My finger tightened on the trigger, but I quickly released it. I slipped the gun back into my waistband and filled the cloth ice pack and tossed at him.
“Ouch! What the hell did you do that for?” He grunted when the ice pack hit him square in the eye.
“If you have to ask, you’re dumber than I thought.”
“Fuck off,” he shouted.
I knew calling him dumb was one of his sore spots. He’d been picked on and bullied in elementary school over his inability to read. It wasn’t until middle school, when he shot up six inches, growing taller and faster than all the other kids, that the tables turned.
“I just need a few days to heal up, and then we can go after her again.”
“You think it’ll be that easy? She’s probably putting in an alarm system as we speak. One with cameras and shit. We’ll have to figure out a way to disarm it.”
“That shouldn’t be an issue. With all the connections you got between your job and this scheme with the girls, don’t you know someone who can hotwire a security system?”
“Don’t say that shit out loud.” I glanced out the windows, looking from one side of the parking lot to the other. It was early morning, and a few of the convenient store workers were trickling in for their change in shift. I lowered the brim of my hat.
“Why not?” he shot back. “If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t be in as deep as we are. You never would’ve come across all those girls and—”
“Shut the hell up,” I demanded. I checked that morning to ensure there weren’t any listening devices attached to my car, but you could never be too sure.
“Ain’t nobody spying on us,” he said casually.
“Considering how much you underestimated your opponent, pardon me if I don’t take your opinion to mean shit lately.”
He scowled, glaring at me. “Remember who the fuck you’re talking to, brother. I’m the one that’s been there for you since day one. Just ’cause you got mixed in with those suit-wearing asswipes in that charity organization don’t mean shit. I’m still your number one.” He reinforced his comment by pounding his hand to his chest. He quickly winced in pain, hitting his injury.
Fucking cluck. He might’ve been right at one point and time in my life. My older brother was all I had back then, but not anymore. We’d been growing apart for years now, and finally, I started to see it. Right then was the moment I admitted to myself that I needed to cut ties with my past.
If everything I had going on worked out the way I planned it to, I’d soon have enough money to quit the job I couldn’t give a shit about, and purchase a ranch, as I’d always wanted.
I’d bring in enough money to have people working for me so that I could sit on my ass all day. Fuck anyone who got in the way of my dream. That included the old man I had to take out a few months ago and his nosey granddaughter. The bitch should’ve minded her business. Then she wouldn’t be on my hit list right now.
Blinking, I pulled my thoughts from ruminating on how I was going to kill her to the man sitting before me. He contorted his face in pain again as he pressed the ice pack to his left eye and stared out the window.
“I’m hungry,” he muttered. “We need to get some food.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Yeah, we’ll fucking eat.”
I shook my head. The weapon that rested against the small of my back burned against my skin. I fisted my fingers repeatedly, contemplating my next move. It took years of his fuck ups and neediness for me to come to this conclusion, but come to it I did.
He has to go.
Chapter Twenty-One
It took another full day before Micah and I sat down and reviewed the autopsy report. As it turned out, Micah had already put in a request. He even tried to have Sy backdoor it, and get it once the Harlington Sheriff Department uploaded it into the system. However, I received the report before it was put in the online system.
Call me crazy, though I realized all this hacking by Sy and Bass had to be at least somewhat illegal, I didn’t mind it. If it made this case move along quicker, I was all for it.
“Says here there was some bruising found around his neck,” Micah pointed out, as we sat on the cream-colored couch in his living room, after having just finished dinner.
I moved in closer, looking over the medical examiner’s writing, noting that there was a diagram that accompanied the report. In it, the ME marked spots along a layout that meant to represent my grandfather’s corpse, where bruising was.
“His leg, too. Why would there be bruising on his body if he died by suicide?”
Micah flipped the page over to go back to reading the report. “Here,” he pointed, “the ME marked the bruising as a few days old. Likely from some other activity or possibly even a previous suicide attempt made before the one that proved lethal,” he read.
I shook my head, knowing that it didn’t sound right.
