Jericho’s smile was cold. “What’s wrong, Carlos? Scared?”
“I don’t want to die. I told you everything I know.”
Atticus patted his face lightly. “Don’t think of it as dying, think of it as being scrapped for parts.”
“Jesus, you did this?” Adam asked, voice filled with something between admiration and disbelief. Carlos’s body was now slumped in a heap on the floor, exactly where he’d landed when they cut him down.
Atticus shrugged, looking around at the others. “Call it a group effort.”
The group in question alternated between frantically working to clean all of Arsen’s blood from the pool table and eyeing Atticus’s brothers with interest and trepidation. Arsen was upstairs resting on Felix’s bed. Lake and Cree had been sent to un-alive Sister Psycho with extreme prejudice, so only Felix, Levi, Nico, and Seven remained.
Not all of the Mulvaneys were in attendance either. August and Lucas were having dinner with Cricket and said it was ‘too important to cancel.’ Aiden was still on the other side of the country, and Archer had just flown out to Vegas that morning for another poker tournament.
So, that just left Adam, Noah, and the twins, definitely not the crew he was hoping for but one he’d settle on just the same. He needed to get Carlos out of there sight unseen and in a vehicle that couldn’t be traced back to any of them. Adam had picked up the van Atticus had used the other night from the garage and parked it in the alley behind the shop. Jericho had assured Atticus there were no cameras back there.
“Why couldn’t one of your boyfriend’s orphans do this?” Adam complained, earning a smack on the arm from Noah.
“Because none of us have cars, dick,” Seven said, looking at Adam like he was a pompous prick. Which, to be fair, he was. All of the Mulvaneys were. If they were actually blood related, people might think their dickish behavior was hereditary. Of course, very few people ever saw them as they truly were. Publicly, they were Prince Charming and Mother Teresa all rolled into one.
Adam stared at Seven for a long moment before saying, “I like him.”
Noah shook his head, smiling at Jericho. “We’re happy to help,” he said, as if they’d asked for help moving a sofa. Noah was a born diplomat, strangely adept at getting people to trust him.
Asa kneeled beside the body, peeling back the lid to gaze into the empty socket. “Where’s his eye?”
“Over here,” Nico said, jiggling the clear glass jar where the eyeball bobbed around in formaldehyde. As always, he had a lollipop in his mouth. Jericho said he’d used the candy to quit smoking and had traded one addiction for another.
“You taking souvenirs now, Gacy?” Adam asked, arching a brow at Atticus.
“We need to pass a retinal and fingerprint scanner in order to access the underground hospital,” Jericho said, glowering at Adam.
All traces of friendliness slipped from Adam’s face. Atticus tensed as his brother tilted his head in that way he did right before he started dropping bodies. Was this battle between them going to go on forever? What was Adam’s problem with Jericho anyway?
“Do you have a tarp?” Noah asked, stepping physically between the two. “It would be really helpful if we had something to wrap him in.”
Jericho stared down Adam for another minute before muttering, “I’ll go look.”
Noah looked to Atticus. “You know you can just take a panoramic photo of an eyeball or finger and Calliope can create a picture clear enough to fool the scanner.”
“So, we don’t need this?” Nico asked, sounding a bit disappointed.
“No. It’s…messy,” Noah managed.
Nico didn’t skip a beat, rising up on his toes to jump shot the jar into the large black trash bin across the room, smiling when it hit the bottom with a satisfying thump.
“That was a great shot but you know we kind of need to take that with us,” Noah said, sounding weirdly apologetic. “You can’t just have some random guy’s eyeball show up in your trash.”
Nico’s shoulders slumped, his expression contrite.
“I got it,” Seven said, jogging to the bin and tying off the trash bag, pulling it free.
“Tell us about this underground hospital?” Asa asked Atticus. “Is that where that Reed guy is conducting his black book experiments?”
Levi looked from Carlos’s corpse to Asa. “How did you know about that?”
Asa shrugged. “I called psyops from the jump.”
“So, we just tortured this guy for fun?” Seven asked, gazing down at the corpse with interest.
