Page 48

Junior

A ccording to Tyler, McKinney liked to tell people he lived in the penthouse apartment of his nicest building, which sounded extravagant but in reality was much more mundane.

His nicest building was only six stories tall, narrow, and sandwiched between a parking garage and a row of new-build apartments that were still undergoing construction.

The security was abysmal. It had one of those older-model buzzer systems, and I didn’t even see a speaker on the panel.

I lifted a hand and pressed it against the top row of apartment buttons, slowly dragging downward over them, ringing every single one because there had to be someone waiting for a delivery or a friend or—

The door chimed. I turned and pulled it open. Inside, the foyer was surprisingly decent, the terrazzo tile in good condition, considering its age. A wall of mailboxes stood to my right, the art deco–style bronze detailing on them harkening back to a time gone by.

The elevator was dead ahead, but I decided to take the stairs to get a better look at the place.

I kept my eyes peeled, but I didn’t see a single security camera.

McKinney was either too cheap for them, or too lazy.

He was also stupid, because a lot of insurance companies required them these days and wouldn’t pay out unless you had video proof to show that you weren’t personally responsible for the damage.

Too many slumlords had fucked up their own property hoping to cash in, and the adjusters in the city had cracked down on everyone else as a result.

I reached the sixth floor and stopped on the landing, looking left and right.

There wasn’t one door up here, but three, so either McKinney had been lying about having the penthouse, or these doors all led to the same apartment.

The numbers on them were different, though, and Tyler told me McKinney’s was 600.

Guess that meant 601 and 602 belonged to other people.

I rapped my knuckles on the door with the 600.

It swung open a few seconds later, no “who are you?” or “what are you doing here?” to precede it. In front of me stood a short, balding white man dressed in slacks and a button-down . He looked clean and put together, but I could smell the alcohol on him even before he opened his mouth.

“Can I help you?” he asked, looking me over.

I had worn my best suit, the starched white collar of my shirt hiding my neck tattoos, hands shoved in my pockets for the same reason. Like this, with my hair slicked back, I could have passed as Tyler’s fellow finance bro. “Are you Patrick McKinney?”

He frowned. “Yeah, who’s asking?”

In answer, I surged forward, shoving him into the apartment and slamming the door behind us.

A punch to his gut aborted his shout of surprise.

I kicked his knee out, stepped behind him, and twisted his arm behind his back, much like I had that drunk man at Velvet, only this time, there was no one to stop me as I dug a pair of pliers out of my pocket and fit them to McKinney’s pinkie.

“Scream, and I’ll take it off,” I told him.

He wheezed, cheek pressed to the carpet, trying to regain his breath. “What do you want?”

“You owe Mr. Strickland two million dollars and you’re late with your monthly payment again.” Why Tyler had chosen that name for a cover, I hadn’t asked, nor did I really care. As far as aliases went, I’d heard much worse.

“I can pay,” McKinney hissed, trying to squirm away from me.

I squeezed the pliers hard enough to pinch. “Stop moving. Mr. Strickland has given you more than enough chances.”

“Wait!” he said. “I can pay! I’m just waiting for a check to clear from a bunch of dirty perverts who rent one of my units.”

That almost made me laugh, thinking back to the other night and Taylor calling me a dirty little slut as I said goodbye to Lauren.

“It’s too late,” I said, dropping my voice to cover my amusement. “I own your debt now.”

McKinney’s breath wheezed out of him as he tried to get a better look at me. “Who are you?”

“People call me Junior, but all you need to know is that instead of owing a bookie, you now owe the mob.”

He made a distressed sound that made me think he’d finally realized just how fucked he was. “What do you want?”

“That building full of dirty perverts.”

“What?” he said, still trying to crane his head up.

I put my boot on his cheek and held him in place, twisting his arm a little harder, squeezing the pliers a little tighter. “The deed.”

McKinney started to struggle. “You can’t be serious!”

“Keep your voice down,” I said, my own deadly calm. “I won’t tell you again.”

A well of blood bubbled up around the plier jaws.

Beneath me, McKinney whimpered. “That building’s worth three million dollars, not two.”

“So?” I said. “Would you rather lose a million dollars and live? Or die? The choice is up to you.”

