Page 65 of Flame
“Last chance to stay out of it,” Rafe warns, meeting my gaze. When I say nothing, he sighs again and knocks once. Not even a second later, a voice comes from an unseen speaker.
“What the fuck do you want, Wei-Shen?”
“I’m here for business, Ace,” Rafe replies. “Open up.”
“You’ve been banned,” the man snarls through the speaker. “Now get the hell out of here.”
“Trust me, you won’t want to miss this ‘business,’” Rafe hisses through gritted teeth. “I promise I won’t kick your ass this time. Now, open the damn door.”
“I doubt that. Nothing you have could be worth the occupational hazard of working with you.”
Rafe raises an eyebrow, inclining his head. “Not even if it could bring down Gino?”
A reply doesn’t come for so long I figure we’ve been ignored after all. I look to Rafe, but he lifts a finger before I can say a word. A second later, I realize what has his attention—footsteps. They approach sounding muffled as if from the other side of the door.
Then, with a metallic squeal, it opens from the inside amid a muttered curse from a figure I can’t make out clearly. He’s slender from what I can tell, leaning against the wall of a small, narrow hallway bathed in shadow.
“What kind of business?” he demands.
Rafe wrenches the door open wider and surges inside without an invitation. “Preferably now. So go on and name your price and take me to your little office.”
“Hey! You can’t just barge in here,” the man sputters, attempting to block his path. He’s short, with shaggy dark hair and large glasses that make his eyes seem comically wide. Shock doesn’t begin to describe what I feel. I’d been steeling myself for someone like Gino or his uncle.
This man, however, doesn’t seem to match Rafe’s caution.
At all.
“Hey!” he exclaims, barring the hallway with his outstretched arms. “I said, stop! And I don’t even know if I should work for you. Not after the last time—”
“Get over it,” Rafe snaps, easily pushing past him. “Now cut to the chase. Can you do it or not?”
He’s already rounding a corner, and I scamper in his wake as Ace has no choice but to close the door behind us.
“Who is she?” he demands, referring to me.
“No one you need to worry about,” Rafe calls back. “Now, answer the question.”
I find him in a cluttered room, his arms crossed. I have to blink several times just to make sense of the chaos. It’s like a pawn shop exploded. Shelves and mismatched bookcases line nearly every available inch of wall. Each one is filled to the brim with old television sets from various decades, as well as boxes filled with assorted electronics—computers, radios, and pretty much any related device under the sun.
“I’m not doing shit for you without insurance,” Ace says, squeezing past me. “Something good enough that if you ever so much as think about touching me, I could bury you.”
Rafe forms a fist but doesn’t lift it. “Name it.”
“You must really want this job done,” Ace surmises, a hint of smugness seeping into his tone. He approaches a desk wedged in between two bookshelves and throws himself into the swivel chair before it. A honeycomb of computer monitors, each displaying a different scene, loom behind him.
Swiveling toward Rafe, he steeples his fingers beneath his chin. “What’s the job?”
“I need you to crack a phone for me. Every message. Every phone call. And decode some of the information on it.” He pulls Faith’s phone from his pocket and dangles it by a sparkly pink charm.
Ace raises an eyebrow. “Something tells me that there’s more to it than that. So what are you offering for collateral?”
“Scan the security footage from the other night around the west side. You’ll catch my car in the vicinity of a drug deal gone wrong. There. You have leverage over me against the police.”
“That’s it?” The man laughs, throwing his hands into the air. “Petty crime? Oh no, Rafe. I need something more than a tiger showing the same old stripes. Something good, or we’re done here. You and your ‘friend’ can show yourselves out.”
Rafe hisses through his teeth. “Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Ace says, stroking his chin. “Wow me. Something good.”
