I accept the call and listen to the recording. “This is a prepaid call from Lucas Phillips. To accept this call, press one. To block this number?—”
I click one, and with a, “Fuck yourself,” I hang up.
“Not sure what that was about, but I have a feeling Lucas was involved?” Jackson asks.
“Sure was.”
“Do you want to block him?”
“You know the moment I do, he’s going to have some vital information about something or whatever, and instead of telling me, he’s going to be all, ‘Oh, but you blocked me, so how dare I tell you shit?’”
“I… have no idea how any of you lived with him,” Jackson says.
“Who?” Cassel asks before getting an odd look on his face. “Was that call from Lucas?”
“Yes.”
“Leland is his favorite,” Micah says for some strange reason.
“Do you want to be his favorite?” I growl.
He merely laughs. “Let me just say, if I was in your shoes, he would have been dead.”
“It was because Jackson tried influencing me to be a good person! I regret it! I have since reverted back to being a bad person!” I declare.
Jackson shakes his head. “You’re not a bad person. And look at it this way, we’ve actually gotten a lot of use out of Lucas. And if you’d shot and killed him, that would have been the end. Now he gets to live his life stuck in prison while the rest of you get to enjoy your lives.”
“Everly… about that rat poison?” I ask.
Everly doesn’t even waste time thinking about it. “Not doing it.”
“Just a sprinkle. You don’t even need to kill him. Just enough to make him hurt.”
“I like that idea,” Micah says. “What do I need to do to get you to do that?”
Everly raises an eyebrow, probably questioning what Micah thinks he could possibly do to persuade him to risk his life by poisoning a man. Micah seems to think that look means that Everly is interested and throws him a smolder.
Everly looks disgruntled instead, which seems to confuse Micah.
Getting the rental vehicle and heading out is the easy part. The hard part comes after we pull up outside of the building that Raul owns and spend some time scoping it out. It’s part of the same tech company that Teo worked for, but as we sit in the three-row SUV not far from the building itself, Cassel just “Hmmms” and “Ehhhs.”
“I don’t even know if I want to know what’s going on,” I realize as I use binoculars to see what I can. Supposedly, Raul’s office is on the sixth floor. I see some movement up there, but I haven’t seen him walk by, which isn’t overly surprising depending on the location of his office.
“Well… do you want the bad news or equally bad news first?” Cassel asks.
“Answer me this… which one can I shoot?” I ask while I pet my baby. “Maple here is hungry for revenge.”
“Technically, you can shoot all of the choices if you’d like. Would that solve anything? Probably not, but you only asked if you could do it.”
“Just… lay it out there for us,” Jackson says.
“So the cameras inside this place all look fine. Everything is going as normal. But something felt off and… according to the neighboring security system that I lovingly ripped into, Raul is not in this building… he’s just made it seem like he is. All of his online information states that he should be in the building at this time, and the security footagefromthe building shows him in his office, but I noticed that the sky in his background showed different kinds of clouds compared to what I can see right now. So I started nosing a bit, and I think it’s a setup. I think hewantsus to go in that building where he’s likely cleared everyone else out and left his people inside to ambush us.”
“I mean… sounds like a party to me,” Micah comments, and he winks at Everly again. The poor man doesn’t seem to know what to do with all of the winks and looks at the rest of us, likehe’s trying to figure out if we’re all getting the privilege of being winked at or if it’s reserved just for him.
“Everly, I can remove his eyes as a step toward your forgiveness,” I say.
Micah’s eyes snap over to me. “Excuse me, whose eyes?”
