“I’m happy to offer my services in the form of any protection you might need.”
“I’m fine on my own.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“On the contrary. I trust you to act entirely in your own best interests.”
Ren laughed richly. “Perhaps you are correct. There’s just the matter of my finder’s fee.”
“I don’t suppose you’d care to wait until tomorrow.”
“I don’t suppose I would.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“As you said, I trust you to act entirely in accordance with your own interests.”
“Do you think I might run before I give you your money?”
“On the contrary, Mr. Coluzzi. I think you might be dead.”
Coluzzi sighed. He realized there was no way out of paying Ren. “Have your men pick it up at the main station after three. I’ll leave it at the kiosk. Give them my name. They’ll be expecting you.”
Easy come. Easy go.
Chapter 55
Home.
Simon eased the Peugeot off the highway, taking the first exit into the city. The road narrowed to a single lane and led down a long, gradual hill, dumping them out at the western edge of the new port, a kilometers-long maritime freight depot with towering cranes, freight elevators, and gleaming steel warehouses. Traffic was sparse, and he sped along the coast past the tankers and freighters, a steady wind scalloping the sea’s surface, filling the cabin with tangy sea air.
“How long since you’ve been back?” Nikki asked.
“A while. I got out when I was twenty-three. That makes it—”
“Ages ago. Eons.”
“Glaciers have come and gone.”
Nikki dodged the invitation to make light of his extended absence. “You never visited?”
“Smarter not to.”
“Your mom? Stepbrothers?”
“Like I said.”
Simon considered this, turning his head and gazing out the window toward the expanse of blue running to the horizon. It was a view as familiar as any he’d known.
He’d promised himself never to come back. Yet here he was.
Business, he told himself. It’s different.
He’d imagined this moment too many times to count, unsure what memories might surface that he’d kept hidden, what recollections would sway him most. The truth was, there had been plenty of good times to go with the bad. He was honest enough to admit that he’d enjoyed his days on the wrong side of the law. He did not regret them. The peril and opportunity they brought, the betrayal that followed, had forged his independent nature and solidified his will to dictate life according to his own terms.
He also knew that despite his time in prison, the years in solitary confinement, the acts he’d committed, and those committed against him—all the events he wished most to expunge from his past—part of him would forever be an outlaw. He needed no more proof of this than the quicksilver flash of desire and regret he’d felt walking the scene of the hijacking and conjuring images of Coluzzi and his crew taking down the prince. For a few moments there, the longing for his old life had won him over. False visions of ill-begotten glory and bloody lucre had swum before him, beckoning him with a harlot’s wanton smile.
It’s all still here, Simon. Ripe and ready for the taking. Up to you…
