Page 150 of To Die For

“Have any idea who that might be?” asked Walker.

“I’m getting there,” said Devine.

“Any idea where Rollins hid whatever he had on Glass?” added Braddock.

“Same answer,” replied Devine.

CHAPTER

68

THE MEN WERE WAITING INthe parking garage when Devine came down to get the car.

Danny Glass and four new faces. They emerged from a black Maybach and surrounded Devine.

“I don’t have a lot of time so if you can make it snappy,” said Devine irritably.

Glass looked at his men. “Back in the car.”

Without a word the four men, who looked like they would kill Devine without hesitation if Glass so instructed, quickly returned to the Maybach.

Now it was just Devine and Glass.

Devine looked around to see if he could observe the contingent of FBI agents he now knew were following Glass’s every step. To their credit, he couldn’t see any of them.

“If you’re here about Hastings and your boys, they started the fight. I just finished it.”

“I don’t give a shit about that, Devine. In fact, you have my apologies. Should never have happened.”

“Okay, so what do you want?”

Glass eyed Devine’s car. “Let’s sit inside. Parking garages have too many ears and sight lines.”

They climbed into the vehicle.

Glass said, “You know the score now, I take it?”

“Your business associates sound like a nice bunch of people. Sort of like a local Rotary Club, but only with homicidal, government-toppling intent.”

Glass shook his head. “I wore the uniform. I fought so these assholes could protest and say shit all they wanted.”

“So did I. And now they want to take those rights away from the rest of us.”

He eyed Devine severely. “When I got wind of what these people were really up to, I read up on what the original KKK wanted to do, and did. These guys are even worse. It’s not just Black folks they’re going after. It’s everyone who doesn’t look, think, or believe like they do. It’s Hitler and Stalin all rolled into one. If they ever come to power, they’ll machine-gun half their supporters, only the dumbasses won’t believe it until their corpses hit the ground.”

“How did they let you get so close to their operation?”

“At first, it was just small nickel-and-dime stuff that I did for them. At below my usual client rates. Then as we performed at a higher level for them, it got bigger, and bigger. I eventually became an integral part of what they were doing.”

“And they came to trust you?”

“They knew about my military background and how it ended. And at first they had no clue how to put something like this together, while I had a lot of experience building an operation on the other side of the law at scale and keeping it going and thriving and having free cash flow that would make a Fortune 50 jealous. They came to me all the time with problems. Problems that I always solved. So they came to rely on me. And I said the words they wanted to hear: the country was not looking like it used to, leaders were too soft and tried to be too inclusive, that if we didn’t take a stand, we’d all be speaking a bunch of foreign languages, that sort of crap. They came to see me as loyal, and important to what they were doing. And I operate on the other side of the law. They had leverage over me that way. It’s not like I could waltz in and tell the cops everything without exposing myself. They knew that, and were counting on it. So I got to see stuff other people didn’t.”

“Did you have any idea as to what you were getting into?”

“At the beginning, it was just the usual: stolen stuff, convert tomoney, launder the proceeds. But then, as they grew to trust me and kept asking for more and more, things got weird.”

“Weird how?”

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