CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Everyone stood.

Annalise, Elle, Sophie. Ryan, Colin, Shannon, and Brent, his arm protectively around his pregnant wife. The grandparents. Even the detective had stayed, and Michael’s friend Mindy had joined the vigil.

Collectively holding their breath, crossing their fingers, and praying to whoever listened, they waited for the surgeon to speak again.

“It was touch-and-go there for a while. We didn’t know where the bullet hit him until we opened up his chest. And he lost a lot of blood,” the doctor said, her tone measured and even. Annalise was poised on the balls of her feet, every muscle strung tight, waiting, wanting, aching for answers. “Turns out he was shot in the spleen. We got lucky.”

Lucky.

Oh God, never had a word been more beautiful.

Never had anyone said such a perfect word. Lucky was good.

“We were able to remove his spleen, and he’ll be able to live a normal life without it.”

“Oh my God. He’s really alive?” Annalise asked in a breathless rush, desperately needing a second confirmation.

The surgeon smiled and nodded. “Yes. Very much so.”

“Can we see him?” The question came from Michael’s grandmother.

The doctor shook her head. “He’s in recovery now. He hasn’t even woken up yet.”

Two hours later, a nurse said he was asking for Annalise. She brought her hand to her heart, then turned and embraced Elle and Sophie. “Thank God,” she whispered, her voice breaking as it had in the chapel with them, but this time for a much happier reason.

* * *

Sanders set down the phone and breathed a huge sigh of relief. Becky wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek.

“He’s going to be okay,” he said, so damn grateful for the news his best friend’s mother—Victoria Paige—had just given him. Her grandson Michael was going to be okay.

When Sanders was pulled over for speeding, he’d never expected his role as an informant would curl around and hook into the murder of his best friend from years ago. He’d had no notion that the bastards who ran the company had pressured Dora to commit murder. He’d thought for years, as nearly everyone did, that it was her crime. Her choice and hers alone. He never knew the men he worked for had wanted Thomas dead and had used Dora to make that happen.

It didn’t mean he forgave her. Just meant that she didn’t act alone.

But he could breathe easier, knowing that all her accomplices at last had been rounded up.

Becky sank onto his lap, her arms still looped around his neck, and he stayed there in her embrace for a long time.

* * *

John stepped through the ER doors and paced in front of the hospital, talking to Special Agent Reiss on the phone.

“And with the information obtained from Mr. Foxton, that’s how we were able to focus in on West Limos,” she said, and rattled off the details.

Agent Reiss had been looking into local racketeering activity for some time, and when Sanders Foxton had been brought in for transporting illegal firearms, he’d become the linchpin in the feds’ investigation into the local crime ring that ran guns and drugs across Nevada. Evidently Sanders hadn’t known what he was transporting, but the details of the runs he’d made over the years had bit by bit helped the FBI narrow in on one company.

A company that had appeared squeaky clean.

That company owned by a supposed West Strass. But as it turned out, West had been dead a long, long time. West Strass was an alias for West Stravinksy, the brother of Charlie Stravinsky who’d been killed by an unknown assailant in a poor neighborhood in his native country more than four decades ago. Since then, Charlie had moved to America and had been laundering his money through companies he set up with a fake identity in his brother’s name. Apparently West Strass had many assets around the United States—a carwash in Texas, a dry cleaner in San Diego, a limo company in Las Vegas, and for a while he’d been the owner of a limo company in San Francisco when Charlie had relocated there, working as a loan shark and running rigged poker games.

But Charlie had returned to Las Vegas and established White Box with his friend and business partner Curtis Paul Wollinsky, who he’d taken under his wing decades ago when Curtis—who went by his middle name then—managed the limo company. Seemed all the questions Paige had asked about missing rides had tipped off Paul, who’d tipped off Charlie, who’d decided he wanted Thomas dead.

That task was all the easier because Thomas’s wife was in love with the man who ran Charlie’s army on the street—the Royal Sinners. There was a reason they were one of the most powerful street gangs in the country. They had access to criminal masterminds, to men adept at both violent and white-collar crime. Luke was the head, giving orders on behalf of Charlie and paying the Sinners better than average money for selling and dealing.

“Did he offer health insurance, too?” John asked Reiss with a derisive scoff.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” she said, then added that they’d nabbed Curtis that morning, bringing him in on racketeering charges.

Funny that their investigations had been on parallel paths for a few months, never meeting until, all of a sudden, the paths collided.

That occurred when Annalise had remembered the term that Thomas heard used years ago, which was still a favorite of Charlie’s today. White Box. While waiting for Michael to wake up, Annalise had told John what happened at the diner, how someone had overheard her conversation with Michael as they’d pieced the two paths together courtesy of that term.

White Box. Supposedly, according to what Annalise had said, it meant something related to Charlie’s dead brother. Everything Charlie did circled back to his brother.

John stopped in his tracks when he realized what its meaning could be. Because Annalise had told him Charlie’s last words. You know nothing about my brother. Nothing about how he was buried.

John’s blood chilled as he realized Charlie’s brother, at age nine, must have been buried in a white coffin. And so Charlie named his businesses for him, and for the way he left this earth.

It was oddly commemorative and terribly twisted at the same time. Which described the man who’d built, raised, and run the Royal Sinners. Terribly twisted.

The ways in which people remembered the dead could turn them into killers or into lovers.

John chased away the philosophical thoughts, pushing his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose as he refocused on the call. “Crazy to think this all started from a speeding ticket,” he remarked as he paced the other direction.

“Right? But that’s how it goes. Nothing happens for a long time and then one misstep and all the dominoes fall.”

They were falling indeed. In the last few weeks, the most notorious street gang in the city’s history had been effectively dismantled. John would never have been able to do his part without the help of the Sloan family—each of them had played a role.

That was fitting.

As he finished the call, he stared briefly at the sky, the sun poking through clouds.

Today was something like justice, and that was all he could ask for in this line of work.