan had been able to do what they hadn’t was impressive as hell, and it made me wonder if maybe I’d been underestimating my quietest brother.

“Do you recognize the crew on deck?” I asked. David made it his business to know every other merc operation within the tristate area.

“Yeah, it’s Oscar’s,” he said. “They might be thugs, but they know enough to be dangerous.”

Impatience clawed at me. I wanted to get this over with and get back to Lauren. “What are you thinking?”

“We wait them out,” David said. “Eventually, they’ll have to leave, I’m guessing before dawn. By that point, they’ll have been up all night, and I’m hoping their fatigue will make them less alert. We can grab him then.”

Given the circumstances, it was probably our best option. Which meant we had a long night of waiting ahead of us. God, I loathed stakeouts, especially when I was unprepared.

Fitting the goggles to my eyes, I rose up just enough to peer out of the roof again and confirm everything David had said.

The men on deck seemed mostly focused on their immediate surroundings, few looking up.

As I watched, a new figure crawled out of the deck hatch.

I almost discarded him as more hired muscle—he was big enough for it—but he was dressed in a suit.

One of the gamblers? This could be promising.

If tonight didn’t work out, maybe I could ID this guy and exploit his connection with the bookie.