“They were professionals. That’s why those bullets only grazed him,” said Sal. “They knew what they were doing.”
“But why would he wait so long to blackmail me?”
Nobody could answer that one.
“How were they paid?” Mick asked.
“Bitcoin,” Trina said.
“Yeah, I figured that,” said Reno. “Completely untraceable.”
“His ass knew what he was doing,” said Sal.
“Who all are going because it’s time to go,” said Mick.
“I’m going,” Trina said immediately.
“No hell you aren’t,” Reno replied even faster. “You’re going to stay in that penthouse with Dominic and the rest of our children until we bring him in. We’ve got to keep this tight and right. And be on the lookout for blowback.”
Nobody, not even Trina, could argue with that.
But as they were leaving out of the Bowels, Reno could see the pain on Trina’s face. He pulled her back. “You trusted an asshole,” he said, “because you had no one else to trust. You did nothing wrong.”
“I could have trusted you.”
But Reno shook his head. “No, you couldn’t have. I would have been an asshole too. Just like I’ve been over the past four months. And besides,” he added with a frown, “you didn’t know if our marriage could have survived all of that.”
Trina stared at him. “What changed?”
Reno placed his hands on both sides of her arms. “Nothing changed. I always knew our marriage would survive that. It’ll survive anything. You just didn’t know it.”
Trina was threatening tears again. “How could you be so sure, Reno?”
“Because it survived all my shit. If it could survive all my shit, it’ll survive yours.”
But Trina searched his eyes. “Even mine?”
“Even yours. It’s hard, Tree. I’m not gonna lie. This shit is hard. Especially when I know you didn’t do it.”
“Toya just confirmed it too, Reno. You have to believe it. I did that shit. I did it!”
But Reno still wasn’t convinced.
“And because I did it, will our marriage survive even what I’ve done?”
Reno didn’t respond to that. He wasn’t going to ever accept that. “I’ve got to go,” he said, kissed her on her lips with a lingering kiss, with his eyes squeezed shut, and then he left.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Mick, Reno, and Sal arrived at Javon Douglas’s cookie-cutter home on a quiet street in a quiet suburb in Henderson. It looked like that kind of home a schoolteacher might have, or an accountant. It looked nothing like the kind of home a swindler would have.
But that was what he was in Reno’s eyes. Nothing but a swindler. He preyed on Trina’s decency and emotional collapse because her character was called into question over shit he orchestrated, and he was going to pay for that. If Reno didn’t handle anything else, he was going to handle that flimflam prick himself.
Parked on the street in front of the house, the three men got out of Mick’s big black Cadillac Escalade and made their way up the driveway and then up the steps that led to the front porch. But just as Reno and Sal walked up on the front porch, and Mick stepped up on the porch following them, he felt a crunch beneath his shoe. When he looked down, he could see what looked like a wire, on the ground, running across the length of the porch.
His eyes stretched and his heart dropped. “It’s a hot wire!” he yelled as he grabbed Reno and Sal and ran backwards down those steps just as the entire front of that house exploded.
The explosion was so great that it knocked all three men off of their feet and threw them across the lawn.
