“Travis,” Shooter huffed from the passenger seat. “No wonder he wasn’t drinking. He was the setup man. He brought Horne there to die.”
I glanced at the time on my phone. Thirty-eight hours and ten minutes had passed since Poulton gave me a forty-eight-hour warning. And we had nothing.
“What a shit show,” Shooter huffed, and I thought of what the director had said about PAR.
“The night wasn’t a complete loss,” I said.
“How’s that?” Shooter asked.
“There is value in seeing your enemy up close,” I said. “It helps you predict what he’ll do next.”
And I had seen something in Sandoval tonight. He was smart. Cool under pressure. And he discussed matters of life and death with unusual ease. When he’d turned to leave the bar, I’d caught a glimpse of him straight on.
Dead eyes.
He would sell out every one of his men to save himself.
But it didn’t change the fact that we were almost out of time. And we had nothing.
CHAPTER SEVEN
By 12:53 a.m., we’d made our way back to the Miami office, the glass building with its diamond-shaped metal sunscreens a dark shadow against the night sky. Vincent pulled the van into the subterranean loading dock.
A slight figure was asleep in a folding chair by the back door, a sweater wrapped over his head. As the van turned off, Richie got up from the chair.
“Gardner,” he said as I came out of the van’s side door. “I called you like three times.”
“I figured you’d gone home already,” I said. “What is it?”
“I mean—like—maybe everything?” Richie’s voice cracked. “Like possibly the break we’ve been waiting for.”
PAR’s youngest member tended to be overly enthusiastic, but after the night we’d had, I wasn’t sharing his positivity.… I placed my bag on a worktable used by tech staff to unload equipment. “Start at the beginning.”
“Sure,” Richie said. “So I’ve been following Freddie Pecos’s every move during the last twenty-four hours of his life, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“I hit a wall. Decided to switch gears. I looked at the amount you seized in debit cards from the mobile home.”
“The nine hundred and eighty-one thousand dollars?”
“To that, I added the amount of cards that you and Jo burned up in the mobile home fire. Guess what?”
“It didn’t match with what you knew Freddie had on hand,” I said.
Richie stared at me. “How did you know that?”
“Freddie was a criminal,” I said, grabbing my bag. “He was skimming, Richie.”
Cassie moved past us, up the concrete steps that led toward the bowels of the building. “A little for the Sandoval gang,” she lilted, her voice singsong. “A little for me.”
“But you don’t knowwherehe was skimming, do you?” Richie looked at us. “You don’t know how?”
“Just tell us, rook,” Shooter said, coming up behind Richie. We were all exhausted from the sting gone wrong and the drive back.
We moved in a group toward the elevator.
“Well. I knew Freddie pretty well,” Richie said. “And he was lazy. I mean, real lazy.”
