Page 105 of Things We Left Behind
He held up his palms. “Hey, man. Don’t look at me. My ass was in here.”
From his position against the wall, Nolan rolled his eyes and shook his head.
“Someone was cleaning up their mess. I’m curious who that would be,” I said.
“Felix was into shit with every fucking one. What makes you think him gettin’ whacked had anything to do with me?”
“He was last seen the day before you were arrested for trying to kill my friends.”
“Look, man. It was nothing personal.”
“You weren’t even man enough to pull the trigger the first time around.”
Duncan scoffed. “It’s called delegating. Bosses don’t do the dirty work.”
“They do if they want toearnthat title.” I’d done my share of dirty work as I climbed the ladder of success. I’d earned the respect and the fear.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “This chat has been real nice and all, but I’m over it.”
“What else do you have to do? Go back and stare at four walls?”
“Better than listening to this bullshit.”
“If you had two brain cells in that dumbass head of yours, you’d be all ears,” Nolan warned him.
“Your father doesn’t see you as a threat,” I said to Duncan. “Maybe you should make him reconsider that. Remind him who you are and that you’re still dangerous to him.”
Duncan shoved a hand through his hair. “Look, man, I tried. I lost. He won. That’s the way it always goes.”
Did we all have this wound from our fathers? Was it necessary for every son to challenge his father to become a man? Was there always a winner and a loser, or was there a different rite of passage, a different path to respect?
“There’s still time to change that,” I told him.
“He didn’t fucking tell me shit, okay? He thought I was a fuckup. A loser.” Duncan tapped the ash off his cigarette into the ashtray.
“So you wanted to show him that you were more,” I prompted.
“Yeah, and I fucked that up too.”
The woe-is-me, defeated criminal routine set my teeth on edge. “You realize if you don’t give the feds something to work with, they’ll transfer you out of this place to a federal facility. The kind where you’re in a cell twenty-three hours a day.”
I caught the nervous shift of his eyes. “They say where?” he asked, trying and failing to sound disinterested.
“I heard Lucrum. That’s maximum security. It makes this place look like a day care center. I saw its sister facility, Fraus. It wasn’t pretty.”
The feet of Duncan’s chair hit the floor. “I can’t go there.”
“You won’t have a choice,” I pointed out.
“I can’t go to Lucrum. I won’t last a fucking day.”
“You should have thought of that before you tried to kill a law enforcement officer, kidnapped a civilian, and then turned out to be an absolute waste of time for the FBI.”
“You don’t understand. He’s got guys on the inside there. No enemy of Anthony Fucking Hugo survives a week in that hellhole,” he insisted.
I leaned forward. “Then give me something I can use. Tell me what you know about Felix. Why did your father commission the list from him?”
Duncan swiped a hand over his sweaty upper lip. “Felix is like a squirrel, you know? Always scurrying around, picking uplittle nuggets here and there. Storing them away for winter…or a payday. He is…fuck. Hewasa likable guy for a dirt bag. A real charmer. He was like Kevin Bacon on the streets. Everyone either knew him or knew a guy who knew him. If you needed intel, he could usually dig it up.”
