Page 15 of Fighting Conviction
“That should do,” Neal whispered into the void.
“Burgess!” The screaming in his ear made Neal jump. Thepitter-patterof pills scattering across his desk sent a shock of panic down Neal’s spine that rivaled the anxiety he felt when the Russian yelled at him.
“What is that sound?”
“Shit, sorry. Hold on.” Neal cursed and dropped his cell phone onto a stack of papers and scurried his fingertips over the desk, searching for each tablet.
One… two-three-four… five… six… seven-eight-nine… ten…
“Where’s eleven?” he mumbled before repeating the question to himself over and over again. He dropped below his desk, ignoring the crack of arthritic pain in his knees at his poor landing, instead feeling along the patchy green carpet for any sign of the missing tablet.
A fuzzy noise from above vibrated the wooden walls around him and Neal crawled backward, using the desk for assistance to stagger up to his seat.
“Damnit,” he muttered. Worrying over his missing pill had made him completely forget he’d been on the phone with the Russian. He had to get his shit together. All his focus had been zapped away by the BlackStone meeting, and now all he could think about was whether he had enough pills to take one immediately.
“Investigator Burgess.” He braced himself for what was going to come next.
The male’s voice on the other line was too loud and angry to understand and parse out each word, but his accent was unmistakable.
“Will you stop yellin’… please?” Neal wished he could give the asshole a taste of his own medicine, but the man made good on his threats. That alone was enough to keep Neal’s damn mouth shut. And sweat for another bar.
And one of them’s missin’.
“We were on the phone you incompetentmudakand you disappeared! What could possibly be so fucking important you would interrupt our conversation?”
“I-uh, I dropped somethin’. I apologize—”
A groan on the other end scratched at Neal’s eardrums. “Let me guess. A small rec-fucking-tangular pill?”
Neal tugged at his collar and loosened the vest now restricting his breath. “No. Of course not. I’m at work.”
“Fuck! That is it. I am cutting you off.”
An anvil of dread dropped into Neal’s stomach and he reached for one of the pills, rolling it between his fingertips for comfort.
“What’re you talkin’ about? There’s no need for that. It was a file. I dropped a file. That’s all.”
“Right.” The man cursed. “What do you think? That I am the fuckingdurak? I am cutting you off. Whatever you have left is all you have until you clean yourself up. You are no use to me high and I do not need my contact being a liability.”
Neal swore and ripped his phone from his ear to wind it back and throw—
“All you have to do is clean yourself up. You can do that. You’ve been doin’ this for years. No need to worry about it now. Just dial it back, one step at a time. We’ll do it together.”
The gentle, feminine voice flowing in his mind made him long to remember what peace felt like. At one point, he’d found solace in her encouragement. But it’d been years since he’d believed the words she’d never said.
“We can do this,” Neal whispered, fighting for conviction, and brought the phone back to his ear. He pasted on a confident smile, as if the person on the other end of the line was in the room. “No problem. Just one last buy to… um… safely cut myself off. I hardly even need them anymore.”
While tugging at his collar again, he looked around for his water bottle. Unable to find it, he rolled his chair to his mini fridge and bent to retrieve one.
“No. I am cutting you off… for good,” the caller spat out. “We need to move on. I do not have all day to console a junkie. Is that all you called me for? To tell me BlackStone knows nothing?”
Burgess nodded and cleared his throat. “Y-yes, sir. Nothin’ to report.”
A huff of breath into the receiver filled the phone line again. “You realize this has been a goddamn waste of time. I do not believe for one second BlackStone is clueless. They must be bluffing. Or maybe you have lost your touch, detective.”
Neal’s silent curse and accompanying gesture made him fumble with the phone. Once he brought it back up to his good ear, he remembered there had been something they needed to talk about. “There was somethin’ they said. The little blonde who went missin’—you know she’s one of them’s sister—”
“Of course we know thatnow. We never would have chosen her if we had knownthen. Fear of reprisal is the only reason why we are no longer interested in her. It would have been helpful of you to give us that information last year before this whole fiasco went sideways.”
