She shakes her head. “He doesn’t spend a dime of that money on himself. He makes a very nice living for himself with legitimate jobs.”
I just stare at her for a second, knowing somehow that she’s telling the truth. I’m not sure this woman could lie if she wanted to. There’s a raw honesty to her that would be hard to hide.
“I thought you smart FBI fucks knew it all,” she says bitterly. “But you don’t know shit. You say you don’t operate on suspicion, but I guarantee you’ve got nothing concrete on him.”
“He stole the money!” I say, louder than I intended.
Nix is a bad guy. A very bad guy. He has to be, because good people don’t see the inside of the Loft basement.
“Yeah, he did,” Coco concedes. She walks away from the wall and sits back down on the bed. “But then what?” She glares at me. “What’s your real fucking name, anyway?”
I sigh softly. “I’m not supposed to tell you that.”
“Well, if Nix knows it—”
“It’s Kennedy. And what do you mean bythen what?”
She crosses her legs, running her fingers over the end of a lock of her dark hair. “Nix started out lifting money that no one ever noticed was missing. He wrote a computer program that added bank charges to rich people’s accounts. Ten bucks here, fifty bucks there—times a lot of rich pricks, and the money adds up quick.”
I sit down on the end of the bed, my anger fading away. Coco really does know Nix, and she idolizes him. I can’t help but acknowledge we have something in common.
“So he started as a black hat,” she continues, using the terminology for a hacker who uses his abilities for destruction or personal gain. “And then, after he’d banked a shitload of cash off that scam, he went to the banks and told them he’d found vulnerabilities in their programs, and he got paid another shitload of cash by them to fix the hole he’d used to bag the money.”
“Look,” I say, meeting her gaze across the bed, “I get that that doesn’t make him a bad guy, but—”
“Let me finish, would you?”
I sigh heavily. “Go ahead.”
“So working for the good guys—the banks—he became a white hat. And after that, he had job offers from all over the place. Lots of money. He took some of them, but he wasn’t happy. He wanted to go back to where he started. So he did, and he got…bolder. Started swiping big money from the filthy rich and routing it through so many bank accounts that no one could figure out what happened to it.”
I nod, knowing that Nix can probably do most anything he puts his mind to. He’s smart, but also savvy. Together, it’s a powerful combination. He could do so much good working for the government.
“So why doesn’t he have a fucking yacht or something?” Coco studies me as she speaks. “Because God knows I’d be living on that thing if he did. Why would a guy with hundreds of millions stay in the game and risk getting caught?”
I shrug. “Criminals stay active when they don’t have to for the thrill of it all the time, Coco. The possibility of getting caught is an adrenaline rush for some people.”
“Not Nix.”
I exhale deeply and arch my brows at her. “If you have a point, can you get to it, please?”
She scoffs. “Okay, why don’t we just go, then? I don’t have to tell you any of this. Nix will probably be pissed at me for it anyway.”
“Then why bother? Why risk making him mad just to tell me something?”
She gives me the unfriendliest smile I’ve ever seen. “Because I want to see the look on your face when you find out the truth.”
“What truth?” I lean forward, my tone begging her to just say it already. “What is it, Coco?”
“If you dumb pricks could find the money Nix took, you wouldn’t find it in his bank account.”
“Where, then? Did he bury it somewhere?” I throw my hands up in the air.
“It’s with all the people who had no insurance when their house burned down. With people who couldn’t afford organ transplants. Places in Third World countries that didn’t have clean water.”
I’ve stopped breathing. I’m just staring at Coco, shock not even close to describing how I feel.
“He…gives it away?”
