tell my associate to shoot.”
“All right.” Bubba held up his hands, turned around and began limping in the direction of the garage. “I’m going, I’m going.”
“Good man.”
Chapter 13
No one in their right mind would bring a captive back to their own safehouse to interrogate him. That was the kind of amateur hour nonsense that lazy screenwriters wrote into cop dramas and action movies in order to make it ridiculously easy for the bad guys to find the good guys (or vice versa) and have a big showdown-slash-dramatic-rescue or whatever. A pair of highly-trained assassins planning to interrogate someone who was working for Mystery Dude X who likely worked for the fucking mafia—they would absolutely never do something so excruciatingly stupid.
Which was why it was exactly what Ricardo and August did with one Brock “Bubba” Johnson.
If they let Bubba go after they interrogated him—and from the way August was snarling at him, the jury was still out—he was going to take off (minus at least one swastika tattoo) and go yelping straight back to whoever had hired him. The guy seemed to have a few brain cells to rub together, and it was a safe bet he wasn’t going to assume that a pair of assassins who could spring for sniper rifles and modified tasers were hunkering down in a crumbling former meth lab. Especially not the delicate fucker who got the vapors whenever he found the slightest bit of dirt on his clothes. In Bubba’s zapped and knocked-around brain, this house was just a quiet, abandoned place where they could squeeze answers out of someone in peace.
Ricardo and August both agreed on that, which was a miracle in and of itself, and that told Ricardo it was probably a sound plan. Or maybe it should have told him it was utterly bugfuck insane and they should go find an abandoned warehouse or something.
But they were already here, frog-marching a blindfolded and handcuffed Bubba into what must have been a living room at some point. The carpet and the rebond pad underneath looked like they’d been peeled back to create one of those relief maps like Ricardo vaguely remembered from school, where it showed the different layers of the earth’s crust. Instead of dirt and bedrock, it was a black mess that used to be white carpet, the shriveled remains of the rebond layer, and the remnants of a hardwood floor covered with overlapping stains that he didn’t even try to identify.
What passed for furniture in here was a frayed lawn chair with rusted hinges and an overturned plastic milk crate. Ricardo shoved Bubba down onto the lawn chair and zip-tied his wrists and ankles in place. Once the asshole was duly situated, August yanked off the ratty pillowcase they’d used for a blindfold.
Bubba blinked a few times, then wrinkled his nose and squinted. “Oh God.” He made a sound like he was going to retch. “This smells like a fucking meth lab.”
“Hey.” August jabbed the guy’s temple with a pistol. “Don’t talk about my mother’s cooking like that.”
Bubba glared up at him, and August responded with one of those smiles that somehow managed to be both saccharine sweet and sarcastic enough to peel the paint off the walls. Well, what was left of the paint. He’d pointed that smile at Ricardo a few times, and Ricardo had contemplated pistol-whipping him, but he had to admit that when it was directed at someone else, it was hilarious.
He didn’t dare laugh, though. He was not giving August that satisfaction.
“All right.” Ricardo pulled the milk crate over with his foot, then rested the same foot on top of it. He pulled an empty magazine from his belt and a handful of rounds from his pocket, and as he started thumbing rounds into the magazine, he said, “We want to make a trade with you.”
“A…” Bubba watched the magazine, his eyes wide and his chest rising and falling with the subtlest hints of panicked breathing. “A trade? What kind of trade?”
“You give us information.” Ricardo pushed in another round. “And in exchange, we let you leave with everything you brought with you.”
“Almost everything,” August corrected.
“Almost everything,” Ricardo acknowledged with a nod.
The white supremacist in the chair turned even whiter, making his tattoos and bruises alike stand out a bit more. He gulped. “Wh-What do you want to know?”
August folded his arms and tapped his foot impatiently on the half-rotted plywood. “What were you doing prowling around at 87 Northam Street two nights ago?”
Bubba’s eyes