TWO
Scotti
Shit.
Shit shit shit shit shit.
That was not supposed to go down that way.
First, I was never supposed to come face-to-face with the freaking cops. Second, there should have been more time in the first place before the NBPD got there. Someone had screwed up the timeline. And, well, in our particular line of work you could not screw up the timeline. It was the most important factor followed by the precision of the camera cuts, the sealing of the door, then the getaway.
And Kingston said my freaking name.
Granted, at least he had the common sense to say Scott and not Scotti, but still. That was an epic fuck up.
We were so off our game.
Comfort did that.
I tore through the lot, trying my best to keep my pace at 'I just lived through an armed robbery' and not at 'I just successfully helped conduct an armed robbery.' It was a careful balance.
I slipped down a small alley in the strip mall across the street, leaning back against the wall, and taking a slow, deep breath. I wanted to go right to them. I wanted to wring their freaking necks. That being said, it wouldn't help if I took off and led the cops right to them, implicating us all. We had been doing this too well for too long to get pinched in some weird-ass town in Jersey.
From what I could tell, they bought my story. They fed right into my lie about the description of two of the perps. The only one who even looked at me like I might have been less than one-hundred percent accurate was the Mallick guy. He was a loose end.
Nothing about him seemed to imply he was a cop or related to cops. If anything, they addressed him like the cops at the drunk tank greeted the local twenty-year alcoholic who showed up to sober up every Friday night.
Dollars to donuts, the man was a criminal of some sort.
Which was, well, interesting.
Not that it mattered per se, but it was just a fascinating tidbit of information. It was also intriguing how his first instinct was to silence me. He kept his wits about him. Again, likely because of some nefarious background, but still, it was an attractive trait to a woman like me to see a man like that.
He was also stupidly good looking. There was that as well. That couldn't go without being said. Men who looked like that deserved a quick mention. Or a long, incredibly detailed mention. In bed. With a battery-operated device after a couple glasses of wine.
Because, damn.
He was tall, first and foremost. That was always what I first noticed in a man, being tall myself. I didn't even see him, but I could feel him against my back. He was at the very least six-two with a strong, but not overly bulky build. In the dark, all I could figure out beyond that was that he smelled good. Manly. Not all soaked in cologne. There was a hint of what was either body wash or deodorant. On top of that, a hint of sweat, but not BO, and a mix of the unusual ingredients of oil, gas, and grass. As in the stuff on the ground, not pot. He smelled like fresh cut grass.
But when the lights cut back on and I got a look at him, well, yeah. He was of the tall, dark, and handsome variety, but in a rough kind of way. I had never been the type of woman who went all gaga over suits. They were too clean, too buttoned-up, too bland for my taste. I figured they were the type to get pissed if I messed up their hair during sex. But this Mallick guy's hair was already mussed. Dark and perfect and mussed. He wouldn't object to a little more muss. Then there was the absolutely perfect bone structure. Classic. He was classically handsome. Oh, and one had to mention those eyes. Those light, almost transparent blue eyes. There was some nice ink work he had going on down his arms as well. Another thing I was into.
I mean, not that it meant anything. Except maybe that I had been too focused on work to get laid in the past couple of months. Or maybe longer. Oh, God, it had been a lot longer. The last guy had been back in some nowhere town in Mississippi. What can I say, he had that southern accent thing, and I had about five drinks in me. And he was an actual, real-life farmer. Like he farmed his land with his own hands. That was almost obnoxiously attractive to me.
But I had to make sure to look into Mr. Mallick when I got back to the crash pad. Just to make sure he wasn't some sort of threat.
I doubted he was, but you never knew.
I sucked in a breath deep enough to make my lungs burn, moved back out the alley, and took the longest, most convoluted walk back to the crash pad.
Seeing Rush's car through a window in the almost dilapidated external garage was a relief like I didn't know I needed, shrugging off a stress I hadn't been aware of possessing any more. That was from back in the beginning, when we were all as green as could be. When we screwed up more than we did right. When Rush was still driving our mom's old mini van. Without a driver's license.
In fact, not one of us actually had a driver's license.
This was because we didn't want our pictures anywhere on any file outside of our eighth-grade yearbooks.
So, even when we were on a job, Rush, the wheel man, abided not only the speed limits, but the local yield and stop signs as well.
My eyes scanned the streets for a long minute, looking for anything off. But there was nothing. Of course there wasn't. That was why we picked the place.
