“Sir, Smithie says—”
For the first time in a very long time, Marcus Sloan’scomposure slipped.
“Run…the goddamned tape,” Marcus ground out throughhis teeth.
The man in front of him sitting in the chair at a bank ofmonitors swallowed visibly, his eyes shifting only momentarily to the man atMarcus’s back before he turned to the controls.
He hit some and all of the monitors blanked except one cameup and the tape ran.
Marcus stood still and forced himself to watch.
It didn’t last long.
He was not a man unaware that acts of lasting brutalitycould be delivered in shockingly short periods of time.
In fact, he’d built an empire on this.
He had just never seen anything like that.
The monitor cut out when the action on it had played out andthe man turned it off.
But Marcus’s eyes didn’t leave it even when he asked,“Where’s Smithie?”
“He’s cut up about this, Mr.Sloan.Fired Milo ’cause hefucked up.Lost his mind when he did it.I was there.Thought he’d rip his headoff.He—”
Marcus’s gaze moved to the man.
“This was not the question I asked,” he said slowly.
“He’s…I think…” the man moved uncomfortably in his chair andsaid no more.
“I won’t ask again,” Marcus told him quietly.
“I…I heard someone say, uh…he and Lenny… That is, I heardthey went to go see Shirleen Jackson and Darius Tucker.”
Lenny, Marcus knew in keeping tabs, was one of Smithie’sbouncers.Good kid, working his way through college providing security at astrip club.Marcus had met him once, and if he’d gotten a whiff of what heneeded from the man, he’d have recruited him.But Smithie shared Lenny wantedto devote his life to finding a cure for cancer, something he’d lost agrandmother and aunt to, so he was studying biology in hopes one day to dothat.
He might be studious but he was also a large, dark-skinnedblack man with a talent for security.
And if he’d seen what Marcus just saw, now he was a man witha mission that might put his future plans in jeopardy.
That did not factor to Marcus.
Only one thing factored.
And Shirleen Jackson and her nephew Darius Tucker, bothcolleagues of Marcus’s, though they played different games on different turf,were a good start.
But only a start.
He turned on his foot and moved from the room, his man Bradyfollowing him.
Once they’d cleared it, they walked through the silent stripclub, now closed when it should be open, lit only by its copious red neon.
When they were halfway to the front door, Marcus kept movingand didn’t look to Brady even as he ordered, “I want a meeting with LeeNightingale.”
“Uh, sir?”
He stopped when they arrived at the door, his hand on thehandle, and looked to Brady.
