I’d kept any knowledge of my personal life way away from them. If they knew about my dating—and Christ—getting engaged to Lucas, I doubt that would go over too well.
But, shit. I looked down at my martini and knew I’d been an idiot to think I could keep anything from them.
“Your contacts can be valuable to us, but even more so when you don’t have to be afraid of getting caught.”
“What does that mean, exactly?” I asked.
“You come work for us. Tell us what you know. All of it. Like a big bang, you give us everything. Make us smarter to deal with the forces trying to destroy us.”
They meant Lucas. They meant my agency, my friends. They wanted me to burn it all down, make the case against them go away.
“Ten million,” Calder said.
“Up front,” Rizzo added.
I hadn’t taken a sip of gin yet and my brain went fuzzy around the edges. Ten million dollars?
Calder smiled. “You see the look on her face?”
“She’s wondering…”
“Where’s the catch?” They both laughed.
I attempted a smile to keep up appearances, but I was shitting scared.
“You will have a new life. A new start. Your old life will have to go away.” Calder leaned forward, his smile drooling off his face and his mustache suddenly looking less jaunty. “You understand, go away?”
Not at first. Call me slow, but I wouldn’t have understood this deal any less if they gave it to me in Spanish. I provided them information, how much more did they want? I’d gone from simple interruptions in the DEA’s pursuit of them to causing multiple agent’s deaths. And I did so without complaint, because to complain would be to ask, “Can you sever my head and throw it in a shallow ditch, please?”
I really didn’t want to hear it but I made them spell it out for me.
And they did.
SPELLING BEE
They were paying me ten million dollars to make the case against them vanish, and with it—Lucas.
They knew all about us. I bet if I’d pushed it they could have showed me pictures and video. I was close enough to Lucas to eliminate him and everything he knew and, on my way out of town, destroy anything related to the case at the DEA office, including several of the task force team members dedicated to putting the brothers behind bars. All the while keeping their hands newborn clean.
Ten million up front to trade my fiancé’s life. A reliable paycheck afterward for cleaning house on the agency and giving up any trade secrets I might know. It was some sort of bizarro-world witness protection program.
And only if they kept their word and didn’t bind me, throw me in a trunk and ship me to Mexico to use as a piñata the second the deed was done.
“We give you time to think about it,” Calder said.
Time to say yes, he meant.
I walked out of there a punch drunk zombie. I spent the night in my own apartment, calling Lucas and telling him I had a migraine. Pre-wedding jitters he called it even though we weren’t supposed to get married until next year. Now he wasn’t even supposed to be around next week.
I thought about it between bouts of throwing up. The twins were good to me. I weighed the chances of them understanding if I declined their kind and generous offer. I came up with all the ways I could still work to derail the case without killing anyone, especially Lucas.
I’d stay working for them, keep it status quo, and use my closeness with Lucas to let them know details of the case. I’d be condemning witnesses and informants to death but I wasn’t engaged to any of them.
They had to understand. I think Rizzo even had a little crush on me. That would work to my advantage, right?
WHICH BRINGS US TO TONIGHT
I went there tonight to answer their proverbial offer I couldn’t refuse—by refusing the offer.
I said no deal. I thanked them. Thanked them! Offered my services in all the ways I could detail. No matter what words I used it all came out like exactly what it was—a plea for my life.
This time I gulped the entire martini with a twist in one go while I waited for them to say something back to me. If there had been a line of cocaine I’d have done that too, even though I’d never touched the stuff before. A morphine drip, two Tylenol—anything and everything to take away the pain in the interminable pause while they looked at each other and spoke in some sort of twin ESP or something.
Calder ran a finger over his mustache. Rizzo brushed wisps of jet black hair from his eyes. Fuck it. Kill me now.
But no, the blood might dirty up their hands.
“We understand, Samantha. We are depressed, but we understand.”
I spat out a laugh so unexpectedly, a tiny ball of spit flew from my lip and landed on Rizzo’s snake skin boot. He remained polite and pretended not to notice. Ever the gentleman.
I thanked them again about a hundred times and got the hell out of there and back down to my car parked next to the brick wall.
AND THAT BRINGS US BACK TO…
… now the girl who looked like me walked back inside. I watched her go, all purpose-driven and catwalk stride, and I noticed my eyes were cloudy with tears that hadn’t fallen. My world blurred and became soft. I blinked and fat pools of water fell and cut streaks through the cement dust on my cheeks.
After the way she killed the two grunts who obviously planted the bomb—a bomb which had been there the whole time I was inside declining the offer, by the way. Guess the twins already knew my answer.
The smell of burning car and burning clothes was overtaken by the stench of burning skin as the impaled and shish-kebobbed man on the ground burned through his layer of clothes and the flames from the car-part skewer reached his flesh. I had to get away.
I opened my eyes to slits and ran closer to the door, stopping on the end of the carport, the end without the collapsed roof, and took shelter against the brick wall, figuring its twin saved my life once already tonight.
I needed to see Lucas. I needed his help, and just to hold him, have him tell me it was going to be all right. I wasn’t going to confess. I’d have to explain about the bomb and my car, but I couldn’t tell him the truth.
And yet…
Even as I made plans in my head about what to say, the words were turned around into the truth. Into a full confession. I’d think one thought and like two magnets repelling each other, the truth would flip my lie around.
I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew I still needed to see Lucas. Driving there was out seeing as my car was under a pile of bricks and fire. My first instinct was to show my DEA badge and commandeer a car from a citizen. But this wasn’t strictly in the line of duty and I had the same odd feeling. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it. I couldn’t violate that rule.