Total pages in book: 62
Estimated words: 58962 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 295(@200wpm)___ 236(@250wpm)___ 197(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 58962 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 295(@200wpm)___ 236(@250wpm)___ 197(@300wpm)
“How’d you get up here?’’ Roy asked Mark.
The man grinned. “Flashed my badge. Go on,” he prompted me.
“I’d never seen the man before. My company’s client, Mr. Burke, was across from him, Sam Lazano. I didn’t know his name then. He didn’t introduce himself or the men with him. I only got his name because Mr. Burke mentioned it.”
“Was he the man who chased after you when you ran into me?” Roy asked then added for Mark’s benefit. “She left the meeting when she got scared and ran down the hall and bumped into me. I pulled her into my suite before they saw.”
Mark nodded. “You were lucky.”
I shrugged and continued. “I never saw who was coming after me. I just heard him, and I was too afraid to look back. I doubt it was this Lazano guy though. I got the feeling he didn’t run after anyone.”
I shrugged.
Roy grunted, as if angry.
“Who’s Mr. Burke?” Mark asked.
“Tom Burke of Burke’s Bowling. He owns three bowling alleys in town.”
“Did this client usually meet in hotel suites?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I doubt it. Burke’s Bowling doesn’t seem like the kind of place that does business at the Four Seasons. I think… I mean, I assume the location was set by Lazano. It seems like someplace he’d stay.”
Mark was calm and easy to talk to. While he was technically interrogating me, I didn’t feel pressured. “Okay. Then what happened?”
“Mr. Burke, Tom, was sweating. Nervous. That’s what tipped me off that the meeting wasn’t normal. He wanted me to wire money for him.”
“Is that something you do?” Mark interlaced his fingers, listening intently.
I set my hand on my chest, right over the orange Broncos logo. “Not me, personally, but I knew how to do the wire. The money was being sent to an account in the Cayman Islands, and it wasn’t in Burke’s name or his company’s. It was for five million dollars. Which the deposit accounts on the laptop showed he’d received in the last month.”
“That’s a lot of shoe rentals,” Mark commented dryly. He pulled a small notepad from his jacket and a pen and started taking notes.
“Burke’s Bowling brought in just under a million in all of last year. I worked on the bookkeeping and tax prep for them, and that made sense. But five million?” I shrugged. “That’s a big jump. The whole thing was shady, and I freaked. I asked for the IDs and signatures, thinking that following procedure and documenting would cover my ass, and then I realized it meant I had evidence against them, which put a target on my back. So while the transfer was going through, I said I had to go to the bathroom and just fled the hotel room. I left the laptop, paperwork, everything.”
Roy squeezed my hand. “You have good instincts, sugar.”
I laughed. “Do I?” No one had ever said that before. I thought the opposite was true. “I think someone with good instincts never would’ve walked into that hotel room.”
“No, you did the right thing,” Roy said. To Mark, “I’m really fucking glad I had just come up the stairwell and bumped into you.”
Mark looked between us, then jotted something down. “Yeah, me too.”
Roy squeezed my hand again. “I, uh, I knew right away that she was… someone I had to protect at all costs.” Roy met Mark’s eye, and Mark simply nodded, as if the bizarre statement were normal. “I walked her down to her car in the garage, but they were waiting for her there.”
Mark flicked a glance at me then back to Roy. “You…fought them?” He seemed like he was choosing his words carefully.
Roy nodded. “Yeah. I’m sure you have the police report.”
“They shot Roy,” I said quickly. I don’t know when I went from worrying about Roy’s capacity to kill to protecting him from the law, but I guess I was there. I didn’t know why Mark was here specifically, but if it was to arrest Roy for protecting me, I had to speak up.
For some reason, Mark had stopped taking notes. “Then what?”
“Then we came back up here,” Roy said, answering for me. “The next morning, she headed home while I was sleeping off the bullet wound. I looked up her address and headed straight over. Found two more guys holding her at gunpoint.”
He slept off the bullet wound?
Mark’s eyes widened and continued. “And you dispatched them.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dispatched them?
Why was this guy unfazed that Roy had killed four men with his bare hands?
What if he wasn’t even actually DEA? Now I was like Casey and being overly skeptical.
No wait. He showed me his badge.
“Eugene was working for us,” Mark said finally.
What? My boss was working for the DEA?
“He’d come to us with his concerns about his client’s money laundering a couple of months ago,” he continued. “We knew it had to be related to Lazano. Eugene was supposed to wear a wire to the meeting last night, so we could get evidence to tie Lazano to the money from his drug dealing operation.”