Page 127 of The Kingpin's Call Girl

My vengeance is wrapping up.

“Bundle him up and bring him to the tech dock.” I pocket my phone.

“They got Declan?” he asks.

“Yep.”

The tech dock is a gloomy stretch of waterfront. There’s a direct shot out to open water where sharks are sure to find a corpse before the authorities ever will.

I get Orton up to speed on the situation with Bender. He’s shocked and angry and has lots of feelings about Edie, but I give him a hard look, and that’s that.

“Fine.” Orton looks thoughtful. “In other news, I heard rumblings of some guy offering serious money for a hair off your head. The guys were talking about it. Now that I hear all this, I’m thinking it must’ve been this fucking cop. Bender.”

“Bender needs to die,” I say.

“He wants to show you up as a fraud and make us turn onyou,” Orton says. “If he gets that hair to test, he’ll be sadly disappointed.”

Or not,I think, marveling at how convinced Orton is that I’m a true Zogaj after all that my brother said.

“I knew that girl wasn’t right,” he grumbles as we reach the door.

I give him another hard look. “She kept important secrets in the face of enormous pressure, and she warned us off.”

“She lied,” he says.

I slam him against the wall, forearm across his throat. “She’s mine.”

His gaze sharpens. “Is that how it is?”

My voice drops to a deadly whisper. “That’s exactly how it is.”

Shouts from inside.

I let him go and barge in. There’s a man tied to a chair, and that chair is currently on its side.

“Good job,” I say to the guys. “Go get a sandwich. We’ll call you when we need some cleaning.”

The guys clear out.

The man makes pleading sounds from behind the bandana that’s tied around his mouth.

Orton rights the chair and yanks down the bandana.

“Please. Whatever you want. I’ve got money. I’ll do a freebie kill. I’ll do ten.”

“Are you looking for mercy?” I lean in close, my voice a razor. “You didn’t have any mercy for that girl you killed down in Tucumayo, did you?”

“It was a job.”

“She was a kid.”

“Just business,” he says.

“She was a kid,” I repeat.

He straightens. “She was a whore.”

I grab his throat, meaning to rip it out.

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