Page 53 of Blind Luck

“Yes and no. He doesn’t know who hired him—we think he was responsible for the Lucy incident as well, by the way—but he did tell us how he was hired.”

“And?”

“Our old friend Amber Road. He checked out the ‘wanted ads’ and agreed to act as a messenger for five thousand bucks.”

Oh, hell. Amber Road was the dark web equivalent of eBay, but now it seemed they’d served up a side of indeed.com too. I’d first stumbled across the site on a previous case, one Jerry had also been involved in, and itwas a clusterfuck of depravity. Drugs, weapons, trafficking… And now thugs for hire.

I groaned again.

“Don’t be like that. We had so much fun the last time.” Jerry and I, we had very different ideas of fun. “Anyhow, T-Rex answered an ad, and the client sent him a photo of me and instructions on what to say. Alexa is obviously sifting through listings on Amber Road as we speak, but I’d put money on the fact that the other shitbirds were hired the same way.”

“So what should we do now?”

“We can probably cancel the hookers. The surveillance, I mean, not actually cancel them. The target is clearly Cole, and he’s flying to San Gallicano the day after tomorrow. I doubt the Amber Road idiots will follow him there. It’s unlikely they’ll even realise he’s left the country.”

“What if they’re watching his house? Or the hotel?”

“There’s nobody watching his house, not constantly. We’re confident of that. And he doesn’t plan to tell the staff at the hotel that he’s overseas. He’s worried his absence would torpedo morale—Captain deserting the sinking ship and all that.”

“Won’t they notice he isn’t there?”

“Officially, he’s going to be working from home with a bout of whooping cough. Only his PA and the general manager know the truth. We’ll keep up the surveillance from the Johansen property, but for now, the case is mostly in Alexa’s hands.”

“You want me to stay in Vegas?”

“Do you have anywhere else you need to be?”

“Need to be? No. Want to be? Of course.”

“Either Alexa will crack this in a week or she won’t crack it at all. Don’t tell her I said that. The ‘won’t crack it at all’ part, I mean—she hates it when people doubt her abilities.”

“My lips are sealed.” Then curiosity got the better of me. “Does that happen often? Her not cracking things?”

She’d always struck me as the oracle—saw everything, knew everything.

“Often? No. Occasionally? Yes. Alexa knows a fuck of a lot about technology but not so much about people. And people aren’t always predictable.” Wasn’t that the truth? “We should catch up tomorrow. I’m planning to have another chat with T-Rex later tonight to see if I can shoehorn any more useful snippets out of him.”

“Tell me you won’t be using an actual shoehorn?”

“Huh. I never considered that. Guess it could work.”

I should have kept my mouth shut. I didn’t want to be responsible for a man getting his rectum stitched back together, even if that manwasa second-rate thug.

“Breakfast tomorrow?” I asked.

“Better make it lunch. I need to get a new cast in the morning.”

“What happened to the old one?”

“It broke.”

“How did you break a cast? I thought those 3D-printed ones were strong?”

“On T-Rex’s face. After he fell to his knees and realised he’d made a terrible mistake.”

Oh. Now I wished I’d never asked.

“Spare me the details. Time and place?”

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