Page 39 of Justified Lies

“Well, I’m not particularly happy with some git taking shots at my partner.”

El studied him for a long moment, then nodded. “Let’s get to work.”

“Call up Sam and let me run some things by her.”

“You don’t have her number?”

“No, I don’t. She calls me from all kinds of numbers, which I am sure she’s doing to protect her position.”

“Probably,” he said, pulling out his phone. “Probably also trying to protect you.”

He blinked. “What?”

“She doesn’t want you to have the knowledge of where she is so that people don’t think they can get it from you.”

“But you know.”

“Well, Mix, thanks to Ed and me, she’s been on the run for years now. So, I figure she assumes we have it coming.”

He clicked on his phone and switched it to the speaker. He hit a saved contact.

“I’m not happy with you,” she said, her husky voice filling the room.

“First, not my fault. I can’t follow Eden around. And second, you’re on speaker.”

“Oh, goodie. What up, Mix?”

“How did you know he was at my place?”

She snorted. Right, she was a genius at tech.

“Ian has some ideas on our victims and thought we should run them by you.”

She made a small humming noise, and the tapping of keys reached him. “Good. Let’s get to work.”

When his phone rang in the middle of the night, he knew it was going to be bad news. It was an instinct that he’d had for decades and one that he kept him alive.

“Yes?”

They never used names when they talked on the phone. He knew he was running circles around the office. All those lazy bastards who couldn’t handle the jobs they had been handed.

“No luck tonight.”

He let the silence stretch out. The fucker had cost him a pretty penny, and he couldn’t get the job done. This is why he had been the one to kill the others. Hiring other people to abduct or track his quarry had been easy. He couldn’t be seen in those locations all the time, so it worked well to have others do the footwork.

The killing…that had been his. This was the first time he had hired someone to actually kill one of his targets, but he knew that Eden, El, and the rest of their motley crew were getting too close to the truth.

Killing Eden had been on his agenda this early in the game, but he’d realized the act would send dear old El spiraling. They were going to be his last kills before he disappeared with all the money he’d acquired.

“That is not the news I wanted to hear.”

“It was a bitch of a shot, and she was late tonight.”

“I don’t take kindly to excuses.”

“I can get her tomorrow.”

Probably not, but that wasn’t important at the moment.