“Fuck me,” Aloha said after he’d buzzed us into a dark room lined with more computers than I’d ever seen at one time. They hummed from several long tables, but Aloha was the only one in the room. He looked at me in surprise. “Bram know you’re with these fucking knuckleheads?”
I blushed. “He knows.”
“Figured he would have gotten you out of your Hunt contract,” Aloha said.
“Great,” I said. “Does everyone in town know I lost the Hunt?”
“Everyone who matters.” Aloha laughed. “I wish I could’ve seen the look on Bram’s face when he realized you were going to be, uh,livingwith the Hawks for three months.”
Hawk scowled. “Don’t be a dick.”
I was surprised to hear a warning in his voice and even more surprised when Aloha seemed to heed it.
“This better be good.” His bald head gleamed even in the room lit only by computer monitors and the blue LED lights mounted at the top of the steel box, and his graying beard fell halfway down his torso. He wore a leather vest, a logo I recognized on the back — crossed daggers over a bloody skull — from the members of the Blackwell Blades who ran around Southside. “It’s the middle of the fucking night.”
“And yet here you are,” Hawk said.
“To do my own shit,” Aloha said. “Not your shit.”
“We appreciate you seeing us,” Jagger said.
Aloha did a lot of work for Bram, but based on Jagger’s deferential tone I had to assume he was a big deal in his own right. I hadn’t been around the Hawks long, but I already knewdeferentialwasn’t really their thing.
They could barely bring themselves to show respect to Bram.
“Fuck your appreciation,” Aloha said. “You fucking owe me.”
“For sure.” Vigo was weirdly cheerful under the circumstances.
“Now tell me why you’re here,” Aloha said.
“We need a rundown on a name.” Hawk handed Aloha the napkin with Anna Lee’d phone number. “Lives in the UK.”
“No shit.” Aloha turned to his computer. “I can read a fucking country code.”
I wondered if Aloha was always this grumpy or if it was because it was the middle of the night.
He started tapping at his computer. “What do you need to know?”
“Everything you can find,” Jagger said.
“Including aliases,” Hawk said.
I still wasn’t sure Anna Reed was an alias, but I had to admit it was a pretty generic name. Plus, it didn’t sound Russian, whichdidn’t mean anything except maybe Anna Reed had immigrant parents who’d given her a western name.
“Will you be able to find anything with just the phone number?” I asked.
Aloha scoffed, his fingers flying over the keyboard on front of him. “Piece of cake. People leave their digital footprints around the internet like dog shit on their shoes.”
“Really?” I wondered what someone could find out about me, wondered if that was how the people who’d run me off the mountain had known I was going to see Daisy the day of my accident, if they’d known I was living with the Hawks and had tracked me from there.
“There are exceptions,” Aloha said. “People who are undercover with the feds or the CIA or some other intelligence outfit, and some of the mob families are getting better at hiding their tracks, but the average Joe has no fucking idea how easy they are to find. The genie is officially out of the bottle.”
He almost sounded excited.
I looked at the Hawks, hoping Anna was an average Joe and not someone connected to an intelligence organization or mob family.
Like the bratva.
