I grab a scoop of M&M’s out of the dish on Cam’s desk and take a seat. It’s starting to feel a little like old times when we would hash out the details of a fix over drinks and junk food.
“I don’t know, Rome. It’s way messier than she described, and it’s going to take some muscle to clean up. Maybe more than just the three of us.”
“Well, now there’s the four of us,” I say. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Whitfield is still stuck in Chicago and they have told him not to return home to Miami because he’s their number one person of interest in the case. They’ve got eyes on him twenty-four seven.”
“That means they’re building a case.”
“Yeah, it’s definitely a shit show. Accident or not, he killed that girl and left his prints all over the goddamn apartment. They’re probably just dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s at this point. They’re going to make an arrest soon.”
“What about our political connect in Chicago? Maybe he could help lose some of that evidence.”
“Nope, Washington is up for re-election,” Cutter says. “And he won’t touch this case with a ten-foot pole. We offered him ten stacks and he wouldn’t take it.”
“He wouldn’t take a ten-thousand-dollar campaign donation?”
“Turned us down flat.”
I continue to try to troubleshoot.
“Cam, can’t you make the prints go away with a few clicks of a mouse? Isn’t everything stored on an online database?”
“Doesn’t work like that, my friend. First, I’d have to break through the Chicago PD firewall and then I’d have to erase a million different digital footprints so it wouldn’t trace back to us.”
“What’s your friend Kat paying us for this job?” Stone asks.
I guess Cam and Cutter don’t share everything yet with their long-lost brother.
“Enough,” I say.
“Enough to risk Cam breaking into the police department’s database?”
“Hell no,” Cutter chimes in.
“Was she a sex worker?” I ask, trying to figure out an alternative solution. “Maybe we can pay off the witnesses in the apartment building.”
“Negative. She was a dental assistant he met at a hotel bar. The girl’s family already has a GoFundMe campaign up, collecting money for the case and demanding for the killer to be brought to justice. The prosecutor’s office is going full throttle on this,” Stone responds. “The girl was an innocent.”
“Should we pass on this one?” Cutter asks. “I thought we were going to get celebrity clients like Mendez from Kat, not messy ones like this.”
“Clients like Mendez are not fixes, they’re babysitting jobs,” I say. “I’m learning that we’re not going to get a lot of those types of jobs. People hire us to fix the messy shit.”
“Yeah, and just because a job is a little more complicated doesn’t mean we’re going to pass. Kat is paying us a lot of money to get Whitfield back to Miami, and that’s what we’re going to do. We’re just going to go old-school to get him out of there,” Camden says.
“So we have to knock a few heads around,” I say matter-of-factly. “Like the old days.”
“Exactly.”
Cutter is right about one thing. I promised that we wouldn’t take on a lot of risky clients like this anymore, but that’s because Kat made me certain assurances too. She said she’d give us cushy fixes for her celebrity clients in Miami. This one is a lot more complicated and could end up being one of those cases we call a barn burner or in other words there will be casualties.
“We don’t know how long we must be there, Rome,” Camden says. “Maybe you sit this one out and help on the next project?”
“Yeah, what about Elizabeth and Knox? You’ve got a lot more to lose than we do, brother.”
Both Camden and Cutter are bringing up an excellent point. Just because I want to jump in balls deep and get back to work doesn’t mean I want to be risking my neck over seven hundred miles away from my family.
“You three go. I’ll ask Joseph if he can find us a few hired hands if you need extra muscle in Chi-town. He definitely has connections there. I’ll manage the day-to-day stuff here.”
