Cold Dark Heart by Julie Kriss
Thirty
Damon
As I watchedAndie close the door, my heart sank. She went into the house without a word, and then she was gone.
I turned back to Terry. Maybe I had sunk the best thing that had ever happened to me; maybe I hadn’t. But right now I had to focus.
“What the fuck, man?” I said to him. “This is all your fault. Your operation is sloppy.”
Terry blinked. He didn’t look so good. Sure, he had a tan and an ugly shirt that probably cost a lot of money. But there were creases around his eyes that weren’t there the last time I saw him, and his jawline was getting soft. When we were DEA, he’d been a guy who could easily pick up women—and he had. Now he just looked like any other middle-aged white guy on the planet.
He didn’t answer me, so I spoke again. “Which former employee did the break-in? Was it Howell?”
“That fucking guy.” The words seemed to come out of Terry’s mouth before he could think it through. “He was always trouble. He was so mad when I turfed him. Now he thinks he’s getting revenge.”
I nodded. I’d actually taken a wild guess—Chris Howell was one of the Wild’s former employees that I’d been looking into. He had a few arrests under his belt for possession and driving a stolen car. His social media showed a guy who liked to take selfies in front of a gym mirror and brag about getting pussy. In other words, exactly the kind of idiot who would take a stupid risk for some heroin and think he was getting a big score.
“You need to surround yourself with people you can trust,” I said. “How many times did we see that in our line of work? Hiring him was a rookie mistake.”
“Fuck off,” Terry said. “He was useful for a while.” He rubbed his face, as if he was suddenly tired. “I have everything under control.”
“Do you?” I asked. “I figured out most of it, no thanks to you. You get it in, Shaffer moves it. Do you think Shaffer will talk?”
“No way.” Terry dropped his hands. “He’s solid.”
I doubted that. From what I’d seen of Shaffer the whiskey asshole, he’d roll over to the Feds and give up Terry if it would save his own skin. We Feds had dealt with guys like him all the time.
“Okay then,” I said. “Maybe you’ll skate through this. What I can’t figure out is where I fit into it. Why did you hire me, then skip town?”
“I was gonna bring you in,” Terry said magnanimously. “I knew the DEA had cut you loose, and I knew you’d been in the business before you became a Fed. I figured you’d be interested in a new career. So I sent you that email. Then you didn’t show up, and it got a little hot for me here, so I couldn’t wait. I left.”
“You signed the bar over to Andie.”
He shrugged. “Just establishing some distance. I still had access to the Wild and I could use it whenever I wanted. I had lots of copies of the keys. Until you screwed that up.”
Right. When I’d installed the security system with the keypads, I’d locked Terry out of his own business. The bad security and crappy locks at the Wild had been intentional. “So how did the product get into the storeroom?”
He looked at me like I was stupid. “Sheffer’s delivery guys.”
I nodded. When a delivery from Sheffer Whiskey was dropped off, it would be accepted by whoever was working at the Wild. “It was still a risk, though, if you don’t have inside guys. Someone could have opened one of those crates.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes you take a risk in business. I was hoping you’d clue in and cover my ass, Blake. But instead you got one whiff of Andie and fucked me over.”