Total pages in book: 99
Estimated words: 94527 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 473(@200wpm)___ 378(@250wpm)___ 315(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94527 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 473(@200wpm)___ 378(@250wpm)___ 315(@300wpm)
It looked as if it was gonna rain any minute, which reflected my feelings about the city of Nantes pretty well. Every goddamn time I’d been here, something bad had happened. And I was never here for long, mostly just passing through. But Nantes didn’t need more than that to show what the city thought of me. Once, a bird had taken a shit on my new Gucci blazer. Another time, I’d gotten food poisoning.
Shan dragged himself out of the passenger’s seat and eyed our surroundings. The sweats and hoodies had been replaced by chinos and fitted pullovers, so I’d say he was feeling better for now.
“Is this a strictly Sons safehouse, or does it belong to affiliates in the UK?” he asked.
“This is ours,” I replied. We had a number of places in France, and this one was used fairly often because of its safe distance from Paris. After a gig in the capital, it was always good to put a few hours between us and the scene of the crime, so to speak.
Our location here was on the outskirts, far away from old monuments and the cathedral, in a neighborhood of subsidized housing for low-income families and students. The middle-class were social, rich people were nosy as fuck and wanted to know the status of every neighbor, and poor folks just wanted to be left alone. A quiet neighbor was a good neighbor.
We took the elevator to the tenth floor, and I retrieved the keys from my pocket.
“Who looks after the place?” Shan asked.
I scratched my eyebrow. “Uh, probably Colin.”
“Colin who? We have almost as many Colins as Michaels.”
I smirked. “Colin Moloney.”
“Ah. Your second cousin.”
“That’s the one.” I unlocked the door, then encountered a second door right away. Crime rate was higher here…
“How’s he doing these days?” Shan went on. “Last I heard, he’d moved to Cork for a girl.”
“Then he moved back to Killarney for another girl and forgot to tell the first one.” I entered the apartment and flicked on the lights as I went. It was just a small one-bedroom place, a hideout for when things got dicey. “I don’t really know what he’s doing, to be honest. I haven’t spoken to him in four years.” Other than a stack of mattresses in the living room, there was a single couch and a desk. The bedroom was empty. Of furniture, at least.
“That’s a shame, sweetheart. We’re supposed to stay close to family.”
“He started it,” I bitched. Fuck—I didn’t wanna talk about fucking Colin. Christ. I was here to get some work done. I opened the closet in the bedroom. Bingo. I squatted down and inserted the lock combination, then opened the safe and started rummaging through the contents. We didn’t need seven nine millimeters; we needed two. I checked the mags and grabbed an extra box of ammo. If we needed more than this, we were screwed.
According to the intel we had, we weren’t going to use more than four bullets. Tops.
“What exactly did Colin start?” Shan wondered.
“May 12th, four years ago—he borrowed my platinum Breitling without asking,” I stated. “It’d been a gift from my grandfather. May 13th, he borrowed my fucking shoes to go get coffee and got mud on them. May 14th, I drove him to the airport and told him to stay with someone else next time he visited Philly. Haven’t heard from him since.”
I flipped through the stacks of money on the top shelf in the safe, finding several thousand dollars in euros, British pounds, US dollars, and Swiss francs. There was also an impressive medic kit, four cartons of cigarettes, and two bottles of whiskey. Essentially everything a man needed for a fun weekend.
After closing the safe again, I stood up and faced Shannon, only to find him leaning against the doorway and smirking at me.
“What,” I asked flatly.
“You’re cute as fuck, but you definitely have a problem.”
“Not since I drove his shitty manners outta town.” I joined him and extended one of the guns. “Do you remember how to use one of these?”
He dropped his stare to the nine and sighed. “I knew it was a lie when you told me it was mostly recon work we’d be doing.” He grabbed it and tucked it into his pants at the base of his spine.
“That wasn’t a lie at all,” I replied honestly. “Recon work is 99%. Shooting a target in the head is 1%.”
He frowned and added a cocked eyebrow to really drive home the argument of me being ridiculous. Then he led the way out, and I was ready to leave Nantes behind and return to my vacation for a bit.
The funder Eric was constantly working on tracking down had wired money from a place in Le Havre in Normandy. That region happened to be one of my favorite places on earth, meaning it was truly killing two birds with one stone.