He went still. “You won’t do it. You won’t kill me. If I die, you don’t get anything.”

He sounded so sure, so smug .

Some people just had to be taught the hard way.

I clipped his finger off.

Before he could register the pain, I had an arm around his face, muffling the delayed screaming, the spurting hand held out wide to keep from getting blood on my suit.

“No,” I said, close enough for him to hear the menace in my voice, “I won’t get anything if you’re dead, but there are a lot of body parts to carve off in the meantime.

You’re going to sign the building over to me, and you’re going to drop the rent on all your other tenants, or you and I are going to be seeing a lot more of each other. ”

Eventually, his shouts turned to a pathetic mewling, and I fought back an unwelcome wave of guilt.

This was my chance to go legit, and I wasn’t going to lose it because my conscience was trying to make a reappearance after lying dormant for a decade.

If everything went to plan, McKinney might be the last person I had to hurt.

The last ugly memory I might ever make. And if he wasn’t stopped now, it would only get worse.

He’d keep targeting Lauren and Velvet and all his other tenants who were slowly being squeezed to death because of his addictions.

What little remorse I had evaporated at the thought.

I’d take every fucking one of his fingers if I had to and then start in on his toes before making good on my threat and working my way up the rest of his body, inch by bloody inch.

I had to get free, would help as many other people in the process as I could.

And while I knew that it didn’t make up for all the pain and heartache I’d caused in my life, it was as good a place to start as any.

“There’s still time to get the finger reattached,” I told McKinney. “If you make the right decision. Otherwise, I’m putting it in my pocket and leaving with it, and tomorrow, I’ll be back for another one.”

He nodded, and I slowly pulled my arm away.

It was late by the time I finally headed back to my apartment.

McKinney might have seen reason pretty quickly, but the way he’d dragged his feet afterward, begging and pleading for mercy I didn’t have, took up so much time that day had bled into night, and I was fucking exhausted from being around that emotional leech for so long.

In the end, the only thing that had gotten him to sign on the dotted line was shaking the baggie of ice I’d put his finger in and reminding him that if he waited too long, it’d be too late to get it reattached.

At one point, I’d gotten so sick of his complaining that I ended up lecturing him like he was a child instead of a man old enough to be my father, telling him to look at the bright side: His debts were cleared, and he still had income properties that he was going to drop the rents on back to city standards.

If he stopped losing his ass in gambling dens, he could comfortably live out the rest of his days in peace.

I could tell from the way he’d bitched and moaned about how it wasn’t his fault he’d lost so much that there was no way he’d get his shit together and do what I said, so I would definitely be paying him another visit.

But for now, I had what I wanted: freedom, or at least the means to achieve it.

Tomorrow, I would start the arduous process of assessing the building I’d acquired, going over the income history with a fine-tooth comb, and figuring out just how many repairs and renovations were needed to turn Velvet into the safest, most profitable play club in the country, because if I was going to do this, I was going to fucking do it. Full send.

I called Tyler on the way back to my apartment, his voice loud in my helmet as I raced across the city’s most iconic bridge.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“I got us the building.”

He was quiet for so long that I wondered if we had a bad connection. “Already? Just like that?”

“Just like that.” He didn’t need to know the gruesome details. “Tell me we’re not going to lose our asses on it.”

“We won’t,” he said. “I looked into McKinney’s financials months ago. I do it with every high roller to make sure I can recoup their losses if they can’t pay their debts.”

Thank fuck for that. “I got him to drop the rents on all his other tenants, too.”

“How the fuck did you do that?” Tyler asked.

“You really want to know?”

He fell silent again, so I filled the gap by telling him a watered-down version of my visit with McKinney.

“What a fucking pain in the ass,” he said when I was done. “I’m glad to be rid of him.”

“Oh, he’ll be back. He’s too stupid or sick to stay away.”

“He’s not coming back to my games. I banned him for not paying his debts.”

“Good,” I said. When word of the ban got out, other bookies would be less likely to spot McKinney money, slowing down his debt accrual. “I’m going to start digging into everything tomorrow, and I’ll let you know if anything major crops up.”

“In that case, I hope I don’t hear from you,” he said.

Despite myself, I grinned.