Page 96 of Unmade

Small, transparent baggies of white powder.

Fuck me twice.

Coach and I exchanged a look.

Drugs changed everything. Drugs meant higher stakes. Drugs were protected by criminals “by any means necessary.”

This was a cocaine operation.

The man spoke again, to which Coach nodded and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“What did he say?” I asked.

He sighed heavily. “It’s a goddamn delivery system of coke to politicians, law enforcement, bankers, and whoever needs a quick fix before the next meeting.”

The man hadn’t said that many words, but I could venture a guess and say Coach was good at putting two and two together.

Jesus Christ. I eyed the workers in their dirty coveralls. Talk about blending in. Looking for a couple of lines? Go see the janitor in the courtyard that nobody pays attention to. But today, of all days, the men in charge of these workers had accepted a second job, to blow up the lobby of the Hillcroft Group.

“Whatever. It doesn’t change much in our case,” Coach said. “When we stop, we run out, guns first, and we take care of anyone trying to shoot us. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

* * *

I was really hungry.

Hunger-induced nausea combined with bumpy roads made me cranky.

“How long have we been on the road?” I muttered.

Coach checked his watch. “Forty-eight minutes.”

And the last fifteen had been like this. Dirt roads and sharp turns.

Coach took another call. “Yeah?” He was checking the gun I’d handed over earlier. It was an old scraped-up Beretta 9000, and he seemed to know his way around it. “Are you fucking kidding me? They ask way too many questions.”

Who did?

“No, that’s for you to negotiate with them,” he said to whoever. “In the meantime, I want a massage chair in the rec room for my suffering, and I don’t wanna see any fucking paperwork.”

A massage chair would be awesome.

“Get two,” I whispered.

“Make that two chairs,” Coach added.

Suh-weet.

“Get out of here with that shit,” he chuckled darkly. “They don’t want the case—they just know it looks bad when we have one explosion, one casualty, and two injured that close to the Pentagon in the same day. Mark my words, they’re gonna let us do all the work, and they get the credit as usual.”

Uh-oh. Sounded to me like another government agency was getting involved. The FBI? The CIA? I bet it was the Feds.

“Who said that? Is that River? Put him on,” Coach demanded. “What’ve you got?”

His body language and the look in his eyes changed to something much more serious within seconds. Based on how his gaze flickered, his mind was racing and processing whatever River was saying, and it felt like we were quickly approaching go-time.

“Well, thanks for finally filling me in,” he stated quietly. “And he thinks Beckett is threatenin’ his operations.”

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