It was barely more than a shack in front of the woods on the corner a few doors down from the Third Street gang's headquarters. It was one of two shacks. The other was across the street and seemed equally as abandoned, but no one screwed with it for some reason. The only improvement this one had from an actual shack was a working toilet. Which, let's face it, is mandatory. After a couple stints in places with only composting toilets, I decided to lay down the law about working plumbing. Nothing against composting toilets. I knew they were the thing of the future and all that. But this was the present. And this woman had dealt with eating fast food and sleeping in the backs of cars since she was seventeen. I had earned the right to be particular about some small things. Like flushing. Flushing was a good thing.
I walked around the back of the one-floor wooden structure that a decent breeze might actually tear down, pushing the door open, and confidently moving in, ready to raise some hell.
And I was met with what was normal- the one room structure with a small kitchenette to the left with a fridge that might have pre-dated my existence, a hotplate, and a sink. There was a living space toward the front by the door. But we had pulled all the furniture into a corner and laid down five twin foam mattresses instead. Another concession of mine. I wasn't sharing a bed with any of them. There was the same faded yellow paint on the walls that was met halfway up with godawful wood paneling straight out of the 70s. The floor was the same worn linoleum in a brown and white swirling color, pulled up at most of the edges and scuffed to high hell in all the main walking areas.
There was the same normal lovely handmade dining room table that I would almost be sad to leave behind, finding all the scuffs and scrapes charming, reminiscent of a time when a bunch of armed robbers weren't using it to stash a big stack of cash stolen from a local box store.
The cash was there. It needed to be counted carefully before we handed it off to a contact to get it clean for us. Just in case. When you were a criminal, paranoia wasn't necessarily a flaw. Oftentimes it was an asset.
Another thing that wasn't wholly unusual was the fact that there was a roaring fire in the fireplace, it being the only heating source. The only unusual part of that was the fact that there was very little wood in the fireplace. No, instead it was a huge supply of men's clothing.
The men were even normal to walk in on.
What wasn't exactly commonplace was to walk in to find four guns pointed my way.
Held by my brothers.
"Fuckin' Christ, Scotti," Kingston said, lowering his gun first, the rush of relief a visible thing on his usually staid face. He was the one the Mallick guy had mentioned, the one looking for Scott. Well, me. It was Nixon, the second oldest, who had to force him to follow the game plan. Not because he loved me any less; he just knew that it wouldn't do anyone any good to get locked up. If they were in jail, there was no way they could figure out what happened to me and do something about it.
"What the hell happened?" Atlas asked, sitting down like his legs couldn't hold him from the relief.
Because they were my big, bad, protective older brothers.
And I was the woman they still saw as a little girl in pigtails and overalls. I was still the tomboy following them around like a little lost puppy, fascinated with all their fun boy stuff. Who wanted to play with dolls when you could be falling out of trees or jumping into lakes?
I was still the very impressionable, very needy teenager who lost her mother and was left in their care. And, God bless them, they truly did their best. But they were only in their twenties themselves. And we all know what young men in their twenties with no supervision were like. There were many-a-nights when I had Lucky Charms for dinner with my feet propped up on a beer pong table, still sticky with spilled alcohol from the party the night before.
But they cared about me more than anything.
Enough so that Kingston used a name during a robbery he was so worried.
My brothers were very much how Mallick had described them. They were all tall, strong, but not huge, dark-haired, and dark-eyed. And while they were my brothers and commenting on their looks was creepy as hell, I could say that we all shared some really good genes and that they had no trouble finding women when they wanted them.
I had barely stepped inside the door before I found myself hauled up against Kingston's chest, crushed there by an arm across my back, holding me so tight that the air got constricted in my chest. "Don't you fucking ever scare me like that again, do you understand me? You took twenty goddamn years off my life today."
That was Kingston for you. Being the oldest, he had a lot of responsibility dropped onto his shoulders before he even hit thirty. He had been forced to have three of his grown brothers and his seventeen-year-old sister in his one-bedroom apartment. His bills tripled from lights to water to food shopping. At the time, he had been working as overnight security in a store. But after a while, he had needed to get a day job as well, washing freaking dishes at a diner. He had done so much for all of us. And, for the most part, we had repaid that with a lot of bitching and moaning for the first few years.
But he had been mom and dad to all of us who had neither anymore.
Ten years later, he still held that role in most of our lives.
Hence the lecture.
