I headed into the gathering room on the top floor of the clubhouse. The sprawling mansion clinging to the hillside had been rundown and abandoned when we first found it. So, it became my mission as their newly-appointed President to pull us all together by funneling our personal money, time, and energy into sprucing the place up. Everyone had a room, in case they needed it. The core group of guys had offices as well. Plus, we had our conference room that overlooked the ocean.
I enjoyed that view more than I let on, most days.
“Well,” Trooper said as him and Dutch came into the room behind me, “that didn’t go as planned.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I mumbled beneath my breath.
“You know, we sell weapons, not bodies,” Dutch said. “But even if we did, that girl’s body downstairs won’t fetch nearly the kind of price we were looking at this afternoon.”
I closed my eyes. “Shut the fuck up so I can think.”
As I stood there, gazing out toward the water with my hands clasped behind my back, I watched my reflection fill up the floor-to-ceiling window. I’d always been a big child. So big, in fact, that my own father blamed me for the death of my mother while she gave birth to me.
Guess him dying of a grief-stricken drug overdose was my fault, too.
“Range?” Trooper asked as he placed his hand on my shoulder.
I didn’t bother looking down at him. “Everybody here?”
He nodded. “Did a headcount. We’re all here.”
I shrugged off his touch and turned to face my crew. “All right, everyone. Take a seat. We have a lot to discuss.”
Bury, another one of our driving experts, scoffed. “Let me guess: the buyer backed out like we thought.”
“No, actually,” I said as I walked over to my seat at the head of the table. “So, let’s sit and talk about it.”
“I think I’ll stand,” Doc said.
I pinned him with a glare. “You sit, or you’re out.”
That got them to take their seats very quickly. Didn’t give me a hell of a lot of time to piece my mind together, but then again, the guys never cared about that.
All they wanted was the truth, anyway.
“So, you gonna tell us why we’re not getting paid right now?” Bury asked.
“Or why we no longer get to enjoy Hell Week?” Thor asked.
“Boo. Hoo. Hoo,” Dutch said flatly.
I pulled out my chair and sat down, listening to it groan underneath me. “During our transaction, someone found us.”
Thor pointed aimlessly tilted him thumb toward the floor. “That why I heard crying coming up from the basement?”
“You heard that, too?” Bury asked. “Because I heard that.”
I held up my hand and silenced the guys. “Yes, that’s why you hear crying. An old man stumbled across us on his daily fucking walk, of all things.”
Dutch growled to himself. “Fuck these clients.”
“We knew they were gonna be trouble from the start,” Bury said.
I drew in a deep breath to settle my anger. “Just like we assumed would happen, we got caught. And when we followed the old man back to his house, we had every intention of bringing him back here to punish him for the money he took from our pockets because he was so damn nosey.”
Thor tilted his head. “I take it you’ve got a plan, then? On how to get us our money?”
I leaned back in my chair. “As far as I’m concerned, this is the client’s fucking fault. They’re the ones that didn’t feel comfortable meeting up with us in one of our specified locations.”
