out to be his grave—and he didn’t want this damn town to turn out to be his grave, either.
God, it was hell getting old. Maybe he’d stayed in the game too long.
Eight minutes, that was it, and then he was calling Crutchfield and finding out where in the hell he was and what in the hell he was doing, farting around out there in Denver, when their asses were on the line.
* * *
From where he was sitting, Tyler Crutchfield could see his suit jacket dragging in the water of a low-lit swimming pool in a subterranean, granite-encased room.
After Peter Chronopolous had literally kidnapped him and wrestled him down here, the guy had stripped him out of his jacket and all too casually let it drop on the pool deck, the cretin. One of the sleeves had fallen into the water, and now the whole jacket was ruined, half of a four-thousand-dollar suit. Tyler had become fixated on it—the way the sleeve had started out floating on the surface of the pool, how it had slowly lost its buoyancy and drifted underwater, the stain creeping up the material. The suit was new, his sartorial pride and joy, and he’d have given it and every other handmade Italian suit in his closet to anyone who could have gotten him out of this basement.
It wasn’t going to be Sam Walls. Lancaster’s bullyboy was across the room, lying in a crumpled heap, wet and, from the looks of him, dead. Tortured, Tyler was certain, with the bleak rig of ropes and pulleys hanging from the ceiling over the edge of the pool. As a two-year captain of his university’s water polo team, Tyler had spent half his life in a swimming pool. He had an affinity for pools, an affection for them, but not this one. The wet, dead lump of Walls terrified him, and so did the other two men in the basement, one of whom was behind him somewhere in the dark, silent and waiting, a man he’d recognized as Quinn Younger. The other man was standing in full light, right in front of him—calm, in control, soft-spoken, harder than iron, and the most ruthless SDF operator of them all.
Tyler had memorized the team’s bios. He knew who he was dealing with, and it made his gut churn. For Liam Dylan Magnuson Hart, there was no past too far removed, no future too distant, and no intellectual path or strategic configuration too complicated to bring to bear on current circumstances.
Tyler was a current circumstance, and he felt the weight of that truth with every breath he took. Even if he lived, which he sorely doubted, he’d be run to ground and ruined in a thousand unforeseen ways, ad infinitum, unless Lancaster destroyed SDF.
Tonight was none too soon, before something truly terrible happened to him, but Tyler wasn’t putting his money on a rescue.
Trapped in this fucking basement, in the bowels of Steele Street, face-to-face with Dylan Hart, he finally understood why Lancaster had failed to kill this team off long before now.
A clean snatch and grab, that’s what Dylan liked, and he was looking right at one: Tyler Crutchfield. The man had all but given himself up when Kid had approached him in O’Shaunessy’s Bar, but not until after he’d first made the mistake of flashing a weapon at the Boy Wonder. Dylan was sure the guy was still hurting from the half-dozen ways Kid had hit him, ways no one else in the bar would even have noticed. Up until that point, Kid had said the guy hadn’t looked like he’d ever gotten dirty in his life.
Things had changed for Tyler Crutchfield. He was sweating like a pig and as white as a sheet. Kid swore that he’d barely touched him after relieving him of his pistol, but the guy still looked like he’d been messed with, and things had gone downhill for him from there. He’d already given up everyone except his mother, and Dylan had barely gotten started.
“Tyler, you’ve been real cooperative so far, and I appreciate all the information you’ve given me about Lancaster and his plans for the teams he created,” Dylan said, and truly, the man had given him everything he’d asked for, one question after another. “But you’re in the wrong game for a guy with no balls. Just an FYI.”
Dylan had known some tough lawyers, but Crutchfield wasn’t one of them. Skeeter could have taken him down with one arm tied behind her