"You can't even blame me on this one," I said as he released me and stepped back. "Today was a shitshow. What the hell happened? The timing on the lights was off. I wasn't even close to being in position. The NBPD got there too fast. The escape was way too close. I had to talk to the cops."
"You had to talk to the cops?" Nixon asked, looking worried. It wasn't a look you saw on his face often. "How? Why? You were in the store, right? Why didn't you head for the planned exit?"
"Because some jackass with a savior complex was holding me captive with his good intentions. Had a hand over my mouth in case I screamed," I added, lips twitching. They all smirked in unison to that. I was not that kind of girl. How could I be with them as the people I looked up to in life? "We need to look into him. He got a decent look at you guys, but I gave a very different description of you guys. Bet my cut," I said, gesturing toward the money on the table, "that he is some kind of criminal around here. The cops were on first-names with him, but not in a 'we drink beers on Friday' kind of way."
"Well, if he's a criminal, I don't see why he has any vested interest in trying to take us down. Kind of goes against the whole honor among thieves thing, doesn't it?" That came from Rush, the youngest of my brothers. He was only two years older than me. He was also our wheel man. And if you were wondering, yes, Rush was his real name. He was two and a half months premature because he was in 'such a rush' to get into the world. It just so happened that the name was a bit of a premonition because Rush always had and always would like everything fast and reckless. He was zig-zagged in scars to prove it. And he was the best driver I had ever seen.
"I don't know. I just got a weird vibe off him. I want to look into him and see what we find, just for my peace of mind. I mean, he saw you guys in shadow. But he saw me. Let's just cover our bases. But first, we need to dissect this job. A repeat of this can never happen again."
Two hours later, we had seemed to work out the kinks and the screw-ups.
"So, this Mallick guy," Nixon said, looking up at me, smirk pulling at his lips.
"What about him?" I asked, feeling my stomach inextricably tighten in, what? Anticipation? Worry? Why worry? That made no sense whatsoever.
"Apparently, the Mallick family is local royalty," Nixon hedged, always being a pain in the ass that way. The jackass used to make my birthday presents into scavenger hunts that were so hard it generally took me a week to find my damn gifts.
"Mallick," Atlas mused. "What? Maybe Irish? Irish mob?"
"No. Get this," Nixon said, clearly delighted about whatever he found out. "They're an entire family of loansharks. Of all fucking things. Actually, this town is a fucking cesspool of criminal activity. Got an arms-dealing MC, Italian mob, three different sects of drug dealers, a sniper, hired muscle, underground fighting, oh and this place called Hailstorm. It's some paramilitary camp or some shit. Leave it to us to end up here."
"We haven't 'ended up' here," I insisted. "We are here for a job. That's it. When we retire, it needs to be out of the country. Somewhere without extradition. You know that."
"Yeah, I hear Russia is lovely this time of year," Rush said, looking horrified at the idea.
We had considered Russia because, let's face it, it's a safe bet in a lot of ways. Also, a lot of the other countries without an extradition treaty with the US were middle eastern and involved in conflict that we didn't want to be in the middle of. It left mostly options in Africa and a few Asian countries. We were mostly debating between Russia and China, both places we could all get lost easily.
Though if I were being completely honest, the idea of leaving our homeland was more than a little daunting. Also, the methods we would have to employ to do so were equally troubling.
Necessary evils, I reminded myself.
A small price to pay for doing what we had to do.
"From what I can tell, they seem to stay neutral in pretty much all situations. They don't get involved in other peoples' business unless it is directly impacting them. I don't think there's anything to worry about there. And as for the local cops, apparently they have a lot on their plate. And by 'a lot,' I mean rape and murder and huge amounts of drugs hitting the streets. I really doubt our little stunt is super high on their priority list right now."
Well that was a comfort at least. And, to be honest, the Collings guy seemed pretty chill about the whole thing. No one got hurt after all.
That was the rule.
Hell, during a job, the guns only had rubber bullets.
No one was ever going to be genuinely hurt at our hands.
It wasn't about the people.
It wasn't even about the money.
It was about the corporation.
They had to pay.
We were the fucking debt collectors.
It was as simple and as complicated as that.
"So what you're saying is, we lay low here a couple of days then we head out to the next job," Nixon mused.
I looked around, letting out a sigh at our lovely crash pad.
Home sweet shack.
And home it was for the next week.
And I did not, absolutely did not have weird as hell sex dreams about a man who smelled like fresh-cut grass and oil and manliness.
Nope.
Not me.